Consciousness of the universe

Rupert Sheldrake is the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project.
The Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained human abilities is supported by the Perrott-Warrick Fund, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge.

Maybe Angels

A Confluence of Imagination and Rational Inquiry

An interview with Rupert Sheldrake
by Hal Blacker

I met controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake the night he and theologian Matthew Fox celebrated the publication of their new collection of dialogues, The Physics of Angels. I knew that Sheldrake was not afraid to challenge orthodoxy by entering realms of thought usually eschewed by other scientists. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge University, England, his most unorthodox work is not easily dismissed, even by his more traditional peers. His first major book, the controversial A New Science of Life, published in 1981, was called “the best candidate for burning there has been in years” by the prominent scientific journal Nature, but was simultaneously praised by the equally well respected New Scientist as “an important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality.” His work ever since has been notable for its revolutionary attempt to bring an awareness of the intelligent and living quality of what we often view as brute nature, for trying to heal the Cartesian split between the physical and the mental, and for adventurously crossing the well-guarded boundary between the worlds of science and spirituality. Still, I wondered how far a scientist could go before he had truly left science’s legitimate domain. Angels? Surely this must be a whimsical metaphor for something more rational, more in line with modernity, more, well, material.

Speaking with Sheldrake showed me I was wrong, in part. His belief in the possibility of the existence of angels, or of intelligences operating in the universe that are greater than our own, is not metaphorical. Nor is it tinged with the wishful fantasy which pervades so much of new age spirituality. Instead, it is the latest exploration of a visionary thinker who is unafraid to take the immense risks that go with entering the territory of the unknown.

In our conversation, Rupert Sheldrake revealed himself to be not only an innovative scientist but a man of impressive erudition in many other fields of learning, and also one whose scientific and philosophical investigation is fueled by a passionate concern for all of life. While some of his theories may seem more fanciful than factual, blurring the line between science and science fiction, speaking with him was a mind-expanding journey that had me, a few nights later, staring into a starry sky and wondering, despite myself, if there was someone or something out there staring back. More significant to our investigation of the relationship between scientific exploration and enlightenment, Rupert Sheldrake showed a quality that is rare in men of his intelligence and breadth of knowledge—a pervasive humility and respect for what is not known, and for that which it may never be possible for the intellect to grasp.

interview

WIE: The first question I want to ask you is, why angels? It seems like an unusual thing for a scientist to be talking about.

Rupert Sheldrake: I’m interested in the recovery of the sense of the life of nature. The thrust of all my work is to try to break out of the mechanistic view of nature as inanimate, dead and machinelike, which forces the whole of our understanding of nature into a machine metaphor. This is a very man-centered metaphor. Only people make machines. So looking at nature in this way projects one aspect of human activity onto the whole of nature. It’s an extremely limiting view of nature, and an alienating one.

Right from the beginning, since my book A New Science of Life was published, my aim has been to try to find a wider picture or paradigm for science that is not constricted to an inanimate, mechanistic view of things. In a way, the bigger picture is the idea of the whole universe as a living organism.

The big bang theory gives a picture of the origin of the universe in a small, undifferentiated, primal unity. The universe then expands and grows, and new forms and structures appear within it. This is more like a developing organism than like a machine. So implicitly we’ve got a new model of the universe as a developing organism.

Physics, also, has broken out of the old mechanistic universe. The old idea of determinism has given way to indeterminism and chaos theory. The old idea of the earth as dead has given way to Gaia, the idea of the living earth. The old idea of the universe as purposeless has been replaced by a new physics based on the notion of attractors, of things being drawn towards ends or goals. And the old idea of the universe as uncreative has given way to the idea of creative evolution, first in the realm of living things, through Darwin, and now we see that the whole cosmos is in creative evolution. So, if the whole universe is alive, if the universe is like a great organism, then everything within it is best understood as organisms rather than machines.

Then the next question that arises is: Well, if the universe is alive, if solar systems are alive, if galaxies are alive, if planets are alive, are they conscious? Or are they alive but unconscious, in the same way that perhaps a worm or a bacterium might be alive but unconscious? And, is the kind of life that may exist in the cosmos more conscious than ourselves or do we have to assume it’s a great deal less conscious than ourselves? Are we the smartest beings in the universe? Now the usual answer of science is yes. I think that’s a very improbable assumption. So, if we come to the idea of many forms of consciousness, if the galaxy has a life and a consciousness, then it would be a consciousness far greater than our own—greater in extent, greater in its implications and power, and in the spread of its activities. This, from the point of view of science, is a ridiculous idea, because science has wiped out consciousness from everything in the universe except human brains.

But there is in the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition and in all traditions, the idea of many beings with greater levels of consciousness than our own. In the Western traditions they are called angels. So, in my book with Matthew Fox, The Physics of Angels, our aim was to explore what the Western tradition actually has to say to us about angels, and see what relevance that might have in the context of new cosmology.

My interest is in a new view of science, where we see the universe as alive, and in an exploration of what it could mean to see that there are forms of consciousness above the human consciousness. If one thinks of a divine consciousness embracing all things, and then this human consciousness here, the traditional view is that there are many, many other levels and kinds of consciousness in between. It’s not that you leap straight from divine consciousness to human consciousness, with nothing but brute matter in between.

WIE: When you are speaking about consciousness, do you mean self-awareness?

RS: I think that self-awareness comes about through mutual awareness. I don’t think self-awareness arises within a kind of solipsistic world of navel gazing. “Consciousness” means, literally, con scire, to know with, or to know together. I think that the reason that we are conscious is because we are interconscious in relationship to other people. Consciousness is shared, and I don’t think an individual human being, without language and without relationship with other people or any other thing, would be conscious. I think that consciousness has to be understood in relationship, not as a kind of isolated thing. And, since I’m Christian, the model of consciousness that I like particularly in the Christian tradition is the notion of the Holy Trinity. Divine consciousness is not just an undifferentiated unity in the Christian tradition. It’s one of relationship and it always has relationship within it.

I think that if a galaxy is conscious, then its consciousness would depend on its relationship to the stars and solar systems within it, and also, probably, its relationship with other galaxies. There’d be a kind of intersubjectivity of galaxies, a communion or community of galaxies.

WIE: Last night, when you and Matthew Fox were celebrating the publication of The Physics of Angels, you spoke about the possibility of the sun being conscious. You said that the sun is a complex system with a great deal of electromagnetic activity, and so is the brain. So, like the brain, the sun might be conscious. When you talk about galaxies or the sun being conscious, how literally do you mean this?

RS: Well I do mean it literally but it’s difficult to know about any form of consciousness other than one’s own, and even that is a mystery. I don’t know what your consciousness is like, let alone the consciousness of a dog or a cat or a bird. Even with organisms we know are alive and probably aware, it’s hard to penetrate the inner life of their consciousness. But since you speak English, I would imagine quite a lot of it depends on the English language, as my own does. The sun presumably doesn’t speak English and doesn’t have language of the human kind at all. And it’s very hard for us to imagine what any consciousness is like that isn’t formulated on human language. A dog’s consciousness or a dolphin’s consciousness is obviously not formulated in terms of human language and it’s a great exercise of the imagination to try to imagine what their consciousness is like. So I think the consciousness of the sun is so beyond anything that we are normally aware of ourselves, it’s extremely difficult to form an image of what it might be.

I think one could say that the scale of interest of the sun would presumably be, first and foremost, the solar system. I think we’d have to think of the consciousness of the sun as not embedded just within the sun but as something that would be centered in the sun but extends through the solar system, just as our own consciousness is not confined to the inside of our heads but spreads out to our entire perceptual world around us and links us to everything we relate to. So I would imagine the solar consciousness embraces the whole solar system and also its relationship to the other stars and the whole galaxy, because the sun is not an isolated unit, nor is the solar system. It’s part of a larger organism, it’s like a cell within the body of the galaxy.

WIE: Professor Huston Smith, who has written a great deal about science and religion, is skeptical about the usefulness of science in the area of spirituality. Because science is so dependent on the experimental method, he doubts that it can either prove or disprove the existence of consciousnesses superior to our own since if such superior beings exist, we would not be able to compel them to submit to our scientific experiments. Do you feel that the existence of beings with consciousness superior or greater than our own can be scientifically proven?

RS: I don’t agree with Huston Smith that the only way we can study things scientifically is by compelling things to submit to our experiments, because if that were true the whole of astronomy wouldn’t exist. We can’t do experiments on galaxies. We can’t tweak a galaxy to see which way it goes, or give an electric shock to a solar system to see whether it jerks in a particular way. All the standard experimental methods have never applied to astronomy. Astronomy is an observational science, not an experimental one. I think that the emphasis on the experimental method in science is somewhat misplaced in Huston Smith’s view, because the paradigmatic science, the science from which the scientific revolution was born, is astronomy, and astronomy is not an experimental science in the sense of altering variables, controlling conditions, and so on.

I think we are in the same position with respect to the consciousness of the stars and the celestial bodies as we are in relation to astronomy itself. We can’t do experiments on the sun or on the galaxy or on other galaxies. We can only observe them, and learn from what we observe. But if there is a consciousness of the sun, it might actually be slightly easier because it might be something we can interact with. We’d have to interact with it through our consciousness, rather than through physical instruments.

I could learn a lot about what’s going on in your body from electroencephalographs and electrocardiograms and that kind of thing, but I still wouldn’t know what was going on in your consciousness. The only way of really finding out about that would be by meeting you, being with you, talking to you, empathizing or whatever. So I think the same would apply to the consciousness of the sun or the galaxy or the celestial beings. If we are going to communicate with them we are going to have to do it by means of our own consciousness, through consciousness, possibly by some kind of intergalactic telepathy. This is obviously not within the present methodology of physical science. But that doesn’t mean that it’s totally beyond investigation forever.

WIE: So you are suggesting bringing consciousness into the study of what we normally consider to be inanimate matter and inanimate systems?

RS: Well, I think that we have to bring consciousness into our study of consciousness and, obviously, if we assume the sun and the galaxy are inanimate, then the issue doesn’t arise. If we just explore the possibility that they are conscious, then the possibility arises of actual conscious communication with them. Now, how that might happen I don’t know. To me, there are a lot of rather unwelcome attempts at conscious communication in the cacophony of channeling that’s going on at the moment. You know, people who claim to be channeling the Pleiades and that kind of thing. In a way, this is a dangerous path because it would be an open invitation to California channelers to start telling us what the stars are thinking. So, how it might happen I don’t know. I haven’t started this investigation myself but, if I did start it, I think that the first thing would be to look through the traditions—the Hindu tradition, the Buddhist tradition, Native American traditions, native traditions around the world—at what people have said and thought about their relation to the stars. Most traditions have the idea that human beings are linked to the stars and that human consciousness is linked to them. In Japan the emperor is supposed to be descended from the sun. The whole pyramid cult and the pharaoh cult were based on the idea that the soul of the dead pharaoh could be projected up into the stars, particularly into the constellation of Orion. The new theory of the pyramids, which I find convincing, is that the three pyramids in Giza are a model on Earth of the belt of Orion. They thought the consciousness of the pharaohs was projected out into that constellation, and that somehow those stars, or that region of the heavens, was specially related to the land of Egypt, to the consciousness of the pharaohs and to the highest consciousness which they could conceive of human beings attaining.

So there’s a great deal in the history of religion and in mythology that tells us something about what people thought in the past. And these are people who probably spent a great deal of time over many generations actually relating to the stars, probably by lying out at night actually looking at them, observing them very closely. No one now looks at the stars. Astronomers have fancy telescopes that take radio readings that go into computers. Astrologers, who are interested in stellar patterns, never look at the stars, they just look at Macintosh screens to see what the ephemeris says. The number of people who actually look at the stars and know them nowadays is vanishingly small—a few amateur astronomers, a few old-style celestial navigators who have been trained in the Navy or something. Otherwise most modern people haven’t a clue. So there are very few people around today who have that kind of living relationship with the stellar realm.

WIE: You are suggesting making direct contact with what one is studying in a way that sounds much more experiential than the way science is usually done.

RS: Well, science starts from direct contact and then it gets more and more into details. The science of animals and plants starts with observing animals and plants. Natural history is the starting point of any science, and that starts through direct contact. Linnaeus didn’t classify all the families of flowering plants by looking at their cells under a microscope or grinding them up and isolating their enzymes. He did it by looking at them, by holding them, touching them, feeling them, seeing them growing in the field or squashed onto herbarium sheets. He was looking at the actual plant form. We have to start from direct contact and experience. That’s the basis of our primary knowledge of things.

WIE: What do you think of the view of neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that evolution is without purpose or design and is the result of blind chance and natural selection?

RS: I think this is an act of faith on their part. It’s not scientifically proven that it is without design—it is simply their assumption to start with. They want to believe that it is without purpose or design and so they say so. They are materialists and, as materialists, their view of the universe, their philosophy, has no place for purpose or design in evolution. Without looking at a single piece of evidence or data, they can deduce that it has no purpose or design because it follows from the premise from which their entire world philosophy starts.

I think that they are tied up in a way of looking at the world which starts not from observation but from dogma. I don’t think there’s anything in science itself that can tell us that evolution has no purpose or design. Maybe there’s nothing that can prove scientifically that it does have purpose or design either. What we see is a variety of organisms amazingly well adapted to their environment. We see in evolution an amazingly creative process. Their philosophy says this is just chance and natural selection. But there are other evolutionary philosophers who say, “Okay, natural selection plays a part, it weeds out unfit organisms. But the creative process in evolution is a mystery.”

Creativity is not blind chance. It’s only blind chance if you start with the dogma that it has to be blind chance—the materialist dogma. Alfred Russel Wallace who, together with Charles Darwin, discovered the principle of natural selection and founded evolutionary theory, ended up with the idea that evolution was guided by intelligent spirits, that the creative side of evolution was guided by an immanent creative intelligence, or many kinds of intelligences, within the natural world. And that’s just as compatible with the evolutionary facts as the neo-Darwinist dogmas. However, even if evolution is guided by intelligent spirits or—just to put it more generally—by intelligence immanent in nature, that doesn’t necessarily mean that this immanent intelligence is working in accordance with an overall master plan or that human cultural evolution is guided by an intelligence immanent in human beings. You know, every innovation, every gadget that’s invented, every new advertising slogan, every new book that’s written, every new piece of music or work of art that’s made, is guided by a creative intelligence. But that doesn’t mean that we know where we are going. It doesn’t mean that these creative intelligences are working in accordance with some master plan for the destiny of humanity. Mostly they are working in accordance with much more short-term goals.

So for me, it’s an open question as to whether the intelligence that underlies the creativity in life is working in accordance with some fixed goal for the end of evolution. I don’t get that impression. If you look at the diversity of life—several million species of beetles, for example, on this planet—you get the impression that there’s a kind of creativity for its own sake, a proliferation of form and variety. It’s not at all clear why there should be so many millions of species of beetles. A quote I like is J. B. S. Haldane’s reply when someone asked him, “Mr. Haldane, you have spent so many years studying life. What do your studies of life tell you about the nature of God?” “Sir,” Haldane answered, “He seems to have an inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Any narrowly anthropocentric view of evolution, the kind of view of evolution that sees it all moving towards the evolution of humanity—the idea that the whole universe came into existence so that life could evolve on Earth, so that human beings could come into existence here, so that smart guys could be professors in major American universities—is very gratifying to our collective ego. But it doesn’t explain why you needed millions of species of beetles and countless species of ants and termites in the tropical rainforests, existing for tens or hundreds of millions of years before human beings arrived on the scene. Why is all that necessary for the evolution of human intelligence? Especially since we are driving thousands of species a week to extinction and most people don’t even know they existed in the first place. It’s a great mystery as to why life and evolution should involve such an incredible proliferation of diversity and creativity.

WIE: If one thinks of the universe as having immanent intelligence, or as pervaded by consciousness or guiding intelligence, or thinks of God as the mind of the universe as a whole, a troubling question arises. How can one explain the apparent cruelty of much of nature, the fact that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” as the poet said?

RS: Well, I think if there’s a universe of diversity and of becoming, which is what our universe is, then all things are mortal. Nothing lasts forever in a universe of becoming. If we lived in a frozen, crystalline universe where nothing ever changed, I daresay there’d be no claws and no blood. But the nature of existence, as we see it in the universe, is that all things come to an end and are recycled. Even the most long-lasting things we know of, like stars, come to an end. The forms in which things come into being have a limited lifespan, so all organisms are going to die sooner or later. And it’s the very nature of animal life that animals make their living by eating plants or other animals. So, if you are going to have animals which by their very nature have to eat other organisms, you’re going to have red claws and teeth somewhere or other. Plants make their living by getting energy from the sun, but even plants don’t live forever either. Decay, disease, death and suffering are built into the very nature of an evolutionary universe of this kind. So, if we have an evolutionary universe in which change and development are built in, in which there is a constant becoming of forms and dissolution of forms, these are inevitable features. The God of such a universe, the consciousness of such a universe, has to encompass these kinds of processes. You could, perhaps, have a different kind of universe, as I said, where everything is frozen in crystalline unity forever. But that would be a different sort of universe, a universe without becoming, without development, and also without creativity. It seems to me an inevitable consequence of the kind of universe we have that there’s going to be red teeth and claws around, and suffering, disease and death.

WIE: For many people that’s somehow inconsistent with the idea that the universe is ultimately a whole which is intelligent and good.

RS: I don’t see any reason why an intelligent, good, whole has to be thought of as a frozen, timeless being. This is a Greek conception of God, not a Jewish one. The Jewish conception of God is God working in time and history and process. The Greek conception is a kind of Platonic version of something totally disembodied, totally detached from the natural world, floating above space and time in an eternal changelessness. No doubt that’s one aspect of the Divine Being, a kind of absolute sense of being rather than becoming. I think that’s a pole of divinity. But there’s another side of divinity which has to do with becoming, process, time, and that’s something that’s strongly emphasized in the Jewish and the Christian tradition but not so much in the Eastern traditions. All of us, whether we like it or not, are shaped by this Western sense of process, becoming, of the meaning of history and of things developing and changing in time. If one wants a God who’s not involved in time in that kind of a way, then there are religious paths that are based on that view. One can view the whole of creation as a terrible mistake, as nothing but a series of endless, futile cycles of becoming and birth and death, and rebirth and redeath and so on, going on and on forever. Then the only answer is a kind of vertical takeoff into a realm of timeless being where you just forget all this and leave it behind you.

When I was living in India I found that some Hindu teachers took that view, and some of the Theravada Buddhists take that view. Their whole aim is to detach themselves entirely from this world of becoming and undergo a vertical takeoff of individual salvation. I don’t think that view is deeply attractive to most Westerners. We are too embedded, perhaps, in cultural conditioning about wanting to help people or save the world, or do something. It’s built into our whole culture. Maybe it’s just a different way of responding to the sense of the divine. But I think that the Western sense of divinity is one where suffering and process are inherent in it all. In the Christian view this is extremely clear. Jesus was crucified on the cross. It’s not about a God totally removed from suffering, process, history and so on, but one who actually has an aspect of his being within it all.

WIE: Do you find that this Western view is more supported by science, particularly by the scientific theory of evolution, than the other view?

RS: Well, I would say that the whole of the Western evolutionary view says that the entire world, the entire universe, is in a process of development and change in time, that there’s an historical process of development inherent in it all. In most Indian and Buddhist traditions, as well as in that of the ancient Greeks, you have a cyclical view of history. There is just an endless recurrence of cycles. Only in the Jewish religion, and in derivative religions like Islam and Christianity, do you have this very strong emphasis on process and time. And now the West comes up with evolutionary theory, and suddenly it turns out that this is the process of not just biological life on Earth but the entire universe. Is this a vast cultural projection and justification of our religious assumptions? Or is it a fantastic confirmation of them from science? It’s hard to know which.

WIE: Do you feel that there is an objective truth ascertainable through science, or is all of science possibly a projection of certain basic assumptions?

RS: I think all of science is the projection of certain basic assumptions. You start from a hypothesis and your hypothesis has a plausibility depending on your assumptions. The universe is reflexive—in other words, it reflects what we are looking for. If you believe the most important thing in the universe is polarity, you can see it everywhere—you know, heads and feet, north and south poles, roots and shoots in plants. If you think the most important thing is trinities, threes, you can find threes everywhere you look. If you think it’s fours you find fours—the four points of the compass, squares, corners and so on. You’re always meeting people who have got philosophies where the secret of life is this or that, and you can find plenty of evidence for all of these philosophies.

The universe can reflect an infinite number of points of view, it seems. But in science the way that you decide between competing views is by means of experiments. In philosophy you can have rival schools of thought that go on for thousands of years. But in science the general rule of the game is that if you have one hypothesis and someone else has another, you can actually say, “Okay, now can we do an experiment to find out which is better?” You have a kind of contest, and by agreeing on the experiment and doing it you ask nature to decide which is the better hypothesis. It’s like an oracle. You ask a question of nature and the answer comes back from the experiment. The experiment doesn’t always resolve the question. There are always disputed points of view in science. But you can resolve some things in science.

Evolutionary theory says that if there were many forms of life in the past that don’t exist now, they should have left various traces. And indeed, you look and there are all these bones of animals that no longer exist buried in the earth in strata and layers and this seems like pretty good evidence of change in time. Then you have the idea that all forms of life are related, and that all animals and plants within a given family are related to each other. And when you look at their DNA and their proteins, you find those are all related, that there is a family resemblance even at the molecular level.

I think the evidence is pretty plausible for this process of development in time. So I think that some things are indeed supported by evidence and you can decide certain questions by evidence. There are some more metaphysical questions that you can’t, like “Is there a purpose in evolution?” That’s not the kind of question that’s easy to decide by evidence.

WIE: Do you feel that having certain ultimate beliefs or assumptions, even if they cannot actually be proven or disproven by science, can inform science, or open it up to other realms that it might not be open to without them?

RS: Well, science is inevitably based on assumptions about the nature of the universe. In the seventeenth century the view that most scientists started from was a kind of neoplatonic conception of God, where there’s a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature. In this view, the mind of God is filled with mathematical equations and mathematical forms which are what ultimately shape and govern the whole of nature. The conventional scientific assumption of universal changeless laws of nature is simply derived from this neoplatonic theology of the seventeenth century. Most scientists have eliminated the mind of God from the world machine, but what they are left with is the ghost of the mind of that God, which is the idea of eternal laws of nature, fixed forever and applying to the whole universe. The big bang theory itself depends on this assumption. You assume that the laws of nature observed over the last fifty years in the laboratories on Earth apply throughout the entire fifteen-billion-year history of the entire universe, without variation, in every single part of the universe, even parts as yet unobserved by our extralarge arrays of radio telescopes. And, on this assumption, you then crank back the calculations to arrive at the big bang. But the assumption of universal laws of nature that never change, that have all been there from the beginning, is a pure assumption. There’s no empirical evidence for it whatever.

Insofar as people have tried to study the laws and constants of nature on Earth, they vary. I mean, we are always updating our view of the laws of nature and the so-called constants, like the speed of light. If you look at the data, they’ve actually fluctuated wildly over the last fifty or a hundred years in which they’ve been studied. These fluctuations have been dismissed as experimental errors. But in my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World I actually go through the history of the fundamental constants, and I discuss how constant are the fundamental constants. The empirical evidence shows they are not very constant. The assumption is that, okay, if the empirical facts show variation, the empirical facts must be wrong because we know they are constant, because they are constants. Science is based, through and through, on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the universe, and this one of eternal laws and unvarying constants is in fact, in my opinion, very questionable.

A lot of my own work is based on the assumption that the so-called laws of nature may not have been fixed through all time. In an evolutionary universe, why shouldn’t they evolve? And in fact, my own view is that they are not laws at all. They are more like habits. There’s a kind of memory in nature and these habits of nature evolve as time goes on. They are not fixed laws that were all there from the beginning—a position that can never be proved by experiment, but can only be assumed as an axiom. Yet most scientists take this for granted, as an unquestioned assumption. So I think science is based on all sorts of assumptions about nature which are essentially theological or metaphysical. In point of fact, most of the ones that science is dominated by at the moment come from a particular kind of theology common in the seventeenth century, this very Greek neoplatonic theology of God as beyond all space and time, with a mind that is eternally full of changeless mathematical ideas, and with the universe coming forth from that kind of mathematical God. If you don’t call it “God,” you just call it the laws of nature, or mathematical reality or something. But this is the assumption. Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg and all the leading physicists of today, including Einstein, all subscribe to this kind of view. Even though they wouldn’t call it “God,” they believe the ultimate reality is a timeless mathematical realm.

WIE: It sounds like the kind of universe you are describing is much more dynamic and also more mysterious.

RS: Yes. Their universe is the universe of rationalism. It’s the idea that the ultimate reality is a rational mathematical mind. The only really valid form of human thought is rational mathematical thought as exercised by great mathematicians and Nobel prize winning physicists, and all the rest is kind of messy detail that hasn’t yet been sorted out. The truth, for them, lies in this ultimate mathematical reason. It’s mysterious in its way, and it’s founded on a kind of mysticism. This view started with Pythagoras in ancient Greece; it all comes from the Pythagorean mystery school, which was a mystical school of thought. So, implicit in conventional science is indeed a kind of mystical insight. But many scientists have lost sight of its mystical origins and it’s just become a kind of dogma.

WIE: It seems that the universe they have created is much more fixed than what you are suggesting.

RS: Yes, even though science itself has revealed that the universe is evolving. The data have revealed that the whole universe is radically evolutionary, even though these assumptions are still in place that it’s radically nonevolutionary. That’s why there’s a big conflict within science from its own findings. My own work starts from this conflict, saying, “Okay, let’s take seriously the evolutionary nature of reality.” Then we have to question the idea that it’s all based on totally fixed unquestioned mathematical laws.

WIE: I understand that you taught at Cambridge University for ten years. What compelled you to leave traditional academia and strike out into the more risky, unorthodox and uncharted waters that you have been exploring since then? And what role has spiritual practice and experience played in this journey?

RS: When I was at Cambridge I was very conscious of the great limitations of biological theory. Although I enjoyed doing research and teaching biology there, I became increasingly aware that the mechanistic theory of nature was a very limited way of looking at things. It didn’t correspond to the fullness of what living things were doing. Just grinding them up and isolating enzymes and so on tells you something about organisms, but it doesn’t tell you how they relate to each other in societies, how they behave in the wild, and that kind of thing. All of that perpetually eludes this reductionistic kind of science.

Then, to find out more about tropical botany, I spent a year in Malaysia, where I worked at the University of Malaysia. This was in 1968. On my way there, I traveled through India for three months. That had a huge impact on me. I suddenly saw this astonishing culture which I found completely fascinating, which had riches and depths beyond anything I had ever been taught about in England.

I got interested in meditation and when I got back to England I did Transcendental Meditation for a while. Then I got into other forms of Indian meditation. I didn’t want to go on with the narrow, reductionist science at Cambridge, and the scientific community there was so committed to this narrow view. So I found a job in India, at an international agricultural institute, where I could do real science, working on Indian crops, that might potentially be useful, and at the same time live in India, which was where I wanted to be. I spent four or five years living and working in Hyderabad, at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semiarid Tropics, where I was the crop physiologist. During this time I had the opportunity to find out about Sufism, because of the Sufis in Hyderabad, and about Hindu philosophy. Gurus came through giving discourses and I visited various ashrams. But I actually found myself most drawn to ordinary Hinduism: the pujas, the people’s practice of making offerings to sacred plants in the mornings, the greeting of the sun in the morning, the pilgrimages to temples and sacred places, the holy trees, holy rats, holy cows, and holy snakes, and that kind of thing. I just liked the sacralization of nature and the earth which I found there. I’d gone there interested in the higher reaches of Hindu philosophy and meditation and actually found myself drawn to what most sophisticated Hindus despised—the folk practices of Hinduism. That drew me the most, and that I found most attractive because it involved a kind of sacralization of the earth and a different attitude toward nature and matter and life.

This was quite a shock to me at first. But I was intrigued by it and it played for me a very important role in giving me a broader view of things. Then I realized that I couldn’t be a Hindu because I wasn’t Indian, and it would be ridiculous to go back to England dressed up in Indian clothes and pretending to be Indian. I visited a few gurus and asked their advice on my spiritual quest. And one or two of them said something I never expected them to say: “You come from a Christian background, you should find a Christian path. All paths lead to God and that’s your path because that’s your ancestral path.” This actually came to make a lot of sense to me. Then later, I met Father Bede Griffiths, who was my main teacher in India, and I lived in his ashram for a year and a half. He was a Benedictine monk who lived in India and followed many aspects of Indian spirituality while remaining a Westerner with Western views. He was a bridge for me between these two cultures and helped me reconnect with the mystical traditions of Christianity, the core of the Christian tradition which I hadn’t really heard about as a child. So that, for me, was the way that I returned to a Western way of looking at things after a total of seven years in India. It took me a long way, going through that Indian path, and coming back.

Then, when I was living in India, I became very friendly with Krishnamurti, and later I saw quite a lot of him. I found him very refreshing. But there were some problems with his approach. He was very good at asking questions, but he wasn’t very good at suggesting answers, and I think that a lot of people got quite lost as a result of his teachings. But I had a lot of fun being with him and I liked him a lot personally. India played an important part in all this, and my time there, which combined doing Western-style science with living in India, was for me the right solution at the time. It meant I could do both. It provided a way of being in both worlds.

WIE: That actually leads me to my last question. Do you feel it is possible to be wholly committed to science and spirituality at the same time?

RS: Oh yes, definitely. I think that many of the great scientists in the past have been very spiritual in their way of life. Michael Faraday, for example, who discovered electromagnetism, was an extremely spiritual man, an extremely good man. Newton was preoccupied as much with the nature of the divine, and the divine will and purpose and presence in the universe, as he was with science. Even Descartes was very interested in theology and spirituality. If you look back through the history of science, many of the greatest scientists have in fact combined these two. There have also been scientists who have been dogmatic atheists, but most of them I wouldn’t number among the greatest in the history of science. Darwin was an atheist in the end, but he wasn’t a dogmatic one. He was quite a moderate and rather sorrowful atheist. The Dawkinses and the T. H. Huxleys and so on are the propagandists of atheism rather than the original creative spirits. They are the evangelists of this atheistic view—they are not the great creative spirits in science.

My own view is that science as a method of inquiry involves learning by experience. That’s really what it’s about. There’s nothing in that that is incompatible with the spiritual life because I think the spiritual life involves learning from experience as well. What is incompatible with the spiritual life is a dogmatic atheism and materialism which has come to dominate particular parts of modern science and, for some scientists, has come to be identified with science itself. But this is a paradigm. Scientific models of reality change, but science goes on even so. Before the 1960s most people believed that the universe was eternal; after that they got the view of an evolving cosmos. Before Darwin most scientists believed that the world was created in 4004 b.c.; after Darwin most have had a much expanded view of time. So it’s not a particular set of ideas or doctrines which constitute science. It’s a method of inquiry, the idea of building on what has gone before and exploring by experiment, and also an openness to new ideas. And that, I think, is completely compatible with a spiritual view of things. I don’t think you can prove some of these spiritual truths by scientific means. Science is a limited method of inquiry. It looks at the repetitive aspects of the natural world, so its sphere of interest is relatively confined. Spiritual experience would involve the limits of consciousness and the nature of consciousness. It overlaps with science in the realm of psychology to some extent. So spiritual inquiry has a broader sphere and science a narrower sphere. But I don’t see any incompatibility between the two.

I don’t know how and why I come to these dialogues.  But here I wanted to introduce you to Dr David Bohm: think science think art.

“I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment....
(David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order)

And I wanted to tell you about the friendship of David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti, but then I came across this interview with F. David Peat by Simeon Alev, only by chance, and nothing more was needed on my part but to reproduce an extract here with the link if you want more: http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j11/peat.asp?page=2

Look for Truth No Matter Where It Takes You

F. David Peat on David Bohm, Krishnamurti and Himself
by Simeon Alev

interview

WIE: Why did you feel it was important, at this time, to write a biography of David Bohm?

David Peat: I think it’s a useful book in that it helps to put Dave’s life in perspective and to bring all his work together, which has never really been done before. Dave had mentioned wanting to have an autobiography written—you know, trying to do it himself, or with help—and after his death in 1992, I talked it over with those who were closest to him. We all felt a concern that other people might jump in too quickly and decided that maybe we should just get one out now.

You see, it does look as if there are many different strands to Dave’s work—the early work on plasmas, his theory of hidden variables, the implicate order and his explorations of new orders in physics; also his work with Krishnamurti, and on consciousness and soma-significance. But when you see his life as a whole, you realize that these are all aspects of a single way of looking at the universe, so they are really not different strands at all. I thought it would be helpful to people to see that, particularly some of the people in physics who are starting to take off with some of Dave’s ideas, choosing some and not others. I thought it might be helpful to put them all there together so that people could see the extent to which all of his ideas were integrated—which even people who knew him fairly well didn’t necessarily realize.

WIE: His life and work were a coherent whole.

DP: Yes, it seems to me that everything did all tie together and you can’t just separate out part of it.

WIE: Is there then an overall message that Bohm’s life and work seems to hold for humanity?

DP: Well, in some sense it is this vision of wholeness—which of course is not new; it’s been present in many other philosophies and said before. But I think that each time someone says it, they are renewing it or reinventing it; they are bringing it to their time. And I think that David very much did that for our time. He also stressed the fact that science had fragmented, both within itself, and from spiritual matters and considerations of consciousness and the self. And you can see in the biography that these ideas were expressed through his own struggle. His life was both a personal struggle and a vision, a vision of something transcendent and a personal struggle to reach this condition of wholeness. And now his work, more and more, does seem relevant.

WIE: How do you see spirituality and science coming together in his work?

DP: Well, it’s certainly true that in his early days he was suspicious of the organized religions, particularly during his Marxist period—and even afterwards—feeling that they weren’t really serving the human race in a very good way. But at the same time there was always present a sense of the numinous, of the transcendent—from his early fantasies as a boy of going off into space and his visions of light, of illumination—the sense of an intensity in the mind, as if the mind could reach some truth that is always lying beyond the edge, that beyond some sort of frontier there’s some deeper truth to be perceived. So I think his work was a spiritual search in that sense, something closer maybe to a mystical search for illumination, for light, for truth. He would often say that you must look for truth, no matter where it takes you; no matter how it looks, you must always face the truth. And in this context I think I should also mention the feeling he had, when he was doing physics, that the universe was inside his body—that he often did feel like a microcosm of the macrocosm. He felt that he could reach truth within his own body, that one could look both outside and inside. So throughout his life there was that sense of direct connection to the cosmos.

WIE: He also seems to have had a sense that larger groups of people could experience life together in that way.

DP: Yes, he used to speak about the different dimensions of the human being—the individual, the cosmic and the social—and particularly towards the end of his life he felt that these three should be integrated, and that then maybe some sort of collective consciousness could emerge. He would sometimes talk about the idea of a river that is polluted. You can try to clean up the pollution around the city, locally, but the important thing is to find the source of the pollution, and in the process of doing that you may discover some sort of new order. He felt that part of that pollution was present in language and that we had to get to the root of that, the origin of it, which could only be done in the context of a group, through some sort of a dialogue.

Bohm and Krishnamurti

WIE: In spite of the fact that Bohm was deeply interested in collaborating with other people, several of his collaborations seem to have ended in some kind of misunderstanding. His association with Krishnamurti is a case in point. How would you describe Krishnamurti’s role in Bohm’s life? Was that one of his most important relationships?

DP: I think David Bohm would have felt that. Certainly he did say that the two most important encounters in his life were with Einstein and Krishnamurti. He felt something similar between the two men—the great, enormous energy that both of them had, and the intensity, and the honesty. And with each of them he had a deep friendship, but at an impersonal rather than a personal level. I think both men were quite important to him, but certainly with Krishnamurti the dialogues they had went very, very deep.

On the other hand, I have met people who felt that Bohm’s thinking was not profoundly changed by Krishnamurti, that his ideas and ways of working were always of the same order, that being with Krishnamurti merely brought him encouragement and inspiration, and helped him through a very dark period when he was becoming disillusioned about the value of doing science in general. These people seem to feel that Krishnamurti was important to Dave at the time, but that his dialogue groups and all of that, and his later ideas about collective consciousness, didn’t come from Krishnamurti.

This is a very difficult issue and maybe only time will tell, when we see things in perspective. Because as well as talking about David Bohm, many people are talking now about Krishnamurti too, within the Krishnamurti Foundation and also outside. They’re reevaluating Krishnamurti, asking who he was and what was the significance of his life. People are beginning to face Krishnamurti and to ask questions about him. So it has been difficult for me to get clear answers from people about Krishnamurti and Bohm.

WIE: Did you ever meet Krishnamurti yourself?

DP: Yes. Dave organized two conferences of scientists to meet with Krishnamurti and I went to both of those.

WIE: In the biography you go into some detail about their relationship as a whole, including its conclusion. Could you give a summary of how and why their relationship broke down?

DP: In the biography I just had to go on what people told me, but I had also talked to Dave quite a bit about that. I think that they were building up a great intensity. When those two sat honestly together, openly together, there was a deep intensity between them and Dave did indicate to me that he saw some of the things that Krishnamurti was talking about—some of them directly, and not secondhand.

On the other hand, he did get disturbed by the way that Krishnamurti’s image was being fostered by the people around him. Although Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land. Don’t listen to gurus, including the present speaker,” people did treat him as a guru and did behave as if he were a guru. And I think that disturbed Dave. He felt there was some sort of incompatibility in this, something paradoxical. He began to wonder about the extent to which Krishnamurti may have been conditioned by his own upbringing and he would ask questions about that.

I think there were also some doubts in his mind about the way the Krishnamurti schools were operating because there seemed to be a lot of conflicts developing in the schools. If people were supposed to be working without all this conditioning, why then were there so many problems? So he had many questions, and I think that on at least one occasion he was in that frame of mind when he met with Krishnamurti. At the same time, I think he had questions about his own life and his own work, and was maybe moving towards one of his bouts with depression.

Krishnamurti, for his part, began to question why David Bohm, if he had seen so deeply the things Krishnamurti spoke about, was so dependent on other people; he seemed to be very dependent on his wife, and on Krishnamurti himself. So it really was a confrontation, in which Krishnamurti asked David to look at the whole nature of himself, and Dave had questions of his own about Krishnamurti. At the end there seemed to be a breakdown between them which was, I think, painful for Dave because he didn’t fully understand what had happened or why, and although they did continue to meet, they never again explored things together at the depth they had in the past.

WIE: Do you think that their meetings up to that point had been mostly intellectual, or was there a kind of spiritual depth between them such as one might encounter between a guru and a disciple?

DP: I have talked to many people who were present at the meetings whose words I treat with great respect. And some of them wouldn’t have used that image of the guru and the disciple by any means. They would rather use the image of two people exploring together, at a similar level, Dave having very deep insights from physics and a very keen intellect, and Krishnamurti coming from his angle, the two men exploring together, looking together at the same thing. In many cases David Bohm would be helping Krishnamurti to clarify, not so much Krishnamurti’s perceptions—he couldn’t do that—but the way Krishnamurti presented them, the language he used and the course of the discussion. Sometimes there were generalizations Krishnamurti would make that Dave would pounce upon and get him to refine.

But it was not only a meeting of two highly energetic minds; there did seem to be, from Dave’s point of view at least, a great deal of warmth and love in it too. That he did feel from Krishnamurti, the warmth. So it didn’t seem to be the traditional guru/student relationship, more the relationship between two friends and colleagues. Dave said he also felt like that when he talked with Einstein, that the two of them were exploring together and there was no sense of one being superior to the other. And I think many people who worked with Dave felt that too. You were aware of course that Dave was far smarter than you were—he could run rings around you—but when you worked with him you didn’t get the sense that Dave was the boss, but that you were exploring together. I think he had a similar kind of relationship with Krishnamurti.

At the same time, some people did feel that when the two of them were together there was some spiritual presence; in fact, people often said that there was an awareness of something powerful in the room. And certainly those public dialogues were very helpful to a lot of Westerners who felt that listening to them was a way to come to Krishnamurti because David Bohm was engaging them in a more Western way than Krishnamurti.

WIE: I brought up the guru/disciple aspect of their relationship because of a particular passage in the biography in which you describe the pressure to change which Krishnamurti began to exert on Bohm after they’d been together for about fifteen years—which would normally be considered appropriate, in that context, to his role as a spiritual teacher. But since you also suggest that Bohm had reservations about what he saw happening around Krishnamurti, maybe it really was more a matter of mutual recrimination.

DP: Again, it’s difficult to know. I have talked to people who were in Krishnamurti’s inner circle and they tell me that this type of a break happened many, many times. It is as if people sat with Krishnamurti for many years, until at some point he appeared almost to turn on them, or challenge them. Even people who Krishnamurti felt comfortable with and who he would allow close to him, he at some point felt the need to challenge. In that sense, when he challenged Dave about himself and his conditioning, that probably was very like the guru/student relationship; it had suddenly switched.

WIE: Which may have been rather startling to David Bohm.

DP: From what I gather, yes. But these are difficult things to know about definitively because the people around them all had such strong vested interests. There were some people who felt that Dave was very important to Krishnamurti, and others who would have been happier had Dave not been associated with him. These people felt that he was contaminating Krishnamurti’s image, in a sense, that he was pushing Krishnamurti too strongly to speak in a Western, intellectual, rational way, thus losing the poetry. There were some people who felt that—that the poetry was being lost. But then, maybe they didn’t see the poetry inherent in David Bohm.

Bohm’s Science

WIE: What were some of the core ideas in Bohm’s worldview that made him such an important figure in the movement to unite science and spirituality?

DP: Dave felt that science didn’t have to be separate from everyday life, something abstract or having only to do with mechanisms. Rather, he felt that the universe itself was in a sense a mirror of our basic structure as human beings and of our relationship to the transcendent. That was the key that was present in all his thinking. So that when he began to develop his theory of the implicate order, there was a sense that this wasn’t just about the structure of matter but also about the structure of consciousness, because everything mirrors itself. Even his earliest work, on plasmas, came about not so much through thinking about atoms and electrons—which of course he did—but about the basic dilemma of the individual and the collective: Can an individual simultaneously have freedom in a society and contribute to that society? He saw that here too, the basic dilemmas of human beings with regard to free will and obligations to society are somehow mirrored in the very structure of the universe. In fact there was a vision he had, I think when he was living in Brazil, in which he saw the universe as a collection of silver balls, each ball reflecting every other ball, itself included—a sort of infinite reflectivity of the universe in which each part is contained in everything else.

WIE: Beginning with his work on plasmas, it seems that as time went on his thought acquired an increasingly cosmic dimension.

DP: Yes, although you could say it had always been that way. Even while he was still in school he was trying to develop a theory about the cosmos based on the idea that it had to include consciousness as well, so right from the beginning he felt that any theory about the universe had to include the human being in it; the human observer had to be part of the theory. It couldn’t be an objective theory in the conventional sense—something standing outside of phenomena that doesn’t also take account of us, the existential fact of our being. His thought was always cosmic, always all-embracing.

WIE: Why did so many scientists—why do so many scientists even now—seem to have so much trouble accepting or respecting his ideas?

DP: Well, I suppose in some cases it’s because people like small little bits of work—"resultlets," as David called them, not results but “resultlets.” When Dave did his work he really dealt with ideas, with concepts, and in very broad brush strokes; whereas the fashion in physics today is that it should all be hyper-mathematical, and he always mistrusted mathematics. Mathematics to him was a good tool, but it was a tool and no more. The thing with mathematics, even the most beautiful and elegant mathematics, is that somewhere in there a lot of assumptions have been hidden, and when we speak together, using ordinary language, it’s a little bit easier to discover what those assumptions are. Mathematics tends to conceal a lot. He was also suspicious of other aspects of the way physics was being done—for example, all this reliance in particle physics on breaking things apart rather than seeing them in an all-embracing fashion. You see, Dave felt there had been a major revolution in this century in quantum mechanics and relativity, but that our thinking hadn’t really caught up with it. In the old order you could fragment things, you could define everything on a Cartesian grid of space and time. Now we needed an entirely new order, and the implicate order, which is inherently infinite, was one of the approaches he was working on. But of course, that’s asking too much of physicists. They like to see things small and finite, and Dave was too much of a global thinker, I think, for many of them—except the very good ones, who were sympathetic to Dave because they realized that something new was called for.

WIE: But to most of the fraternity of physicists it seemed that he had gone beyond the bounds of science?

DP: Yes. And it is ironic that now, after his death, his hidden variable work—which is the work that caused so much controversy—is now being picked up on by physicists because they see it as a way of making calculations. To Dave it was a completely new way of looking at quantum mechanics, but they are just using it as a way of making calculations. They have left the meat behind and just taken the juice.

WIE: “Bohmian mechanics,” they’re calling it?

DP: Yes, the Bohmian mechanics, that’s right. That would have shocked Dave somewhat. It’s ironic that that’s what they have extracted from his theory. But similar things have happened in the past. He and Basil Hiley realized at one point that the new order they were looking for had already been anticipated by mathematicians like Grassman, Hamilton and Clifford. And in that case too, what had happened was that people had left the real deep stuff behind and just extracted some of the facile ways of doing calculations; the truly deep ideas had always been ignored.

WIE: It might help people to put all of this information in context if you could give a concise overview of some of Bohm’s most important theories.

DP: Well, one was his theory of hidden variables, which I’ve just mentioned. He believed that the universe was an infinity of levels, that the universe could never be completely encompassed by human thought. In that respect he differed a great deal from Einstein and there was quite a bit of correspondence between them on this subject. Einstein felt that ultimately there would be a single, unified level that would explain everything, whereas Bohm believed that for each level we’d reach there would be another concealed beneath it, and so we’d never reach the end of it.

This idea also contained an alternative to reductionism because in reductionism you’d discover, say, molecules, and then you’d explain them in terms of atoms, and atoms in terms of elementary particles, and so on; you’d go into smaller and smaller bricks. But for Bohm, the level above and the level below could mutually condition each other. So these were not really independent levels, much as you could say that the human body is made out of organs and cells, but that the cells in turn are determined by the whole order of the body. So the higher conditions the lower, and the lower the higher. He therefore felt that quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea of randomness and indeterminacy at the subatomic level, was just one step on the way to a deeper theory which would include these hidden variables. Like Einstein, Bohm wanted to retain the idea that there was a degree of objectivity at the subatomic level, that things don’t have to have human observers around to make them happen; and he was also concerned that quantum mechanics doesn’t offer any real explanation of how quantum events actually take place. So he developed a theory that he called first the “causal” and then the “ontological” interpretation of these events. These were essentially a way of trying to explain things in a more rational way, and although they didn’t meet with much success in the 1950s, more recently people have come to accept them as another way of looking at quantum mechanics, another approach.

Then there was his theory of the implicate order. The world we seem to live in—the world of classical objects, the world of Newtonian physics—Dave referred to as the “explicate order.” He felt that what we take for reality is only one particular level or perception of order. And underneath that is what he called the “implicate order,” the enfolded order, in which things are folded together and deeply interconnected, and out of which the explicate order unfolds. The explicate is only, you could say, the froth on top of the milk and the implicate order is much deeper. It includes not only matter, but consciousness; it’s only in the explicate order that we tend to break them apart, to see them as two separate things. Dave spent a great deal of time in the last decades of his life trying to find a mathematical expression for this vision of reality.

He also felt there was a need to reintroduce time into physics. Of course time had always been there as a parameter, but not as an actual dynamic entity which makes things move around. That was the work he was doing up to the very end of his life. And his other work of that period, with dialogue groups, was not separate from that because again, he felt that his theory had to include consciousness as well as matter, which led in this case to the idea that there could be a field of information. His ontological interpretation of the quantum theory gives the notion that matter is always responding to such a field. Up to that point we had two levels in nature—matter and energy. And now Bohm in his ontological interpretation introduced a third, which he called “active information"—information as an activity in nature. The electron moves and does these curious things because it is responding to a field of information, an active field. And the human body also responds to an active field—that’s how the immune system works. So he introduced this notion of active information as something which is inherent in both matter and consciousness, a collective and non-local phenomenon to which the individual human consciousness, or brain, is capable of responding. He believed it was possible to develop some sort of collectivity if people worked at it together over a period of time, so he developed his dialogue groups based on the idea that it might somehow be possible, through this active information, to produce a transformation in human consciousness. He may have believed that this is what had happened with Krishnamurti—that if you were with Krishnamurti, in the presence of Krishnamurti in a group of people, some change of consciousness took place.

WIE: This was what he was trying to accomplish by himself, after the break with Krishnamurti.

DP: Yes, that’s right, by working with these groups. Sometimes he felt very encouraged by them and at other times he didn’t. But he did believe it was possible—because in physics you don’t always need an enormous amount of energy to effect a large change—that maybe even a few of these small groups could affect human consciousness.

The Unknown

WIE: That could be seen as a rather ambitious goal, but one of the things that struck me about Bohm almost as soon as I began reading him is that in spite of his stature he seems to have been extremely humble. He seems to have had profound respect for what he didn’t know.

DP: Yes, that was certainly true. Although there was of course the other side too. He would argue quite forcefully with people; when people were on the wrong lines he wouldn’t let them off the hook. But yes, he had a sense that, before the whole universe, we know very little.

WIE: Do you feel that this humility played a role in his work?

DP: It certainly made it easy for the people that wanted to work with him. You just sat down and looked at the problem or discussed things. And in the same way it probably allowed him to sit and talk with Krishnamurti without that big sense of self being there. Most of the people that met Krishnamurti were aware that they were in the presence of a guru, which made it somehow difficult for them to speak to him. And his humility probably made it easy for him to speak to Einstein too.

WIE: And in his thought? Do you think this humility played a role in his ability to draw the conclusions that he did or to have the perspective that he had?

DP: You know, there’s always an easy way out, isn’t there? You could take your ideas and say, “I’ll present them in a way that the public will find pleasing,” or, “I won’t take them too far.” You can search for approval or for promotion—all of those things which lead inevitably to compromise. If you want to be successful you might find some little field and try to carve it out. But right from the beginning Dave never wanted to do that. He had the honesty and the modesty to do what he really wanted to do, which was to ask the biggest questions. I mean, what makes it possible to ask the biggest questions? You are either very arrogant or you freely admit that you don’t know very much.

WIE: What impact did your association with him have on you, as a human being, and also as a scientist?

DP: Well, probably it helped me to give up doing science!
It came at a very good time, a time when I was questioning a lot of things myself and wanting really to go to an edge in what I was doing. I came to work with Roger Penrose in London for a sabbatical year, met David Bohm almost by chance, and started talking to him. Actually, what happened may be similar to what happened between Bohm and Krishnamurti: it wasn’t that Dave revealed anything new to me, but he confirmed the suspicions that I already had. I probably had wanted to look at all these deeper questions, but didn’t have the guts to do it, or didn’t think it was practical or even possible. But when I saw that Bohm was doing it, I thought, “Well, why not the rest of us?” Maybe Krishnamurti didn’t really tell David Bohm anything new. Maybe he just supported him in his inquiries. In my case, the crucial thing was to feel that support from Dave over a number of years. It’s not that he thought he was actively supporting me; just his presence was supportive.

He also made a point of rejecting this idea of geniuses, of saying that you don’t have to be a genius. Anybody can do it who has the energy to question and to face things, to keep working on something. That’s an important point to make. Otherwise a lot of people will give up and say, “Well, I’m not a genius.” This is what was said to me when I was doing research, “Well, you’re not a genius, so why bother doing those things? Pick something small.” Whereas Dave made the point that anybody can do this work. You have to have some training of course, but the main thing is to keep asking those questions. Anybody can ask those questions.

WIE: This advice you were given about not being a genius—is it routine for graduate students in physics to hear that kind of thing?

DP: Yes. Yes it is. It happens quite a lot. Another piece of advice I was given was, “Find a very, very small area in physics and then just publish about ten or fifteen papers on it; then you’ll get a reputation. Then you can go and do this other stuff.” In fact—another little story—when I did go and spend a sabbatical with Bohm, a very senior physicist in England asked me to come visit him for a few days. He took me out to dinner one night and, very fatherly, said he wanted to give me some advice. He said he knew I was working with Bohm and that it probably wasn’t a very good thing to be doing. It would be bad for me, and really I should try to dissociate myself from him and go back to doing small pieces of physics. “Do small problems,” he said. “That’s the way that physics is going to progress, by people doing little bits of things.”

Another person told me that his ambition was to be just a footnote in a textbook. Now Dave never thought that way. Dave felt that was a deeply false modesty, when people said that sort of thing, and that really the only important thing was to ask the big questions—otherwise, why do physics? I think this idea was expressed in one of the letters between Dave and Einstein. Einstein wrote, “If this is the way things are going, then there’s no point in my doing physics anymore.”

WIE: What are some of the directions your work has taken which you might not have pursued had you not met David Bohm?

DP: Well, it was more a matter of opening up the inquiry. David Bohm once told me that the most significant thing Krishnamurti had told him was, “Begin with the unknown.” Now Krishnamurti didn’t have much time for Dave doing physics—I don’t think he thought much of it—but that was his advice: “Begin with the unknown.” It’s out of that, I suppose, that I’ve spent time talking with Native Americans, trying to understand their world. And over the last few years, I’ve also talked a lot with visual artists—sculptors, painters—trying to understand the struggle that they are engaged in, which also has to do with looking for a new order, and I’ve seen incredible similarities between that and what people are looking at in physics. Mainly I’m just trying to ask the biggest possible questions. Maybe that’s what Dave left me with.

WIE: When Krishnamurti said, “Begin with the unknown,” you must have a sense of what he meant by that.

DP: I think Krishnamurti felt that proceeding from the known to the unknown is not the way to work. You must begin with the unknown, with the question, and in the unknown one finds this enormous energy, whereas when you are constantly working from the known, there isn’t that energy to penetrate things. David himself told someone else one time, “Between where you are now and where you’d like to be there’s a sort of barrier, or a chasm, and sometimes it’s a good idea to imagine that you’re already at the other side of that chasm, so that you can start on the unknown side.”

New Directions for Science

WIE: I read an article of yours in which you outlined the need for a completely new paradigm for Western science, and described your own explorations of the worldviews and cosmologies of Native American cultures. How are you able to reconcile these directions which, in the minds of many people, may seem quite far apart?

DP: Well, I suppose that when I did sit down with some Native American elders and tried to understand their worldview—not that I did understand it beyond the merest occasional glimpses—some of the things they said did seem to correspond. . . . But you see, I didn’t ever want to do or write anything that was like The Tao of Physics because I don’t know if I believe all that stuff.

What you could say, though, is that there is a certain perception of the cosmos, or a perception of our relationship to it, which is present among the Native Americans, and it’s a process vision of nature: everything is process, it’s flux, it’s transformation. We come into relationship with this flux, but the basic reality itself is transformation and change. On the other hand, for several hundred years, physics looked for certain kinds of fixed orders and structures until finally quantum mechanics subverted that program. And then later on, chaos theory also subverted that program.

So you could say that Western physics reflected a human desire for a certain kind of order—a classical order or a Platonic order—which has now been subverted. It’s as if nature has told us that we can’t go that way anymore and that the way ahead, quantum theory or whatever, corresponds in some ways to the perceptions that I’ve had when talking to Native Americans. You can see that these two ways of looking at things are not that far apart. The Native Americans see a universe which is a flux, or a process, or a relationship of energies. And when you ask quantum physicists, “What are these things, what are molecules?” they will tell you, “Well, they are relationships of energies.” For example, David Bohm’s idea of an elementary particle was of a process: a particle is constantly in the process of collapsing inward and expanding outward. So we too are now dealing, really, with fluxes and processes and relationships, which is very similar to the metaphysics of Native Americans. I was very struck by that. I suppose I was also struck by the fact that they had developed a language which enabled them to live in that sort of a world. One of the key problems with quantum mechanics, as Niels Bohr pointed out, is that the Indo-European languages, which we use, deal with concepts and interactions between static objects, and because of that they just cannot seem to deal with the quantum world. We seem to be cut off from it by virtue of our language.

WIE: We don’t have a language adequate to express those truths.

DP: Right, because our language works in terms of nouns, so what we tend to see is a world of objects and interactions. And because we have a noun-based language we also tend to see categories and concepts, and to put things in categories. So a certain way of thinking, a certain logic, follows from the languages that we speak. But some Native American groups don’t have those sorts of languages, as a result of which they don’t have the idea of categories to put things in, and they don’t come up with the sorts of problems that we do. There’s a kind of liberation in that, you see: by looking at their world and coming back to mine I see my experience of the world as culturally conditioned rather than inevitable; I see that there could be other ways of looking at it. That’s what I found so valuable about that contact. So to answer your question, I didn’t see any incompatibility between my interest in science and my interest in Native Americans. I’m talking a lot with artists these days for similar reasons: because I can see that the other big change that needs to come about in physics is a change in our concept of space, and all of the artists I’m talking to are very concerned with that. It could be that as we approach the millennium we are all beginning, through our different disciplines, to look at similar sorts of questions; or that the rigidity of the Western mind has come to an end and is giving way to something more flexible. Maybe science is being tempered by things like intuition, by compassion, by other sets of values that have not been present before.

WIE: From a certain point of view science has always been innovative, but at the same time scientists have traditionally taken great pride in the rigor and rationality of their methodology. These days however, several people who are considered cutting edge members of the current generation of scientists are pursuing very fascinating but, from a certain point of view, seemingly outrageous directions. Rupert Sheldrake, for example, who also appears in this issue, is investigating “the physics of angels.”

DP: Oh, really, is he? So he’s come out with it, then.

WIE: Yes, he’s just published a book about it. And it occurred to me that people could conceivably think of this as a leap beyond the kind of rigor that scientific investigation requires.

DP: I’m sure many people would.

But you see, I’m living in this village in Italy where I pay very small rent and the wine is very cheap and all the food the people grow locally. I don’t really have to satisfy anybody anymore so it doesn’t really matter too much to me. And when I talk to Native Americans I can see that these people have incredible discipline in their life and in the way they work—much more discipline than we have in ours I would say—and also for the artists I’ve talked to, there’s a long, deeply honest engagement with their materials and with their work and I see tremendous rigor in that. I’m interested in rigor in that sense. Maybe we should go back to David Bohm’s idea of looking for the truth wherever it takes you and not compromising, not trying to sweeten things. The people who do that are the people I respect.

Now you do know of course that there are all sorts of kooky, crazy people too, both within and outside the scientific community, but I’m not so much interested in that.

WIE: So in this case for example, one could conceive of the physics of angels as a very creative, very risky direction in which Sheldrake is going out on a limb in order to explore something that he deeply believes in.

DP: You’re asking me to comment on something I don’t know too much about. But maybe I could put it this way—and I hope I’m not being mealy-mouthed: If, eight hundred years ago, some of the deepest philosophical minds in Europe such as Dionysius the Carthusian and St. Thomas Aquinas debated and looked very deeply at certain sorts of issues regarding the way they perceived reality and came to conclusions about it, then I think that is worth taking seriously. Now when you try to import that into quantum mechanics, for example, it usually does become totally flaky and stupid and new age. So the thing is, you have to perform a very creative act of discovering the language with which to express these things in a way that is honest to the modern world and honest to the original ideas. I think that’s where the real difficulty lies: it’s an act of translation. Because after all, who was it?—I think it was Nicholas of Cusa—who developed an idea very similar to the implicate order, but you couldn’t have imported Nicholas of Cusa into quantum mechanics. It just wouldn’t have worked. It needed someone like David Bohm to rediscover the idea, put it in a new context and a different language. So I think that’s partly what it is. And if Rupert Sheldrake is able to bring intellectual respect to Aquinas and Dionysius and all those people within our modern contemporary world, then that is a creative thing to have done. I’ve not read his book and I’ve only talked to him briefly about this.

WIE: I think I agree, but I wasn’t necessarily asking you to comment on Sheldrake specifically so much as on this kind of thing as an overall direction in contemporary science.

DP: Well, angels, okay. But flying saucers and alien abductions and things? . . . I’ve just come back from the Institute of Contemporary Arts conference in London last week where we had flying saucers, alien abductions, massive doses of drugs, Timothy Leary dying on the Internet—all of that stuff. Now that’s getting a bit flaky.

WIE: So in making these kinds of distinctions, how do you draw the line?

DP: It’s very difficult. A lot of it depends on the people involved. I think you can spot a kooky person pretty easily, and there are a lot of kooky people. But I suppose if you meet a person and you have a degree of respect for them, and then they tell you something that sounds a bit outlandish, you should spend a certain amount of time with them and go into it, talk about it, explore it. There’s always a way, even if what you hear at first is a crazy language. I mean, when you hear that Swedenborg went to other planets and things like that, that obviously is kooky stuff; I personally don’t believe that Swedenborg went to other planets. But if you gather that maybe Swedenborg had an intuition of some sort of truth about things and tried to express it in the only language he knew at the time, that becomes a bit more acceptable and then you can say, “Let’s sit down with this fellow Swedenborg because he seems to be a very intelligent, deep thinker. Now what is he saying?” Maybe that’s the only way you can do it, at a personal level. You may have to try, initially, not to be put off by the language in which the thing is expressed, whether it’s flying saucers or angels or whatever, and ask yourself, “What if it’s a metaphor for something, an image of something? Alright, then what is it an image about?”

Some people see flying saucers, other people see angels, but what is it really all about? Native Americans will say, “We see the guardians of the spirit.” And you press them a little bit more: “What are the guardians of the spirit?” “Well, they are energies.” Then you say, “Okay, if you’re talking about energies, and I’m talking about energies, then we’re talking the same language, which is about relationships of energies.” It’s about trying to find some sort of common language and respecting each other in discussion.

WIE: Then from your point of view, those are equally valid idioms or ways of describing the same thing?

DP: What I mean to say is that when you’re dealing with a culture that has developed and existed for a long time, such as the Native Americans, or even Europe in the Middle Ages that talked about angels, then you have to have a lot of respect for it. Now that’s not the same as saying that you have respect for flying saucers or magical inner children or your higher animal or anything like that, as people do in California. I’m not saying that. I want to stay on one side of this.

WIE: The distinction that’s made by some of the people I’ve been reading—Ken Wilber and Huston Smith, for example—is not that these aren’t all valid ways of investigating and describing our experience, but that there can be a kind of category error that takes place. The domain of science is that of an empirically verifiable physical reality, this argument goes, while the spiritual domain, and also the rational/philosophical domain, address completely different dimensions of human experience. All of these are related of course, but even so, one shouldn’t expect to be able to say something in one domain that will apply in another.

DP: Yes, those are strong arguments, I can see those.

You know, there’s a story about Pasteur. Pasteur was in his laboratory and somebody came to interview him and said, “Pasteur, sir, doctor, when do you pray?” And he said, “I am praying now,” as he was looking through his microscope. In the individual life, the life of David Bohm for example, there could have been no time when he stopped being a scientist and became something else. He could not have accomplished that fragmentation of his own being. It’s the same with a Native elder; there’s no time when a Native elder is not in a deep spiritual relationship with nature and there’s no time when he’s not praying; it’s happening all the time. So personally I don’t see how a human being could stop being one thing and suddenly become another. And I think that for some scientists the basic impulse is a religious one, or a spiritual one—a sense of the numinous, of some deep order or some transcendental quality of the universe. You will always find that to be true of these scientists, even after you’ve distinguished their honesty and their willingness to face the truth from their work and the particular language in which their ideas are expressed.

But I do take the point that there’s a danger in using science to prove religion or to give credibility to religion—you know, a “God and the New Physics” type of book. I think there’s a danger in that.

WIE: You mentioned The Tao of Physics earlier. Do you feel that Fritjof Capra’s work falls into that category?

DP: To be honest, I’ve never read it. I must be one of the few people on the planet who’s not got around to reading it yet, so I don’t know, I couldn’t say, it may, it may not. But I do think there are a lot of weak analogies, when you say for example that quantum mechanics produces a vacuum state, which is a state of infinite potential energy, and then you jump from there to saying, “Well, that’s God.” Now that’s really stupid stuff. That’s very silly.

WIE: Picking up a thread we left behind, having more to do with your own perception of things: For you, what is the most important thing in life?

DP: Hmm. . . . An easy question! The most important thing in life. . . . You know, maybe I don’t think about it. Maybe I don’t think about that sort of thing. I mean, it’s been nice finding a village on a hilltop, surrounded by beauty, where people live in a sort of traditional way, where you can lead a life that’s balanced—a little bit of walking, good food, warmth. And, I suppose, being able to express yourself creatively, maybe that’s the important thing—whatever it might be, writing or painting or doing something. And having relationships with people. . . .

I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s not something that worries me. Maybe if it worried me I wouldn’t be doing this. In the past I was more worried about things. Maybe I’m not worried at the moment . . . but nothing lasts forever!

End of interview

You can thank me later when you come around….and magic happens when the right people come together.

check it out for yourself:

http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/

Looking at the price list in front of me, then it would have cost me less than £100/a whole month for about 4 hours everyday, monday through friday.

Todays prices check it out: http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/pdf/summer_sched_2010_web_r1.pdf

Pollock did say at sometime that it took him about 10 years to unlearn what he learnt at the league, before he decided dripping paint was OK.  Something like that...he said.  The Honorary memebers list is long: those who either studied or were instructors at the league at sometime during its history.  You know what: it is allowed to be cool in New York.

The ‘ending of time’ is really a follow up from the previous 2 articles.  When one moves away from the dogmatic center to then be in a space of ‘choiceless observation’ with no judgment in the mind.  Living with a mind that is only observing and watching and with this comes stillness.  Now the question you ask is how does this new space work.  Out of this stillness what are the new rules of the mind.  How does information become in this new space. 

‘The nature of duality and non-duality are revealed in simple language. In that state of questioning, a state when the questioner, the experiencer has ceased, in a flash, ``truth’’ is revealed. It is a state of total non-thought.’ (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

‘The mind which is the vessel of movement, when that movement has no form, no ``me’’, no vision, no image, it is completely quiet - In it there is no memory. Then the brain cells undergo a change - The brain cells are used to movement in time. They are the residue of time and time is movement; a movement within the space which it creates as it moves - When there is no movement, there is tremendous focus of energy - So mutation is the understanding of movement, and the ending of movement in the brain cells themselves.’ (Jiddu Krishnamurti)

I think when the mind is still from only observation a whole new physics comes into being.  So how does the NEW come through in this new space?  We now look at the ‘The Tenets of Quantum Physics’ by Amit Goswami (theoretical quantum physicist).

Non-Locality
We are all interconnected - even without signals, and experimental evidence is proving our inherent unity.

Tangled Hierarchy
In our brain, we become one with the neuronal images of an external object because of a tangled-hierarchy, a circularity. The observer is the observed.

Discontinuity
The discovery of something new of value in though is a quantum leap of Aha! Insight

The first 2 points are important to the artist but it is the 3rd point which shows us the way to what’s new I think.  When I say, I think, I mean, I am putting an idea across: it is not ‘what is’ (but it might be), a natural fact that has always been true as Krishamurti explains: through observation we need to recognize these facts, both tangible and intangible.

Non-Locality: also includes the work of Rupert Sheldrake, where with the morphogenetic field we are all connected (see earlier article): that organic database in the ether that we help create and feed off.

Tangled Hierarchy: In our brain we are one with what we observe. ‘The observer is the observed’ was first put forward by Jiddu Krishnamurti purely by observation, and later taken up by Amit Goswami as a quantum fact.  We tend to stand away from what we observe of ourselves and the environment, but really we are one with it: we are what we observe, and it does not exist apart from us.  If you look at it through a neuronal perspective, then you can see how it works: what you are and what you observe just sits there next to each other, zapping away in your mind.  You and what you observe are one.  So when we follow a problem we might have with the ‘self’ or that ‘center’ created through time in us: we watch it totally to see what it does and how it functions.  But we watch it like it is one with us: ‘the observer is the observed’.  It changes I/we change.  Get it.  ( I was taken in by a statement that Alex Katz made on TV recently, when the interviewer asked him what was the content of his work and he said the style was the content.  He said he did not think Rembrandt was a good artist, because he always was making work, with the question to the viewer of ‘get it’, ‘get it’, ‘get it’ with each work he made).  When we see the ‘what is’ of it, we then bring it to an end.  We are really cleaning up the database.  We have to deal with the 100’s and 1000’s of years of accumulated happenings, through from the times of the ancients, to the present time that we have made of ourselves: we observe and bring the un-natural elements to an end.  The stillness in mind comes as a result of some of this process.  It is a process of cleansing and being, through observation.  Also in Tangled Hierarchy it has been said that some things/happenings with you perhaps, cannot be explained when observed in an isolated manner: the reasons for this is that the ‘physics’ of it all is complete, an equation can be formed, only when all the elements/people are put together and looked at as in a group.

And then there is discontinuity: this is information that comes through to you that does not have to go through a medium to arrive to you.  Like when an electron in an atom goes from one level to another it is not seen to go through a medium to arrive.  It appears and disappears.  So the new comes to you in this fashion: it appears as what we know as insight.  So when you discard such information, because your thinking mind does not recognize it, then you discard a possibility that could have brought change.  So when a mistake shows itself as something new, but you discard it because you are busy being a carpenter of an artist, then you discard something that would have taken the front line of art for a quantum leap. And so on.

You can ask Damien Hirst about discontinuity because people are still trying to get their heads around his work.  He has changed some of you forever by just you looking at his work: the function of art: to transform you. And it ain’t bingo.

A true artist is beyond the vanity of the self and its ambitions. To have the power of brilliant expression, and yet be caught in worldly ways, makes for a life of contradiction and strife. Praise and adulation, when taken to heart, inflate the ego and destroy receptivity, and the worship of success in any field is obviously detrimental to intelligence. Any tendency or talent which makes for isolation, any form of self-identification, however stimulating, distorts the expression of sensitivity and brings about insensitivity. Sensitivity is dulled when gift becomes personal, when importance is given to the “me” and the “mine” - I paint, I write, I invent. It is only when we are aware of every movement of our own thought and feeling in our relationship with people, with things and with nature, that the mind is open, pliable, not tethered to self-protective demands and pursuits; and only then is there sensitivity to the ugly and the beautiful, unhindered by the self.

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To sing we must have a song in our hearts

Learning a technique may provide us with a job, but it will not make us creative; whereas, if there is joy, if there is the creative fire, it will find a way to express itself, one need not study a method of expression. When one really wants to write a poem, one writes it, and if one has the technique, so much the better; but why stress what is but a means of communication if one has nothing to say? When there is love in our hearts, we do not search for a way of putting words together. Great artists and great writers may be creators, but we are not, we are mere spectators. We read vast numbers of books, listen to magnificent music, look at works of art, but we never directly experience the sublime; our experience is always through a poem, through a picture, through the personality of a saint. To sing we must have a song in our hearts; but having lost the song, we pursue the singer. Without an intermediary we feel lost; but we must be lost before we can discover anything. Discovery is the beginning of creativeness; and without creativeness, do what we may, there can be no peace or happiness for man.

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One can be creative without having any particular talent

The freedom to create comes with self-knowledge; but self-knowledge is not a gift. One can be creative without having any particular talent. Creativeness is a state of being in which the conflicts and sorrows of the self are absent, a state in which the mind is not caught up in the demands and pursuits of desire. To be creative is not merely to produce poems, or statues, or children; it is to be in that state in which truth can come into being. Truth comes into being when there is a complete cessation of thought; and thought ceases only when the self is absent, when the mind has ceased to create, that is, when it is no longer caught in its own pursuits. When the mind is utterly still without being forced or trained into quiescence, when it is silent because the self is inactive, then there is creation.

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Art divorced from life has no great significance

Art divorced from life has no great significance. When art is separate from our daily living, when there is a gap between our instinctual life and our efforts on canvas, in marble or in words, then art becomes merely an expression of our superficial desire to escape from the reality of what is. To bridge this gap is very arduous, especially for those who are gifted and technically proficient; but it is only when the gap is bridged that our life becomes integrated and art an integral expression of ourselves.

J.Krishnamurti, From EDUCATION AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE

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‘Thought is really, if one goes into it, if one observes it, the response of memory; and without memory there is no thought, no thinking. Whatever we are asked, whatever the challenge, whatever the response to that challenge - all that is still the recording, the response of the past, of the memory, of all the experiences that one has gathered. And that past has always a center from which we think; and that center is more emphasized in our life, has more importance; that center becomes profitable, that center assures security. From that center we think, we act. That center is more or less static; though its challenge takes a different form, a different shape, though things are added to it and taken away from it, it is still there. That center has become important for each one of us. That center might be the family; that center gives me comfort, gives me pleasure; that is the thing round which I have gathered so many things in order to protect myself. So, there is this center which is created by thought, thought being the mechanism of the past. Until we understand thought and the thinker, there must be duality, there must be conflict; and all conflict wastes energy, deteriorates the quality of the mind.’

I am only interested in how all this works with the artist.  He has created a center from where he makes art.  The center is created with time as an expression of his experiences: it is a reflection of his past.

‘We have a center, and that center is created by thought; that center is the background. That background is very extensive and historical and has also plenty of mythology and moral values of society. However extensive that background is, there is always a center in it, the ‘me’, which is more important than history. That ‘me’, that self, is created by thought, because if there is no thinking, there will be no ‘me’. The ‘me’ is not created by some supernatural entity; the ‘me’ is created by everyday incident, by every accident, by every experience, by the innumerable assertions and denials and pursuits.’

So the artist constructs his form with the assistance of all his idiosyncrasies: his past. 

But the ‘new’ in art does not come from the known.

When it comes to the final solution: let’s face it: art is made to transform and only the ‘new’ in art can do this. So can you work from no center: the magic question.

‘Is it possible to have no center at all? Do not translate this into your own language, into what you have read in the Gita or some other book; forget all that, and look at the issue. Do not interpret it in your own peculiar language - then you lose the vitality of perception.’

So what is the ‘self’ like with no center.  No center does not mean no ‘self’.  Thought is inherent part of the ‘self’.  It is not going to go away.  ‘The observer is the observed.’ All you observe is not going to cease when there is no center.  Stillness is not nothingness.  Stillness is to allow happenings to continue as they are, but you do not do anything about them.  You only observe them.  Choiceless observation.

‘Meditation is actually this process of investigation into oneself. If you go into it deeply yourself, you are bound to come across all this, where it is possible to think without the center, to see without the center, to act so completely without idea and approximation, to love without the center and therefore without thought and feeling. And, when you have gone through all that, you find out for yourself a mind that is completely free and has no borders, no frontiers - a mind that is free, which has no fear and which does not come about through discipline. And if one has gone that far, one begins to see - or rather, the mind itself begins to observe the thing itself which unfolds thought - that the quality of time, the quality that is yesterday, today, and tomorrow, has completely changed, and therefore action is not in terms of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Such action has no motive - all motive has its root in the past, and any action born out of that motive is still an approximation.’

A center that does not churn up its past for an idea but keeps it free for something new to show itself.  Observing the happenings without intervention is to be still.

‘So, meditation is the total awareness of every movement of thought and never denying thought - which means letting every thought flower in freedom; and it is only in freedom that every thought can flower and come to an end. So out of this labor - if it can be called labor, which is really out of this observation - the mind has understood all this. Such a mind is a quiet mind; such a mind knows what it is really to be quiet, to be really still. And in that stillness, there are various other forms of movement which can only be verbal to people who have not even thought about this.’

‘……the mind in that state of aloneness is capable of total individual action - individual in the sense that it is not related to a particular society or culture. Such a mind becomes silent, completely still, and in that very stillness there is an extraordinary movement, a movement which is not put together by the mind. That movement without any center, without any direction or objective, is creation; that movement is the real, beyond the measure of time and man.’

The ‘new’ in art comes out of this stillness and for that center to cease completely is the only revolution, but that revolution cannot come about through any effort on the part of the conscious or the unconscious.  You cannot think yourself into your center ceasing.  There is no method to make it cease.  ‘Choiceless observation is the only way: by complete cessation of all choice. Then the mind becomes extraordinarily quiet, utterly still, and in that stillness there is a revolution at the center.  Only then is there a possibility of being truly individual because then the mind is alone, uninfluenced. That state is creativeness.’

Look at it this way: that choiceless center kind of mind, sits at the center of the room.  When you live only by choiceless observation you remain at the center.  If you start to make all your observations an experience you move towards a corner and ‘become’.  If you finally sit facing one of the corners, you are blinded of the other 3 corners and of the Truth of things.  You start to think off the corner you are facing.  At the center there is only stillness through observation with no judgement.

And out of this stillness of ‘choiceless observation’, the ‘new’ in mind is born in action.

There seems to be an obstacle to satisfaction in the process of making art. The difference between the mystic and the artist is that the mystic is quite happy to be standing still. For him, ‘stillness speaks’, but for the artist he has to keep feeling his way through his art until he realizes it is not going to come to an end. The process drives the artist through all the crevices and you come up with mainly dead ends. The manifestation of this process is the art work. The end product is only part of the process. The art work throws light on that journey. It shows the viewer, through its excavations, its mistakes, through the coming together of form, through the history of the works, something of the ‘Intelligence in nature.’

‘….Earth in its entirety is indeed a living, breathing organism with an intelligently (albeit instinctively) coordinated sense of its own existence and purpose.’ (J.S Gordon, ‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis.’)

The process of making art is but a mini replication of the greater. There is something of the way a work of art falls into place when it is completed that is similar to the way the universe has fallen into place amid the chaos into order. Only an artist struggling with form to make art can truly feel this when it happens. You know it by doing. And it is repeated with each work. He/she starts to feel a coming together and senses that ‘intelligence in nature’ at work. After a while you take the invisible forces at work for granted and make it part of the process. It becomes a way you finish off a work of art. You know it will naturally bring itself to completion. And you will instinctively know when it is not there yet.

Art is a valuable database for the natural Truths and the structure behind the intelligence. It comes through the personality of the artist and through the flavour of his own form in his mind.

Today, even the scientists are confused about what they know of the structure of the universe. So let us look at some ancient literature as to what they say about the invisible forces of the universe. This is relevant to the artist as he is working up against this in his process of the work that he is trying to manifest. The idea of his work comes of the form that is in his mind and his mind, whether he likes it or not, is connected to the structure of the intelligent universe, both visible and invisible.

‘In 1988, Professor James Lovelock, a fellow of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, put forward the then apparently revolutionary idea that every part of the Earth, including its rocks, oceans and atmosphere, as well as all organic entities, was a part of one great living and intelligent organism.’ (‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis.’)

If you open up the Sikh holy book, these are the first few lines you will read.

The one God
Whose name is Truth.
The Creator.
Who is present in all Creation
Who fears none.
Who hates none.
An immortal being beyond time.
Unborn
Self existent
attainable only through divine grace.

Meditate.
True in the Beginning.
True throughout the Ages.

True even Now.
says Nanak (Sikh Guru),Truth will always be here.

The truth comes from everywhere, so at times it is OK to just look over the edge of contemporary thinking, over the pages of cool contemporary magazines and art books, to see where the process is coming from. You must remember cool is yesterday and today, time rolls back to the days of Kandinsky at the turn of the last century. It was a time of the NEW in art with the advent of abstraction. Like Kandinsky did in his time: he looked at the Kalevala: Finish mythology, and he was fascinated by the life of the Shaman: a person who has been to the brink of death and then back again, now all knowing. He carried the book ‘Thought Forms’ from the Theosophical society with him at times. Then came, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, by Kandinsky. In today’s contemporary art schools: spirituality is not a valid reason for subject matter for the work. But as science and mysticism comes together we start to very rapidly see what our limitations are and what the work is all about and that the final product of the creative process is only part of a bigger happening. The Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, reminds us in the very first few lines, just how vast the process of the creative wave really is. It gives you an idea of an underlying intelligence that permeates all and will always be true.

The spark in ones own mind can come from many different places. This is also a component of how the Whole perhaps works. I was at a talk by J.S Gordon on his new book, ‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis’, but more on some of the reasons for climate change by looking at the history of the formation of the universe, from chaos to order, and an underlying order that is cyclical, yet very precise. This explained the cataclysm that ended Atlantis. And it is here again today. It was by looking at this structure of the universe and its possibilities that the point was made, that perhaps within our galaxy, we live within a sphere of consciousness that is contained, because of the forces that hold the different parts of the universe together (see diagram below).

These forces interact, but can remain distinct. And this can also be reflected by our own group spheres we live by and hence the limitation. We cannot perceive outside this bubble. More importantly we have to create this circle of limitation for us to generate an idea, to think coherently. This is where the flavour in our work comes from. The personality that is created in this sphere comes through in the work. It was the fact that the conscious whole had to be capped for the mind to create, to work, was what fascinated me.  Remember that the artist works within the limits created by his own mind and also within the limits of his medium: the painter limited by a flat two dimensional space and its edges.  He first looks from outside the canvas, from the vast universe and all it holds, both the tangible and the intangible and then filters it down into the image that he creates.  It implodes through the artist into his work. The vast forces of the universe was also organized in this way. From big to small. As above so is below. Our minds are limited to function. ‘That is why with each work of art, the process always leaves the artist with a taste of dissatisfaction in his mind.’ I am trying to recall what was said. That is perhaps why the looking never ends. But then if you see it as it is, then you have it.  The transformation comes from accepting this fact: that we operate within limits and we will never see all. The process will allow you to see this.

‘Man was seen as being unable to make his escape from one cycle of existence (or state of being) to another – except subjectively and at the critical points of transition between one celestial cycle (or state of being) and another…..’ and also ‘ It was for this reason also that each new cycle was seen as producing its own ‘zeitgeist’……..We use the expression ‘zeitgeist’ to mean the influential ‘Spirit of the Age’, from its literal meaning in German, although the modern interpretation of that expression gives it the flavour of no more than some sort of unspoken communal human perception of, or instinctive urge towards, cultural change.’ (J.S Gordon, ‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’)

And also there is ‘zeitgeist’ and there is ‘zeitgeist’. To the ancients, the ‘Spirit of the Age’ was an ‘avatar’. With us, what you see now is of the last 100 years. The ‘zeitgeist’ is what you are living in today: the flavour of the century. And I think today, it is now in transition again, with the recent banking failures, the population sees how vulnerable the man-made system is, and its group consciousness will see it make a change. Add to this a couple of volcanic eruptions because of the ‘compressional and expanding forces’ of the universe, an earthquake here then there and you are looking at change. People get bumped around in this process and they start to ask questions or rather they start to think. We don’t see it until we live through the process of the system, dismantling the system. It is not very dissimilar to what the artist feels as he follows the process of making art. But we, the group, consciously will do it ourselves. We are in the process of making something new for us to live in, because we see the Truth in the limitations of the past. ‘As they did historically in ancient Rome, Greece, communist Russia…..’ Nature allows us to make and break systems. Well the artist, he sits coolly among all this and also functions just like it, in his own bubble: and he wonders why he is not seeing it yet. As the greater process functions, so does the artist as he lives creatively making art. Though the artist deals with the material object, the devotion to his craft has attuned him to non-material concerns. He is a function of the greater process: a micro entity of the ‘intelligence’: contained in a sphere with his own limitations and trying to decipher the big picture with his art.

‘The ancients saw the universe as a concentrically organized sequence of fields of consciousness, this being to them a universal principle.’ (‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’ J.S Gordon.) As you can see from the diagram earlier we sit smugly in the center, in our little worlds, with our limitations and think we are the biggest thing since sliced bread. You know what I mean. Now if this is the big picture and we are really enclosed in the sphere of limitations not being able to see the landscape of the structure we live in: then we have to accept this. Progress comes from accepting this. We see that everything we make is an illusion, every idea is not real, but it may be an indicator of the manifestation of the invisibility and vastness of the space we live in, then perhaps we can unfold and progress. It is to bring on a settlement so a new space can become.

History of the universe has been a cycle of chaos and order. The making of us and the destroying of us: order and chaos. Atlantis was an example of this. In this cataclysm the new is created. As in art, it is only the look for the NEW is relevant. It is a personal opinion. It is the driving force for the unfolding of the race and evolution. ‘…..The ancients saw consciousness unfolding and then evolving……’ (‘The rise and Fall of Atlantis’). To bring this to a close quickly it is sufficient to say, from looking at J.S Gordon’s work on Atlantis, that these cyclical nature of the universe would bring on a series of states or ‘planes’ of consciousness within our local solar universe, that little circle in the center of the diagram. We evolve through 7 planes of consciousness (The current race is 5 and on the 5th plane). The flavour of this evolving nature of the races is one of involution becoming more egocentric, with increasing amounts of mass desire and by the 3rd race more grounded increasingly in physical matter. By the 4th race the concept of Mind, desire and physical form is fully integrated. ‘From the middle point of this race (4th) the process of evolution commences, the desire principle now becoming increasingly personalized and dominant in each individual and each local group. Correspondingly, in the present Fifth Race, it is the mind principle which is becoming increasingly individualized and dominant in the integrated personality and the local group.’ The seventh race returns to the first race and both races are spiritual in nature and the cycle repeats itself. As it did in Atlantis, the catastrophe will bring an end to one form for it to evolve to another. Another diagram from the book on the different races, ‘The Rise and Fall of Atlantis’ by J.S Gordon ISBN: 978-1-905857-43-2)

We are now in the 5th race, though still tied up to the object, desire, materialistic in the way we live but we are in transition. In the 5th race (us) the mind principle becomes prominent in the individual. We have just been through a process where the illusion of the structure we made for ourselves to live in started to show its weak areas. We could at one time almost see the possibility of the illusion crumbling. It had changed the lives of some, where all of what they thought was secure they lost: their homes, money etc. The mind gets stuck on things like this. When a lot of minds get stuck on such matters we get change. The structure of the ether changes. You witness the ‘rise and fall’.  There is an awakening of the ‘Intelligence’ in the mind. I like to finish with a quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti on how the intelligence is woken by the discovery of a fact behind the illusion.

‘You see, intelligence is not personal, is not the outcome of argument, belief, opinion or reason. Intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility, when it discovers what it is capable of, and what not.’ I think what K is trying to say here is exactly what is going on now in all our minds. Does this structure we live in now: is it real. We saw glimpses that it may not be real, only an illusion. When you see a fact, and its relationship to a fallacy, there is something in you that alters. A new presence makes itself felt in you because of that experience. The presence is a kind of ‘intelligence’ that can now operate through you. ‘And only when that intelligence, is functioning can the new dimension operate through it.’ The new you, as a result of seeing a universal Truth, now continues the evolutionary process towards the 6th race. So, as for the artist, in a different way, when he gifts you with the NEW in his work, he changes you forever and invokes that ‘intelligence’ to function in the NEW you.

So this is how we are made.  We have become this through our conditioning.  You only have to look at the way we dress in different parts of the world: we all have a kind of uniform to represent ourselves.  How does this come about: it comes about by being made to be so.  Your mind has become because of conditioning.  Out of that rigid structure created by you, you remain there making art.  That morphogenetic field that Rupert Sheldrake talks about is firmly in control.  Living dogmatically.  Freedom from the known, is to get out of this conditioning.  ‘And when you look with freedom it is always new.’ The new in Art is the driving force that will advance the front-line of art in ways that you cannot expect.  At the turn of the last century (1890 to 1920), when Artist finally dropped realism for abstraction, there was a coming together of people, literature, conversations, spirituality: India, Europe, China...: and this brought on abstraction which we today accept as valid and continue to live with it.  It is fully integrated into our psyche.  What was it in the minds of those that brought this about.  What does it take to invoke the New.

The mind has to sit in a certain way not to be a victim to conditioning and to recognize dogmatic behavior.  One thing that is important with Krishnamurti is that the process of seeing (and ending) that you are conditioned must be natural.  If there is a method to the process then it becomes dogmatic.  And this also applies to making art I think.  If there is a method to doing your work, then you are following a conditioned path and you will produce work that will not venture out of its mould.  This is also a danger with getting caught up with technique.  Technique can be important but it must be secondary to looking for the new.  You can see the danger of this too: when I make a judgment like I just did I am in danger of conditioning myself of that fact.

‘To understand anything you must live with it, you must observe it, you must know all its content, its nature, its structure, its movement. Have you ever tried living with yourself? If so, you will begin to see that yourself is not a static state, it is a fresh living thing. And to live with a living thing your mind must also be alive. And it cannot be alive if it is caught in opinions, judgements and values.’

‘In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand - a very difficult thing to do because most of us don’t know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.’

Remember you are loaded with a rigid past in your mind.  You have to first accept that you are shackled to your past and you are living off that information from your experience and your past.  Some might think that this is cool.  I am me.  And I am going to be more me tomorrow.  So whats wrong with that: it becomes an obstacle to you seeing your real self.  It makes you look through your conditioning.

‘When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is we look only at the projections we have made of ourselves. Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.’

‘……the simplicity that can look directly at things without fear - that can look at ourselves as we actually are without any distortion - to say when we lie we lie, not cover it up or run away from it.’

To rid yourself of your conditioning you have to follow it.  To be aware of it when it comes up.  To recognise it and follow it to see what it does to you without judgement.  Without judgement is important, as judgement means making it an experience.  The magic of being aware of your conditioning is that when you see it and understands what it does to you: it then comes to an end.  You have naturally brought it to an end.  It was not a method that brought it to an end.  If it was a method, like meditation, that was used to end it, then the trait has not ended.  It was only suppressed and will show itself again in time.  But if it naturally comes to an end through observation, it has ended.  It is still there with you; it will always be part of the process that is you: ‘the observer is the observed’; you are not outside of what you observe, it is you what you see, but it won’t show itself again as you have followed it to its end and understood how it works.

I think the perfect state ( I recognize that I am making a conclusion here and the truth of it to be recognised through observation only) is one of awareness and action.  The new is discovered by keeping the mind free only to observe without conditioning, and to manifest the discovery through action.  Action is a busy time for the psyche.  It involves thinking, making, lots of noise and chatter in the mind.  But the mind has to return to pure awareness and observation as its restful state. And continue through observation to bring all its conditioning to an end.  To finally live in stillness.  The still mind lives with no judgement to push itself into a corner, as it always returns to the center.  A still mind is fully attuned with the universe and all its happenings.  You live in harmony with the greater ‘intelligence’.  And when you are there I cannot tell you what it will be like. 

Is art just a prerequisite or is there the urge to create when one is still?

(all comments from, ‘Freedom from the Known’ by Jiddu Krishnamurti.)

Who is that person that you call an artist? A man (or woman) who is momentarily creative? To me he is not an artist. The man who merely at rare moments has his creative impulse and expresses that creativeness through perfection of technique, surely you would not call him an artist. To me, the true artist is one who lives completely, harmoniously, who does not divide his art from living, whose very life is that expression, whether it be a picture, music, or his behavior; who has not divorced his expression on a canvas or in music or in tone from his daily conduct, daily living. That demands the highest intelligence, highest harmony. To me the true artist is the man who has that harmony. He may express it on canvas, or he may talk, or he may paint; or he may not express it at all, he may feel it. But all this demands that exquisite poise, that intensity of awareness and, therefore, his expression is not divorced from the daily continuity of living’ (Total Freedom: Krishnamurti foundation of America)

Besides being holistic, there is also that question of ‘purpose of life’.  At some stage in the artists career he is going to ask himself this question. When I asked the artist John Hoyland in his studio, when he was in his 70’s, (see previous article ‘John Hoyland: Today’s Turner’) as to why he still had to keep painting: he said because he just had too. There is something of the Truth in this answer if he is to follow the ‘movement of creative thinking’ as Krishnamurti points out. Once you are riding on its wave, you know you have to keep going, to keep looking, to keep creating because with it you are fully in touch with the very process of creation and existence.  ‘Fully alive’ as K points out later in this text.  But first there does not seem to be common ground in our search for purpose.

The artist is looking for it through his art, ‘(he) will tell you that it is self-expression through painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; the economist, if you ask him, will tell you that it is work, production, cooperation, living together, functioning as a group, as society; and if you ask the religionist he will tell you the purpose of life is to seek and to realize God, to live according to the laws laid down by teachers, prophets, saviors, and that by living according to their laws and edicts you may realize that truth which is God. Each specialist gives you his answer about the purpose of life, and according to your temperament, fancies, and imagination you begin to establish these purposes, these ends, as your ideals.’

K says that we create an illusion, a false environment by conditioning, we live in it, and we look in there for the Truth, the purpose of life. We tend to ‘work towards an end, a purpose. You wade through this turmoil to the goal, to the end, to the haven of refuge, to the attainment of ideal; and these ideals, ends, refuges have been designed by economic, religious, and spiritual experts.’ There is no common ground.

And so for the artist what is his Truth of purpose before he finds his expression.  Perhaps it begins and ends in the same place:

‘The very inquiry into the purpose of life indicates the lack of intelligence in the present; and the man who is fully active – not lost in activities, as most Americans are, but fully active, intelligently, emotionally, fully alive – has fulfilled himself.’

What he means by ‘fully active’, ‘fully alive’: with total observation, without conflict in the mind, primed up for watching through being aware of your space, without judgement, without being conditioned, and always remaining in the center. You have to come to this state of being ‘fully alive’.  The enquiry into the end is futile, as he says there is no such thing as an end and a beginning: there is but the continual movement of creative thinkingand more importantly it is that movement right now. What you call problems are the results of your ploughing through this turmoil toward a culmination. The ideals you look for are set up by the false environments that you have created for yourself. So essentially what you are doing is already trying to arrive at an ideal, which you will discover, is something not of an ideal after all. They are ‘just escapes from the present turmoil.’ There is only that ‘movement of creative thinking.’ Dealing with the environment as it is just now. The creative intelligence deals with just that, without the experts who create the false environments for you to be in and make purpose and initiate beginnings and ends and goals you grind yourself towards. So according to K, the end purpose and only purpose is learning to be fully in the present. To bring yourself to that point and stay there, you look at the movement that is you, in you, your mind, your daily activities, and watch them without judgment, to be in complete awareness, to only observe, to watch the cycles that repeat themselves because of lack of observational understanding and see how they come to an end when you follow them and see them clearly.  ‘The observer is the observed’: what you observe is you and not outside of you.  You are not separate from it. There is no method in the process. It is a naturally occurring process of observation, just as you are, watching your mind and everything around you. Bringing to an end the unnecessary process of psychological thinking and protest, so it does not get into the structure of the image. The noise of the mind then flattens out when these are gone. You are then left with pure awareness, just observing, completely understanding every movement, both externally and internally. Being complete and one with the environment and hence living in complete harmony with the vast space of the universe.  And making art from here.  Totally free to discover the NEW.  Total freedom. 

The mind has to first naturally find its way to this space.  Naturally and not through a method, as intangibles obtained through a method is not permanent.  They only exists when the method is in use.  The destructive patterns come naturally to an end.  This is bringing something naturally to an end, by just ‘watching’ it.  The stillness comes as a result of this ‘watching’ while being completely alert to things at all times.  Initially you might have to remind yourself to be alert, but with time it comes naturally, like breathing.

When Elton john was asked why does he still keep writing songs, when he does not know what he is worth and will never have to worry about his next cup of coffee, he said, ‘ because I am trying to find that ultimate song’. Is it what he is saying is that he is still looking for that ultimate something NEW song that will stand out of all the other songs that is in existence, and transform us forever with the NEW. Then I feel this is not going to come from thinking, but by being empty minded in the now, calm, noiseless, steady, and then suddenly there it is, sitting in you mind, like magic, and not knowing where it came from. Thinking yourself into something uses tools that are already in existance, your past, your hopes for the future, all coated with your experiences and hence conditioning. How can the new come from data that is already known.  Freedom from the known is also a point that K puts forward in his talks.  The new has to come from non existence, from nothing. But being one with all and to allow this to happen, the device of mind has to be primed to receive.  Your living space that your mind has created to live in, is an illusion, and if you live in an illusion and you look for the Truth using the coordinates of an illusion, you are looking outside the realm of the naturally true.

The process and the purpose is: to be, so all is known without thinking, and action to manifest a discovery.

You have to get to stillness first, before you start making timeless art.  Finding the new and adding it to the front-line of art.  In the process, transforming viewers who come across the work.  There can be no other purpose in this ‘futile’ obsession.  The artist to be in contact with the universe by being as close to the structural energies of nature.  To recognise conditioning in himself, to live outside the illusion, to be free of all that is known so that the new is accessable and to be totally free to create art that is timeless.  Making work that will always be true to its time because its presence is that of the very essence of nature.  I like to finish with a quote from a book by Karen Armstrong on ‘Buddha’, that before Christ ascetic from today’s Nepal and yesterdays India, around 300 BC who found that quiet center:
‘‘Nibbana (enlightenment) is a still center; it gives meaning to life. People who lose touch with this quiet place and do not orient their lives toward it can fall apart. Artists, poets and musicians can only become fully creative if they work from this inner core of peace and integrity.’

We have to finally ask ourselves: are we, yes us, creating a brave new world for ourselves.  We are all responsible for both the tangible and the intangible part of existence.  This wholeness, the totality of existence, is brand new at any moment, created by us, as we bring it into existence. Everything, all the good and the bad, keeping in mind that there is no good and there is no bad as they are all part of the structure of existence (especially in the arts: so called ‘bad’ art, shows the way for the ‘good’ art, and if you see the truth in this you would price them equally and enjoy it for its power to point the way forward) AND THAT there is only that,’movement of creative thinking.’ The front-line of existence being created by: artists, economists, teachers, guru’s, mystics, killers, parents, muggers, presidents, kings and queens, drug dealers, microsoft, corner shop owners, schools etc. and at any moment, you look at it and you see what you got and you work with it. Never the same from one moment to the next, constantly being made and the artists, i would like to think, has a very positive part to play in this creation.  And they will know what it feels like to ride the wave of the creative experience. 

Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist at Cambridge University and he had put forward the theory of Morphic Resonance.  He suggests that there is a database of information that is created and stored by the working of social groups.  This is not stored in the brain but outside of it.  In the ether.  And the field develops according to the feedback it gets from the participants by morphic resonance.  The field strengthens with time as the group grows according to the information it gets from this field.  One can see why cultural patterns emerge in different parts of the world as groups.  It feeds off the same data or morphic field that is created and it exists because of the group.  Like a group of artist.

Artists around the world (with the help of the internet) will be part of an elaborate field, both locally and universally.  As the field expands and changes from feedback due to improved communications, you will find that the world of art in China say, will start to take on more western forms.  Its old forms that characterises the Chinese look will metamorphise into new forms.  The important think to realize about a mophogenic field is that it is a template.  If you cannot work yourself out of that template you can become predictable without knowing it, as you constantly, unknowingly, feed of this field.  So finding the new, the truly new, will be difficult to come by, both because you are ‘stuck’ with this data of information but more importantly, the groups that live off these fields, will not recognized what is truly new.  The ‘new’ will always be, that little bit that is different plus a lot of what already exists.  Or more like, the work will always be the same, feeding off the same data over and over again without knowing it.  So progress is this predictable ‘frontline’ of forms, concepts, colors, dragging the past along its path.

Morphic field” is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a morphic unit which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity.[12] According to this concept, the morphic field underlies the formation and behaviour of holons and morphic units, and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group which has already established its (collective) morphic field, will tune into that morphic field. The particular form will read the collective information through the process of morphic resonance, using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through morphic resonance, a feedback to the morphic field of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the morphic fields as a universal database for both organic (living) and abstract (mental) forms. (wiki)

If you cannot break off that loop you will wonder why, in art, new radical form and ideas are difficult to come by.  A little bit of this and a little bit of that from the past, from the Morphic field, that database of past ideas that you feed off but don’t know it is there and going nowhere in your work.  The MORPHIC FIELD is the home of GROUPTHINK.  The NEW transforms, and I like to suggest is the main purpose of art.  An experience, an idea, which lifts you into a new space, instantly.  You see it and you have it.  You will never be the same again after such an experience.  The excitement of the New will not come from feeding off the Morphic field or Groupthink.  Increasingly we are beginning to discover, or the mystics have always known, that we are ‘shackled’ to a universe that insists in maintaining its balance and one that also makes us function in specific ways. 

Unknowingly we create ourselves off a template.

This concept of the Morphic Field has been around in India via the Vedas.

‘Also, he (Sheldrake) agrees that the concept of Akashic Records, term from Vedas representing the “library” of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to morphic fields,[13] since one’s past (an Akashic Record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same brain), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) morphic field.’

In his talk, Sheldrake did mention in fleeting that it is possible that Creativity might function outside the morphic field.  This mechanism of finding, creating, as it turns via the mind of the artist might stand apart from the ‘field’ and outside it. It does not have to work with the ‘field’. He also did mention that we still did not understand how consciousness worked.  The mystics of yesterday and the scientists of today are starting to come together.  They are in partnership today to show us what New is.  And the Artists were always in the thick of it, through form, colour and composition, to show us how the process functions, how the mind turns and to find for us, what is means to experience something truly New.

(Sheldrake has spent time in India.  From 1974 to 1985, he worked in Hyderabad, India, where he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. For a year-and-a-half he lived in the ashram of Bede Griffiths, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.[4][) )

Then, there is also that secret force of the universe: ‘The field’ (by Lynne McTaggart).  She explains after talking to scientist that there is an underlying electromagnetic field that permeates the whole universe and is responsible for holding the universe in place.  This field exists even under very low temperatures and is not affected by the happenings around it.  It is forever ever will be, just the way it is, unchanging, omnipresent and unseen but always present.  Things we cannot see but unknowingly we live by their rules.  The science is beginning to open up this unseen world and making it very real for us.  It is the same with the mind and how it works and how it interacts with the unseen. 

For the artists it is creativity: this is a whole new ‘machine’ of its own.  As Sheldrake had pointed out in one of his talks that it could possibly work outside the unseen database only choosing to interact with it if it wants to do so.  An independent force responsible for progress and the ‘new’.  So, as for ways of seeing: what is awareness? It is ‘looking’ without thinking.  It is ‘looking’ without making a judgment.  It is ‘looking’ without allowing time to alter its original state.  There is no good or bad in this type of looking but only there is.  I think artists will already be familiar with this type of looking.  They would already have been there at some point: that one-pointedness, stare into the void or canvas, all lost to nothingness and not knowing where you had been when the real world returns.  There was no thinking in that zone.  But is this possible all the time in the walking-talking non meditative state.

Candice O’Denver says that “the true nature of the mind is infinitely expansive pure awareness”. This awareness is space-like, sky-like, primordially pure and timelessly free. It is uncaused and uncreated, the unchanging basis of all manifestation. “It has never been made into anything.” It is naturally ever-present in every moment, and always at rest. This changeless pure awareness is our true identity, and remains forever free and unaffected by transformations such as birth and death. As the “unchanging basic space of all phenomena”, awareness is that by which everything is known, the fundamental intelligence by which we know we exist. (http://www.greatfreedom.org/)

So how do we live in ‘our true identity’.  The cross-legged meditator’s try and bring on this state of awareness by using a mantra to bring the mind to a state of emptiness and hence rest. 
The mind is, but it does not think.
The mind now is, but it sees without thinking.  There is an underlying energy of looking but without the ‘spikes’ of thought kicking itself up from the calm.  To be in a state of awareness is to put away the thought as soon as it ‘spikes’ or bubbles to the surface.  Cross-legged awareness is fine for you to know what it feels like, but to LIVE in awareness, is to be walking talking working playing awareness.  Cross-legged awareness is a method to get to a way of looking, but walking talking awareness is to live with a true undisturbed state and to work in that calm state. 

Not all thinking is good thinking.  Psychological thinking is a waste of energy.  Nothing comes of it.  It ‘burns’ good brain cells for no outcome.  He this and she that: psychological thinking (Jiddu Krishnamurti).  You put away these unnecessary spikes of thinking and return to the calm base that permeates all, that is omnipresent, and you become part of that force that permeates the universe. 
‘Short moments of awareness,
repeated many times,
become automatic!’ (Candice O’Denver)
Creativity, the new, lives here.  You get to it through being aware and by leaving thinking out in the cold.  Use thinking only when you need it, like crossing the road, look left, then right, or when baking a cake.  But living in awareness…….put that thinking spike away when it is not needed.  If you swing the dragon by its tail and out into the cold often enough you will find yourself living is a state of blissful awareness.  And so what.  What do you get by being in this state of awareness: the universe starts to download into your world?  It cannot do it with the ‘noise’ of thinking or with conflict in the mind. That is why quiet calm living in awareness is important for the artist so he sees all, is all, not this or that by being forced into a ‘state’ or corner by thinking.

‘awareness is that by which everything is known’
(Candice O’Denver)

And also Jiddu Krishnamurti (Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti Talks in India, 1948).

‘‘It is only creative intelligence, creative understanding, that can bring to you a new culture, a new world, and a new happiness.’

And new ART

(siri 19th feb. 2010)

Recently there was a reality artist TV series by Charles Saatchi, where he had a group of artists making art, with initially a given subject matter and then finally given the freedom to do their thing.  One underlying matter that came across from the judges was the requirement of subject matter.  ‘I look at it and I must get it at first glance’ or something similar: I think it was Tracy Emin.  You can see that the judging was based on about getting it.  You know ‘getting it’ is a mental activity.  The mystics say that thinking is an action of the mind, like walking, seeing etc. of the sensors.  If you can stop walking when you want too, or stop seeing by dropping your eyelids, then you can stop your mind, stop your thinking when you want too.  When a thought appears: you put it away.  If you do this often enough, you will see that the ‘spike’ of energy that is thought will cease to arise.  But then what have you got left after thought has ceased.  Now that is where the magic lies.  That is where you will find the true home of great Art.  In that quiet (but not empty) space is another way of seeing: seeing without thinking.  Seeing without time by being only aware of what you are looking at, without making a judgment, without thinking.  That is ART without a subject matter.  It is only what it is because of its form, composition, color and whatever else that goes into making a painting, a sculpture, an installation.  The object emanates something that will trigger a transformation.  It is NEW without a past.  It has no links to the frontline of art.  It is not a result of

groupthink

That is where the NEW in Art can manifest itself .  It is a place where spontaneity, chance, play and intuition will show you what’s new.  It is a place where a mistake is made and you chase it for something new.  Art that is created from that quiet space of only being aware, without thinking.  It has no subject matter. It is without a past.  Its future is eternal: forever it will be true to the viewer.  It has no narrative to put it in its place, to give it time.  It has no history.  You cannot make reality TV with it.  Initially it will be confusing as it has no place in the mind of viewers to put it in its place.  It stands so far off the front line of art that it might seem impossible for the thinking/action oriented mind to comprehend.  It is endless like this idea can be an endless poem describing the properties of non thinking art.  Eternal art lives in that quiet space, with no past, no future, but always will be true, it will be unchanging in its ‘aura’ to the viewer, forever.  And more forever, and more.  And some more.  It always is.  Can you see it: thinking without time: by only being aware.

As J Krishnamurti says: enlightenment is not something that will come to you because of time of effort, years of crossed legged meditation.  It is instant: if you see it, then you have it. 

.......And it has nothing to do with thinking.

(Siri , 1 january 2010)

One-pointedness is both focused and sustained attention and intention:

‘We aim our attention toward the object and place it on the object. Focused attention, however, tends to dissipate quickly. So we add the effort of sustaining our attention on the chosen object.
While a focused and sustained attention is necessary, it does not prove sufficient for true one-pointedness. We also need a focused and sustained intention: the intention to connect with, open to, surrender to, and serve the Sacred. This one-pointed intention, like our one-pointed attention, must be immediate, in this very moment. Gathering every fiber of our being, every wayward intention, we gravitate toward a higher world.’(http://www.innerfrontier.org/Practices/One-Pointedness.htm)

So the artist gathers and manifests his information from the intangible digital database.  His one-pointed attention and intention drives the process of making art and together with the

Non-Locality: We are all interconnected - even without signals, and experimental evidence is proving our inherent unity.
Tangled Hierarchy: In our brain we become one with the neuronal images of an external object because of a tangled hierarchy, a circularity. The observer is the observed.
Discontinuity: The discovery of something new of value in thought is a quantum leap of Aha! insight.
and much more, he makes his art.