Creating Consciousness
A study in consciousness, creativity, evolution, and violence
Albert Low
rev 2011.09.29
Copyright 2010 Albert Low
ISBN: 978-0-9866318-7-0
Smashwords Edition
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The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part
T.S. Eliot[1]
“I think people get it upside down when they say the unambiguous is the reality and the ambiguous merely uncertainty about what is really unambiguous. Let’s turn it around the other way: the ambiguous is the reality and the unambiguous is merely a special case of it, where we finally manage to pin down some very special aspect.” - David Bohm[2]
~ ~ ~
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: Ambiguity: the Wound in the Heart
Chapter 6: The Theology of Science: accident v. creativity
Chapter 7: de Chardin and unity: an alternative world idea
Chapter 8: Interaction of body and mind
Chapter 9: Evolution and the basic ambiguity
Chapter 13: The Birth of Trauma.
Chapter 14: Yearning for Unity: the frog voice
Chapter 15: The eruption of unity
Chapter 16: The Hidden Man, an exercise
Chapter 17: The null point as center of consciousness
Chapter 19: The Word as Metaphor
Chapter 20: Violence and Creativity
Chapter 21: The Temple and the Word
Chapter 22: Sufism and the ambiguity of you and me
Appendix 2. The Oscillating Universe
Appendix 3. The Ambiguity of Subjectivity
Appendix 4. The Dynamics of Space
~ ~ ~
Chapter 1: Introduction
When the dominant myths of a culture are being fragmented by contradictions that can no longer be hidden, and when no new myths have fully taken their place, an increasing number of persons become terrifyingly aware-of the unstructuredness and naked freedom of human consciousness. - Michael Novak [3]
This book is about consciousness, about why and how it has evolved. John Horgan, a senior writer for The Scientific American, said that consciousness is the most elusive and inescapable of all phenomena. He went on to say that this is a problem that so far “seems to have been ducked by most scientists who simply assume that mind is the outcome of complexity. The alternative seems to be an unacceptable dualism in which the mind and matter are two different stuffs and therefore, presumably for ever running on parallel tracks.”[4] A discussion of consciousness and its evolution will inevitably entail a discussion of the relation of mind and matter. However, in order adequately discuss consciousness and the mind-body relation, we shall also have to consider creativity as well because consciousness is a creation, of the same order as the creation of life itself. What this will show is that underlying creativity and consciousness is a profound contradiction, a self-inflicted wound. Consciousness acts as a balm and a buffer to this wound and, in order to be able to act in this way, it evolves by way of continuous creativity. Sometimes the pain from the wound is too great, then creativity fails and violence erupts. Spirituality, all pervasive Unity, is the medium in which this drama is played out.
Such are the main themes of this book. In their development the age old problems will be broached that till now have proved intractable: the nature and origin of consciousness, the role that language plays in its inception and subsequent evolution, the relation of body and mind, the part played by mind in evolution, the nature of the life force. These and their variations will be explored. One contribution this study may well make is a framework within which modern psychology could find a new basis that would recognize spiritual activity as having a legitimate place in the ecology of being.
* * *
Myth and Science
What kind of book is this? When we meet people for the first time we often ask them what they do for a living. This helps us to put them into a context and we can relate more easily to them. Similarly we like to ask of a book, are you a book on philosophy, science, literature, fiction, non-fiction or what? Alas, in introducing this book to you I am at a loss to know quite how to state its credentials. The book cannot really claim to be scientific nor philosophic; it is closer to being a myth although it is putting forward a theory. But this does not mean to apologize in saying it is closer to being a myth. According to Webster’s Dictionary myth “serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or to explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomena.” Webster admittedly also says that a myth is “an ill-founded belief held uncritically,” which has become the more accepted definition; but this is because science has taken upon itself the task of dislodging most of the myths on which Western civilization fed in its infancy, even if to do so, it is has had to create its own myths. As a myth our study will make no call for action, nor will it put forward any program for action. It has no QED as we had when working with Euclid’s geometry. It does, however, provide us with a framework which allows greater intellectual freedom, greater flexibility of thought, than has been possible up till now.
In giving Webster’s definition of myth above we left out a part that says that myth is “a traditional story of ostensibly historical events.” Darwin, with his myth of the Evolution of the Species, pushed the definition of “ostensibly historical events” back to include, not only the history of mankind but also of the whole of life on earth. Teillard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest/scientist, in his famous The Phenomenon of Man, pushed back the definition of history even further to include the history of earth itself, just as Stephen Hawkins is trying to push the definition back further yet to include the history of the universe. This book will go back a stage further yet and look at the origins of evolution itself.
In many myths the division between origin as time and origin as source is not made. Thus to return to the origin of life, even of existence itself, we do not necessarily have to return in time. If that were necessary then all we could do would be to take the route that theoretical physics is taking at the moment, with its inferences and assumptions that, more and more, have very little hard evidence as support. The original source is not simply in the past it is also now; to understand ‘then’ we must understand ‘now’- just as, according to the scientific approach, to understand ‘now’ we have to understand ‘then.’ This would make meditation, no less than mathematics, a way to explore the source.
If we go by way of meditation then we must go by way of progressive approximation; that is, instead of knowledge appearing clear and distinct, like a train, carriage after carriage, emerging from the dark tunnel of obscurity, it appears something like a harbor appearing out of the mist as one approaches it by ship in the early morning. In a way it is all there from the first sight, but only gradually do the outlines become clear, only gradually do the distances and relations between the various buildings and equipment become definite and the details obvious. In this book we shall be taking the ‘progressive approximation’ approach and considerable repetition and recycling back to ground already covered will be necessary to show this ground from a newer and more inclusive perspective and so give a firmer basis for the integration of the detail. Unfortunately this will mean we cannot always give clear and distinct definitions to all of our terms and now and again will have to call upon the reader to use his or her own intuition to follow the argument. This could be sometimes trying. Where possible illustrations and examples have been used to make the more difficult points accessible. We have also tried to illustrate the main ideas by calling upon many other writers. For this reason we would suggest to the reader that if some part of the book causes him or her to stumble, to skip that part and just go on. The point will be covered from another perspective later on.
* * *
The grain of consciousness
A phrase that is repeated throughout de Chardin’s book is “first a grain of matter, then a grain of life, then a grain of consciousness.” The atom could be looked upon as a grain of matter and the cell as a grain of life. Just as one could hardly come up with a new theory of matter without at least taking the atomic theory into account, and just as atomic theory makes a whole number of otherwise disparate seeming facts into one whole body of knowledge called physics and chemistry, so I contend one can hardly understand human spirituality, creativity, consciousness, religion, purpose and value, without taking into account the grain of consciousness, and what has led up to its evolution. By taking this grain into account a whole host of otherwise disparate fields are revealed as one coordinated whole. To be able to do this, to be able to take the grain of consciousness into account, we have to re-examine our basic myths of origins and destiny. But neither the theory of the atom, nor the theory of the cell claim to be theories of everything. Similarly although manifestly we are giving an inclusive theory, we mean by the word theory what it possibly meant originally: a way of looking at the world, a perspective.
An old Zen saying declares “If you want to go North, don’t point your cart South.” The reason light has not been shed before on the intractable problems that we shall be dealing with is because we have had our cart pointing south, and the light is in the North. In other words, we have been looking in the wrong direction. Little of what will be said is truly original; what has been done mostly is to bring the research and writings of others together within a new perspective. I have written about music, poetry, evolution, creativity and so on, not to come up with a new theory of music or poetry, but rather to show the value of looking at them within this new perspective. Indeed there may be some readers who, misunderstanding my intention, might feel that the points I make are sometimes lacking in depth or are incomplete. But all that I want to say is “If you look at these things within this perspective you will find a place for all human endeavor. Nothing need be rejected, nothing is ‘wrong,’ nothing needs to be thrown away or refuted.” As St. Thérèse said, “In my Fathers House there is room for everyone.”
* * *
A new way of thinking
A radically new way of thinking is being born: the holographic theory of the brain of Pribram, the notion of the implicate order of Bohm, the morphic fields of Rupert Sheldrake, as well as the logic of simplicity of Lamouche, and the logic of the inclusive middle of Lupasco, to a greater or lesser degree come out of this new way of thinking. An old order is dying and a new one is taking its place. This new way of thinking is being fed and watered also by the teachings and practices of Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and Hinduism, all of which are enabling us to see the limitations and shortcomings of the old linear and reductionist way of thinking.
The old view was based upon clear and distinct ideas and was ushered in by Descartes, among other thinkers. It gave birth to the belief that concepts could be clearly and uniformly defined, that the world could be considered a closed system and understood in the same way that a machine could be understood. Underlying this old view was a single, unified point of view, a viewpoint originally attributed to God but subsequently adopted as the objective eye of science. The new view will be based upon ambiguity, upon alternate realities, as well as upon multiple points of view of observers who cannot be abstracted from what they are observing.
We are, as has been said by many different people, at a crossroads. In the way we think and in what we do during the next few decades we shall set a course for human nature from which there will be no possible retreat. The old view gave us science, technology, industry and commerce based upon new kinds of motive power: steam, gas and electricity. It gave urban dwelling, massive cities and large economic units. During its early years, during what we call the Renaissance, art and culture flourished as well as a new found freedom in which the human being was the judge and controller of his fate.
The new view is already giving us a radically new technology based upon information and we are yet to determine what we are to do with this newfound possibility. Chaos theory, theories of complex systems, computer simulation are newcomers to the field of human experience and offer completely new ways of looking at the world. We are also entering into a world in which it will be possible not simply to change, fashion and adapt reality to our needs but to create reality - not simply to create new forms of life or new materials, but whole universes by which I mean new global and integrated experiences from sensations artificially created. In this lies a dreadful danger because a human being is not simply an observer of the world. A human being is also a participant. Being both observer and a participant is, as this book will point out, a curse but also the gateway to heaven. With the new technology greater numbers of people for longer periods of time will simply be observers of virtual reality.
Because we are at a cross roads we are faced not only by danger but also by wonderful possibilities. One of the consequences of the old point of view was that the soul was banished along with its accompaniment of consciousness, purpose, creativity and values, none of which can be reduced to clear and distinct ideas and all of which imply involvement and participation. The trend towards ‘virtual reality’ and all the danger that it implies is simply a continuation of the view that it is possible to reduce a human being to being simply an observer. However underlying the new viewpoint is the acceptance of ambiguity, and with this comes the possibility for human beings to rediscover, as a necessary and integrated part of an understanding of the world, consciousness, purpose, value and meaning. It will be possible for us to see that we are not simply passive observers of the cosmos but immediately and directly involved in it. It will be possible for us, in other words, to see spirituality and science as two aspects of one seamless whole.
* * *
Insight Into The Grain of Consciousness
It might help if I were to say how the insight into what I am referring to as the ‘grain of consciousness,’ with its correlate of the importance of ambiguity, came about, because, as will be obvious later, this insight does not have a logical root. The pivotal point of the book, and to some extent of my life, occurred while my wife and I were living on a ranch in the Northern Transvaal during the year 1957. We had gone there, with our two-year-old daughter, so that I could embark upon an intensive period of study in philosophy and psychology. At least that was the overt reason. The other, unspoken reason was I had reached a point in my life when nothing was making sense anymore and I desperately needed time to think things through.
The ranch was a vast sprawling and inhospitable range of land on which grass barely survived and which was spotted with stunted trees, gnarled and tortured by a scorching sun and lack of rain. The main life forms supported by this land were snakes, some of which were poisonous, and white ants, millions and millions of white ants that constructed their termiteries up the trunks of those poor starved trees using their wood as a basic form of sustenance. The trees would eventually die and so innumerable anthills ranged across the landscape looking like the pillars of some blasted temple in a wasteland.
Our nearest neighbor, that is not counting the family of baboons who lived across the valley, was a farmer six miles away and whom we saw once during the whole year we were there. We had no electric light, no telephone, and no kitchen - my wife cooked on an open fire in the open air. The nearest village, a small one, was 12 miles away. We got our food supplies by putting money with a shopping list under a stone at the gate of the ranch. A bus driver would pick these up once a week. Two days later he would drive by with the supplies.
But it was heaven. The silence was alive; it was vibrant like no other silence I have ever known. This isolation and silence made up the perfect desert conditions for deep meditation. Even in this region of death, the silence was never hostile and as far as I can remember I was never afraid of it nor of the velvet blackness that was the night. Even the laughter of the hyenas who were attracted by the dead cows, (at one time blackwater fever would regularly take at least one per day,) did not seem fearful nor did the vultures who came hovering during the day.
* * *
What is reality
I spent the day mainly in study and among the texts was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. One of the problems that Kant addressed in this critique was the problem of what we could know of the outside world and how we could know it. This was a problem that had haunted me ever since I started asking questions seriously, and as this problem forms an essential basis to this book, we must dwell on it for a few moments.
What do we mean when we say the world is real and how do we know it is real? If one removes sense data, that is what we can learn about an object through our senses, what is left? For example, we see a green leaf. But, we are told, it is not the leaf that is green but the light that has not been absorbed by the leaf, and so has been reflected by it. Green is what the leaf is not. Similar arguments can be made about the other senses. A car does not make a noise; noise comes from the vibrations of air striking the eardrum. The smell is not of the rose but of molecules in the air surrounding the rose. So what is a leaf when stripped of all that the senses tell us about it? Quantum physicists are asking a similar problem about quantum reality. I have put their conclusions in Appendix A and if you are not familiar with them you might want to look them over. Some of them are quite surprising.
The problem is often summed up in the question: “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a noise?” The Buddha posed the same question when he asked, “Does the ear go to the sound or does the sound go to the ear?” What, or how much, is contributed by the physical world and how much by the mental world?
A limerick puts it all in a nutshell:
There once was a man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad.”
One answer that was given to this was:
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Signed, yours faithfully, God.
In other words ‘everything is in the mind,’ the mind of God. The other view, more favored by the scientists, is that there is no God, no mind, no perception, just movements of matter in space and time. This means that the two principal responses to the question, what is left if you take away sense data, are, on the one hand nothing is left as everything is ultimately a creation of the mind: this is idealism, or in the extreme solipsism; and, on the other, that everything will still be the same, because everything is just what you see. This is naive realism. Kant came up with a third view, the view that ‘something’ is left but we cannot know what it is and he called this the noumenon.
* * *
How can we know we do not know
This solution of Kant’s set up a puzzle in my mind, which became more and more troubling. How could we know anything about something we could not know, not even that it exists? This puzzle became refined to “How could we even know that we do not know?” It was in its way the ultimate Zen koan. I struggled with it completely dumbfounded for sometime and then, out of the blue came the resolution: we are both at the center and at the periphery of the world simultaneously. How that is an answer to the question was one of the things I have had to find a way of explaining, while trying, at the same time, to explain what this answer means. But it certainly made a great deal of sense to me at the time and the value of this insight has increased for me over the years. For months afterwards I felt as though a tremendous burden had been lifted from my mind and I seemed to exist in a new medium.
Over the years I have accumulated a small library of books each of which in its own way makes perfect sense of the insight, and each of which in its turn is given a deeper meaning in the light of the insight. This accumulation was neither intentional nor systematic. On the contrary books have come my way from second hand bookshops, catalogues, recommendations and browsing among recent releases. So in this way, what I have called a myth, has taken form of its own over the years. This book therefore is the result of years of meditation on this insight, trying to make it accessible to others.
Through the years I have written about it in different ways. First, in a book on management called Zen and Creative Management, which I wrote in 1970, I wanted to show that the basis of management, and also of the mind, is not solving problems, as one is often led to believe by seminars on ‘scientific’ management, but making decisions; and furthermore, that we have to make decisions because of dilemmas, not problems; and these dilemmas ultimately arise out of the basic ambiguity of being ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ participant and observer, center and periphery, simultaneously. In another book called The Iron Cow of Zen, (the ‘iron cow’ being the basic ambiguity,) I tried to show the value of this insight into ambiguity in understanding the human predicament, and how the koans of Zen Buddhism were an expression of this basic ambiguity. Then later in another book called The Butterfly’s Dream I tried to show how this same ambiguity lay at the basis of all spiritual work, and how it made this work both necessary and possible.
* * *
The wounded surgeon
Each of us is an individual: that which cannot be divided. But each of us is at the center and periphery simultaneously. In other words each of us is divided. The whole book is about this ‘impossible’ situation, this ambiguity. All that I can do at the moment is very briefly sketch in the broadest implications.
Because we are at the center and periphery simultaneously, yet by our very nature indivisible, a fundamental conflict, schism or wound, a blessed wound it has been called, yawns in the heart of each of us; the source of our pain, as well as of our ecstasy and joy. Because it is in the depths, indeed at the source, of our being we have great difficulty in talking and even thinking about it. To see what is meant by this schism we have to go up upstream of experience, upstream of logic, because logic and experience themselves arise as ways of trying to deal with it.
~ ~ ~
Chapter 2: Ambiguity: the Wound in the Heart
“Every Persian fairy tale ...opens with this contradictory formula, Yeki bud, yeki mabud: There was one, there was not one”
A fundamental ambiguity, a kind of primordial double bind, lies at the origin of consciousness, of life, perhaps even of matter itself. A Zen master held up a stick to his assembly of monks saying, “If you call this a stick, I’ll give you thirty blows; if you say it is not a stick, I’ll give you thirty blows. What is it?” This Zen koan was used by Gregory Bateson to introduce the notion of a double bind, the principle feature of which is no matter what we do we cannot win. I suggest that ambiguity is the primary double bind out of which consciousness and life have evolved. The philosophical ‘problems’ that we have created about the origin of life from matter, of mind from the brain, of value from fact, are attempts to break open this ambiguity and make it accessible to the intellect.
I spoke in the introduction about ‘me-as center/me-as-periphery,’ which is like the oroboros of the ancients, the snake which swallows its own tail - but who knows which ‘me’ is the head and which the tail? After all there can only be one me. Evolution and creativity emerge from the endeavor to escape from the pain that this primary double bind causes, the pain that brings about not only our own personal conflicts and antagonisms, but the wars of the world as well.
This century has been full of war, civil war, death and destruction. At one time we came near to destroying the whole planet and even now this threat still rumbles and grumbles in the background. That we could even conceive of this total destruction seems not so much frightening as incomprehensible. Seeing on TV, or at the movies, the kind of destruction a modern war could bring, we are, without doubt, anxious and fearful; but over-riding the anxiety and fear is the question, how is it possible? How was Verdun possible, or the Somme in the 1914 war, or the battle of Stalingrad in the 1939 war, when whole armies were locked in orgies of destruction? How can we do such things to one another? What is this terrible force of violence, conflict and destruction at work in us?
This book will show that this force can be understood, and in a way that is completely new. It will also show that this same force is the force of creativity and the force behind evolution; human evolution as well as the evolution of all life. In human beings it is also the source of spirituality. In other words we are going to talk about evolution, creativity, spirituality and violence, but not as separate processes but as the outcome of a single force to which we give different names.
* * *
The origin of conflict
The question of what causes violence is by no means new and humankind has always wondered about it. Unfortunately the usual way it has been accounted for has simply made things worse, not because the understanding is wrong, but because it is incomplete. The diagnosis is something like a doctor who confuses the symptoms with the disease and in treating the symptoms simply makes the disease worse. In order to understand what this means, let us take a look at the way conflict is currently viewed. While doing this we shall come to see several things: that conflict is not learnt; that it is not in itself experienced, but is the basis of experience; and finally we shall come to see that conflict is also the basis of creativity, and that some violence is failed creativity.
During the cold war a cartoon appeared in a Montreal newspaper. Two dinosaurs were fighting, using their huge tails as weapons. One of them towered above New York, the other above Moscow; the first had the face of the American president, the second, the face of the Russian leader. Each would obviously destroy his own city if his massive tail swung. In its way the cartoon said many things about the force of conflict at war within us. Let us use it as a way to uncover how we normally think about conflict.
* * *
Others are to blame
What perhaps catches the eye first is that topping the figures are the heads and faces of the two world leaders of the time. The cartoon seems to be saying these two are fighting to satisfy their lust for power, regardless of the havoc they might wreak upon their own people. Many of us feel our leaders are the cause of national and international tensions, and believe that if only they would let go of their search for power, the world could become a peaceful place. Such an attitude underlay most of the peace demonstrations of the 60’s. Somehow, it is felt, they must be made to change their ways; they must be made to sit down and talk and work things out. Those advocating this view encourage us to write to our politicians, or to the newspapers, to bring concentrated pressure to bear, which in time, the advocates believe, will reform these leaders.
We often feel the same way about problems and troubles in our personal life. If only our boss, our spouse, our friends would be a bit more understanding, tolerant, sensitive, they would not cause us so much grief. Psychoanalysis has reinforced this notion by attributing our suffering to the way we were brought up and we tend to feel that our mother, or father, or teachers were the cause of our troubles: if only they had brought us up differently we would not be so anxious, so hesitant, so lacking in this or that way.
In a way this view is an optimistic one: we have a problem, have identified its cause, and can now tackle and resolve it. With respect to our leaders we can apply the full democratic process and resolve it. With respect to the others that are causing us our problems we can try to change them, change our jobs, our friends, and our spouses and in this way get rid of the trouble they have caused.
* * *
A conspiracy of oppression
But even so this view can be haunted by a profound pessimism coming from a fear that perhaps the two figures are nothing but figureheads or masks for other faceless ones who pursue their lust for power in a social twilight, pulling strings and manipulating regardless of the consequences: the CIA, the KGB, the Pentagon, the gnomes of Nuremberg, the military/industrial complex; sinister forces beyond the reach of reason and democracy, intent solely upon expanding their own gain regardless of the costs. In our personal lives we see ourselves as victims: women the victims of men; the blacks victims of the whites; citizens the victims of the government, students the victims of teachers.
But underlying the pessimism is the same belief that underlies the optimism: specific people, or groups of people cause conflict consciously and deliberately, and therefore bring about our troubles. Through erroneous perception and behavior, or inherent evil, so the belief goes, these people bring the rest of us into conflict with each other, and with ourselves. We are suppressed, held down by others. Correcting the perception, changing the behavior, or eradicating the evil can resolve the conflict, and the unhappiness it causes.
* * *
Conflict is only natural
The cartoon also showed two animals fighting, and as animals they are not pursuing conscious, albeit misguided or evil aims, but are simply giving vent to a natural instinct for aggression. This instinct, some say, is present in humankind as well, and therefore it is ‘only natural’ for human beings to fight. Humans are only animals, it is said, and they share in the common pool of instincts and drives of all animals. All animals fight for territory, for mates, for supremacy, so why should we be surprised to find fighting and conflict among humans or feel we can do something to prevent it? Men are violent because of testosterone, or dammed libido, or thwarted aggression. But, after all, life forms have evolved through conflict, and the weak and unfit have thereby been eradicated. Looked at this way, conflict, far from being a curse, is a biological blessing because it ensures only the best survives. This is the optimistic side of what could be called the ‘evolutionist’ argument, but the evolutionists too have their pessimists.
* * *
A tragic mistake
These pessimistic evolutionists believe nature has taken a wrong turning somewhere in the maze of life and the human being is the result: a tragic mistake doomed by its very brain structure to self-annihilation. The human being is, according to this view, an evolutionary sport of no real consequence. Arthur Koestler in his extremity said the only way out was a ‘happy pill.’ He said nature has taken a wrong turning. “When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that Homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process.”[5] The development of a happy pill is possible, he contends, “It is not utopian to believe that it can and will be done. Our present tranquilizers, barbiturates, stimulants, antidepressants and combinations thereof, are merely a first step towards a more sophisticated range of aids to promote a coordinated, harmonious state of mind.” Koestler is very serious about the happy pill and says further, “We must search for a cure for the schizo physiology inherent in man’s nature, and the resulting split in our minds, which led to the situation in which we find ourselves.” If we do not, he threatens, “The old paranoid streak in man, combined with his new powers of destruction, must sooner or later lead to genosuicide.”[6]
The cartoon implies this also: dinosaurs are extinct because they were a failure in the rigorous competition of the school of life; why then should mankind not fail? Looked at from this point of view the cartoon depicts a tragedy: no matter how hard we strive, the impersonal forces of selection will destroy us; indeed, our very struggles, and the destruction these struggles entail, are themselves simply blind forces working out our destiny.
Meditating on this cartoon, we penetrate deeper and deeper levels of cause. First the surface layer: two intractable and selfish men are caught in a squabble and, unable to lose face, bring down the world as a consequence. From this personal, psychological layer we penetrate to the social, political layer of groups seeking power and manipulating social forces. Moving deeper, we reach the biological layer of instincts and territory, aggression and reproduction; and then the evolutionary layer, where a cosmic force works out its inherent potential through trial and error, fits and starts.
* * *
The triumph of good over evil
But we can go deeper yet. The fighting figures are made up of human and animal elements: the head is human rationality and reason; the body, instinct and passion. The head is high in the sky among the gods, the body rooted to earth. Is this then the cause of conflict – is the outer conflict but the projection of an inner one? Are we at war with ourselves through the collision of incompatible forces such as reason and instinct, the angelic and demonic? Do we seek relief from the ensuing tension by dramatizing the conflict onto a more accessible stage, by projecting it onto others? With this question we have penetrated another stratum, the religious one. The problem is no longer ‘his’ problem, or ‘its’ problem, but my problem, a problem concerning me and what ‘me’ means. A deep intuition of unity is violated, split in two incompatible halves: a mind half and a body half, each with its own demands. I am an individual, and yet divided: part of me soars to the heavens, the other grovels in the mud. The holy and the diabolic cannot live in the same house, and so each tries to destroy the other, blind creatures fighting and thus destroying what they hold dear. This is the view held by many Christians, Buddhists and Jews, and is implicit too in the psychoanalytic movement. The human being is torn between the conscious, rational realm and the instinctual, unconscious realm, split between the forces of good and evil.
From this point of view the resolution of our conflict is seen as the triumph of the conscious over the unconscious, taming the instinctual by the rational, or the defeat of Evil and the victory of the Good. Conflict to end conflict, war to end war. Good is the end of conflict, evil is its cause.
But all of the above leaves unresolved why there should be conflict in the first place. It tells us how conflict makes itself known, the way it is expressed, the elements involved, yet does not tell us about the origin of conflict. We experience pain, aggression, anger, and so on, but these are the outcome of conflict, not conflict itself. Conflict is at the root of experiencing, it is not itself an experience. We cannot learn conflict because learning itself is an outcome of experience given back to us through memory. We cannot account for conflict either by evoking an 'instinct of conflict' or an 'instinct of aggression.' This just substitutes one unknown, 'the cause of the conflict,' by another unknown, 'instinct.' Any situation has conflict underlying it. This intuition permeates the whole of Buddhist teaching. The most fundamental axiom of Buddhism, or as it is more commonly known; the first noble truth is that life is founded on suffering. If this is the case then we cannot understand ourselves, or the world we live in, unless we understand conflict.
* * *
Conflict is inherent in any situation
Conflict is inherent in any situation, and irresolvable in the way a resolution is normally sought, that is by the elimination of one side over the other, the triumph of one side, or the merging of two into one harmonious and loving, Utopian whole. According to the scenario in which good and evil are at war, conflict comes from a horizontal split in experience in which the higher level, at best, wants to raise the lower up, while the lower wants to drag the higher down.
Wars are not simply wars of good against evil. Each side in a war sees it as a just war, a holy war; each side fights for what it conceives of as the good. In World War II, the Germans wore Gott mit Uns on the buckles of their belts. But the English and French were certain that God was on their side. A war therefore is the good against the good. From this point of view each of the two parties to the conflict has an equal right to be, although each would deny the other that right. This means that with the alternative view that we are now offering, the split is not horizontal but vertical: What is good for me is bad for him, what is bad for me is good for him. If we adopt this point of view we must surrender the belief in an absolute good, an absolute right and superior, with their corollaries of absolute bad, inferior and wrong.
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The Elements of Conflict
duality: In the cartoon two sides are opposed; that it takes two to make an argument is obvious. The basic axiom of Buddhism, all is suffering, bears this out. The Sanskrit word used in Buddhism for suffering is duhkha, which means twoness, duality. The double bind of Bateson, which we referred to at the beginning of this chapter, is based upon two opposing commands given to a person each of which must be obeyed, under pain of punishment, but only one of which can be obeyed. According to Bateson two people must be involved in establishing a double bind, the victim and the person giving the conflicting commands. However, this is not necessarily so because we can give ourselves opposing commands: “I promised my wife that I would get home early tonight so I must leave now. I promised the boss that I would get this job wound up tonight so I cannot leave now.”
However duality alone does not cause conflict. Polarity, complementarity, even ambiguity, as it is normally understood, are examples of duality in which no conflict occurs. Kenneth Boulding, an American economist who made a study of conflict and competition, wrote, “Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which parties are aware-of the incompatibility of potential and future positions and in which each party wishes to occupy a position which is incompatible with the wishes of the other.”[7] I have emphasized ‘incompatible’ because we could sum up what Boulding is saying thus: conflict arises in the presence of two viewpoints only one of which can prevail.
unity: When thinking about conflict and competition one often forgets that they require, indeed are based upon, co-operation. An agreement more fundamental than conflict makes conflict possible. This co-operation comes from an underlying 'sameness.' In the days of dueling a 'gentleman' (which originally meant 'of the same clan') would only duel with another gentleman; it would have been unthinkable for him to duel with a commoner.
Those who share most in common suffer the greatest tension among themselves. Two members of the same business firm are more likely to hate each other than are two strangers. Two stamp collectors, two golfers, two suitors are more likely to have antagonisms than, say, a stamp collector and a golfer, or a suitor and a stamp collector. ‘Sharing in common’ is often expressed through adherence to rules and a common purpose. When two nations fight they must agree on something to fight about. For two boxers to fight they must agree on the rules and both must want to win, that is, to be the One. Without that agreement no fight can take place. In other words underlying the duality of conflict, indeed causing conflict, is Unity.
A Zen story illustrates what I am saying: One night some brigands burst into a Zen temple. With drawn swords they seized the temple priest and threatened to kill him. The priest said, “Before you kill me I should like just one thing.” “What is that?” cried one of the robbers. “A glass of wine,” replied the priest. Astonished the man let go his grip on the priest, who, quietly and without haste, went to a cupboard, opened the door, and took down a glass and a bottle of wine. He carefully covered the table with a white cloth, polished the glass and set it and the bottle of wine in the middle of the table. He then drew up his chair, opened the bottle of wine and poured out a precise measure. After corking up the bottle and returning it to its place in the center of the table, he took a sip of wine. When he looked around, he found the robbers had left.
A similar story tells of an event said to have happened in the trenches during the 1914-18 war. It was breakfast time, and in a British trench the soldiers were preparing breakfast and, inevitably, brewing tea. A German patrol leapt into the trenches with fixed bayonets. A British soldier, terrified, automatically and without thinking, held out a cup of tea to the German who was about to stab him. The German turned and fled.
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Conflict and Creativity
For most people conflict is at worst an evil, at best undesirable - it is the gateway to violence and destructiveness that one day may well wipe out the whole earth; it is the way to damnation and death. In a particular individual, according to Bateson, the double bind could, in the extreme, bring about schizophrenia. He said, however, that the double bind is also common to humor, poetry, and art. In other words, conflict can also be seen as the gateway to salvation and life, creativity, love, and, as the koan of the Zen master shows, awakening to spirituality.
Duality and Unity are the two basic ingredients for creativity and for conflict. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler,[8] says creativity arises when a single situation or idea is perceived in “two self consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference.” Creativity therefore involves a twoness, (the two self consistent frames of reference) and oneness, (the single situation or idea). He goes on to say that the situation “vibrates simultaneously on two different wavelengths,” and he coins a word 'bisociation' to refer to this way of perceiving. The two mutually incompatible frames of reference, or, what we called earlier, the two viewpoints of the single idea, generate a tension, which explodes at the moment of creation. In talking about this creative tension Koestler uses words such as “clash,” “explosion,” “collision,” “confrontation,” words which can just as well, indeed often do, describe conflict. This definition of Koestler’s is strikingly similar to a definition of humor made by an English poet of the eighteenth century, James Beatty.[9] He said that laughter arose “from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage.” The close tie with creativity is underlined by the fact that, according to one Hermetic source, the world was created by laughter.[10]
Koestler’s definition of creativity is also very similar to Boulding's definition of conflict: duality, the “incompatibility of the position of the two parties” and unity, “the single position to which each is aspiring”. Creativity is duality, two (the incompatibility of two frames of reference) and unity, (the single situation or idea.) Creativity and destructiveness, love and hate, co-operation and competition, come from a common source. In other words, creativity is not on this side with conflict on the other, hostility on this side and love on the other; they are the outcome of the fact that 'this side' and 'that side' are mutually exclusive and yet, insofar as each is the manifestation of unity, are mutually dependent. Therefore for one side to prevail it must destroy the other. But if it does so then it destroys that upon which it is dependent and so destroys itself. It is like a cosmic Catch 22. Conflict lies at the heart of creativity, while unity lies in the heart of conflict. Conflict and creativity both have the peculiar property of arising out of unity, which is at the same time a duality; out of a duality seen simultaneously as Unity. This ambiguity is known in Zen Buddhism as “not One not two.” The Sufi refers to unity and duality as a unus-ambo.[11]
We do not need to invoke an instinct of aggression to explain conflict in the world. Although others are invariably an essential element in our times of aggression, hostility, and struggle, nevertheless we cannot blame them for our suffering. We suffer because we are human, because we are alive. To see conflict as a necessary part of the situation allows us to review all the so-called instincts: creative instinct, aggressive instinct, reproductive instinct, and so on. Furthermore, and this will make it unpalatable to many, it will do away with the notion of any fundamental or lasting peace. Life is hazardous, always at the crumbling edge. Every resolution, whether through creation or destruction, sets the stage for more conflict, thereby calling for more creativity or more destruction. But while this point of view does away with the hope for everlasting peace, it also does away with death as we normally understand it. Everlasting, absolute peace has its counterpart in the notion of everlasting, absolute death.
This book will explore as fully as possible the implications of saying that we cannot experience conflict and that it arises out of two that is one, the Not One Not Two. It will also explore unus-ambo as unity divided against itself.[12] Ambiguity, as the term will be subsequently used, is not simply a passive, vague confused view, but the structure of a struggle to restore unity by an act of love that gives rise to and sustains both the universe and each of us as the universe. I shall explore this unus-ambo as ‘Me’, a self which, although One and indivisible, is at the center yet simultaneously at the periphery of all; a self that is wounded in its heart: ‘a blessed wound.’ To clarify what is meant by ‘one being divided against itself’ and why conflict cannot be experienced requires a lot more elaboration; the rest of Part 1 will be devoted to this. First let us be clear about what we mean by Unity.
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Chapter 3: All Is One?
“It is by the One that all beings are beings. (If) not a one, a thing is not. No army, no choir, no flock exists except that it be one. No house, even, or ship exists except as the one.” - Plotinus
'All is one.' This is the fundamental theme of the book. All that the book will say is dependent upon it. Yet how are we to understand this statement, ‘all is one” and of what value would such an understanding be? On the face of it, it seems too dense to penetrate, too opaque for the light of understanding to shine through. 'All': is this not the most general of words, encompassing not less than everything? And 'one' - is this not in its turn the most abstract and least substantial of words? Is not 'one' what is left after all other qualities have been stripped away? It seems the most general meets the most abstract in 'all is one,' a meeting of ghosts at midday.
The Rig Veda, a collection of the oldest religious hymns of India, has a verse that reads:
There was neither death nor immortality then. No signs were there of night or day. The One was breathing by its own power in infinite peace. Only the One was: there was nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden in darkness. Then all was fluid and formless. There in the void by the fire of fervor arose the One.
The One was breathing by its own power. What power does One have? By the fire of fervor arose the One. What is the fire of fervor that arouses the One?
The One was, and is, the origin of all; the origin not only in time but also in order. The One not only was the first but also is the first. From the One comes all: trees, houses, cars, you and me, the 'all' that is the world. Yet even so, the One is the goal, the last; is that which, by 'the fire of fervor,' is sought after, longed for. One is Alpha and Omega.
Human beings have called it God, Brahma, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, and many other names. It cannot be known by the intellect or through any intermediary, any sign, symbol, or idol. To know God truly, as opposed to simply knowing about God, is to be God and to be God is to transcend every kind of form or distance, every kind of abstraction or definition. In Buddhism this One is seen as 'empty,' without restriction or limitation, without inside or outside. Buddha said:
There is that sphere wherein is neither earth nor water, fire nor air: it is not the infinity of space, nor the infinity of perception; it is not nothingness, nor is it neither idea nor non-idea; it is neither this world nor the next, nor is it both; it is neither the sun nor the moon.
It neither comes nor goes, it neither abides nor passes away; it is not caused, established, begun, supported; it is the end of suffering.[13]
Animals, we are told, have an environment, while human beings have a world. Whether animals do or do not have a world, the distinction between a ‘world’ and an ‘environment’ is interesting. By an 'environment' is meant disconnected happenings and things, a confused appearing and disappearing of shapes, colors and noises. By world we mean an integrated totality, a whole. William James said the experience of a baby is a buzzing, blooming confusion. Research suggests this may not be so but there is the same sharp difference between buzzing, blooming confusion and a world which is ordered and whole, wherein each part is organically related to, even interdependent with, each other part and with the whole. Out of interdependence comes a pattern, a structure in which sameness and difference are woven together in space and time by purpose and design in a single tapestry called ‘my life,’ or ‘my world.’ A limited use of the word ‘world’ means the earth, but it will be used in this book in a more inclusive way. The origin of the word world is “the life of man.”
We have no doubt our world is one coherent whole. Our need for meaning and value comes out of this intuition of wholeness. Each of us expresses this coherence in our own Weltanschauung. A Weltanschauung, or worldview, is a global grasp, a comprehension in which each part finds its place and by which we assimilate new experience. If an experience cannot be assimilated within this worldview, it is rejected, denied, or the source of the experience destroyed. The theories of Galileo, for example, so threatened the worldview of the time they could only be dealt with by suppression and destruction.
So another name for the One is Truth. Humankind has always contemplated the world and wondered about its coherence and has looked for the One truth of coherence. More recently this has given rise to the search for a general field theory, a theory of everything. Truth is not something added to the One, nor is it a property of the One to be discovered and known; it is the One. Philosophers for centuries have looked for a formulation in a metaphysics that would show the grand unity underlying God, the human soul and the world. We like to believe in progress, that we are privy to a truth higher than the one our more primitive ancestors knew. But truth does not evolve; its expression may be sophisticated or crude, but it is always the same all pervading Oneness at issue, whether with Archimedes or Einstein, Plato or Bradley.
* * *
Turning Towards The One
Plotinus said, “It is by the One that all beings are beings. (If) not a one, a thing is not. No army, no choir, no flock exists except that it be one. No house, even, or ship exists except as the one.” Thus One is not simply the whole, the all, what we call the world; everything is one: an army, a flock of sheep, a house, a chair a desk. What ever you see is one. This is taken for granted but that should not obscure its truth. One is the all and all is one. One informs everything, not simply as a concept of the one but as an organism or a thing.
The world is a 'universe,' a word that, etymologically, means turning towards the one; what then is the One towards which one turns? Earlier thinkers looked for one substance: air, fire, water, earth or ether, from which all has been made. Later thinkers have substituted relations for substance and have tried to formulate these relations in a single theory, one unified field theory, one grasp of the essence as relationship. Einstein’s faith in Oneness led him to say that the theories of science are constant throughout the Universe, and also led him to reject the quantum theory as a final statement because it implied a basic contradiction or split wherein something as basic as light would have to be perceived now as a wave and now as a particle.
We should not be surprised to find science and philosophy clashing with religion because the former seeks a Unity called truth; the latter seeks the same Unity but calls it God. Nor is it surprising such a clash should have brought about wars and revolutions. Just as the crusades were an attempt to have the One as God prevail over the One as Allah, so the Reformation could be seen as the attempt of the secular One to prevail over the religious One.