Creating Consciousness

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