Lifescape

A lot of time, this spring and summer, has been taken up with endings and new beginnings. Finishing my MSc in Psychotherapy was one (long overdue) ending. The publication of my new editions poetry series and the growth of my new venture, creative thorp, with my wife Mary, both felt very much like beginnings. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about experience and about the tension between rational and enlightened experience. Here’s the beginnings of a summer reflection….

THE MOMENT IS NOW

In his wonderful ‘Lectures on Physics’, latter-day renaissance man Richard Feynmann wrote – “We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science. So if something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that is not science”. He was aware that science is a human activity and that science – or sciences – can divide the universe into parts, rather than experiencing it as a whole.

For many people over the centuries there has been a divide between materialistic science and spiritual experience (historically aka religion), and the debate rages even now as the materialists (Dawkins, Hitchens et al) are attacked both traditional theologists (perhaps understandably) but also by a new breed of ‘enlightened’ and ‘awakened’ thinkers and practitioners. I’ve written about what I see as the muddled thinking of those in the new-age community who want to use the language of science to explain their own versions of reality which are, often, experiential and speculatory. Now there’s nothing wrong with experience – I think, in fact that its a good thing, but like Feynmann might have said “there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just not science”.

What saddens me is that the best thinkers of our time don’t seem to be able to hold both positions. People have always have had experiences of enlightenment and transcendence. Historically this would always have been within a religious context; now we have other paradigms in which to experience these things. Some people still have a more traditional way of thinking about it – Islamic theology and the ‘rapture’ beliefs of the new Christian movements in the USA. However, nowadays thinkers are explaining these experiences in the light of our scientific speculation, questions and understandings – the big bang, quantum physics, DNA and so on – some are trying to integrate science with the meditative traditions from different cultures – but this is still only just a glass to see through. Science and religion, philosophy and enlightenment – they’re still human activities seen through the lens of the mind. James Hillman might not have written in quite like this, but the sentiment could be his: “It’s the psychology stupid”.

A human experience – transcendent or mundane – is a human experience. It might be explained by science (a god spot in the brain perhaps) or in a spiritual paradigm that speculates and believes in a ‘beyond’ – whether this be a traditional heaven, a life after death, reincarnation, god or a meeting of some kind of evolutionary, universal consciousness in the ‘here and now’. One of the most powerful ideas around at the moment is the spiritual enlightenment that emerges from being in the present moment – what Eckhart Tolle and others call “the Power of Now”. It uses the ‘new-age’ language of living one’s life purpose, awakening and being in the present – but essentially it does what many other traditions have recognised before – that a meditative state of mind can be profoundly powerful and enlightening for human beings.

However does this necessarily have to be within a spiritual framework? Ken Wilber has mapped out the wide and rich extent of religion, psychology and what he calls ‘growth technologies’ – all of which could just tell us that there’s nothing new under the sun. I have a lot of suspicion about the idea that somehow human consciousness is something special and connected spiritually to the physical universe. It seem to me to be the ultimate in human grandiosity to see consciousness as anything more than a wonderful evolutionary accident. And yet ‘enlightenment’ IS wonderful, and can feel transcendent, but I have no problem in holding the knowledge that my DNA and life experiences have combined to make me who I am, alongside the sense that I can have an experience of soul, destiny and calling . This is, I believe, the SECULAR soul -and of course this view, and these words, are also only a product of my own psychology…