DUVERSITY UK

These essays come from a work in progress and illustrate the approach. The book was started from the material generated for the Baltimore Seminar-Dialogue on Higher Intelligence in 1998.

The emergence of ourselves as intelligent beings – and also, of course, very stupid ones – is like a question asked of the universe. Heidegger might have felt this when he declared that ‘man is the question of being’. We – and all life that came before us – stand in contrast with what we have learned about the physical universe over the last millennia. We have treated the universe as mindless and as a consequence have created the puzzle of intelligence. We are an infinitesimal part of the universe – and so far there has been no verifiable evidence of other intelligences similar to ourselves, which emphasizes this – and so can be disregarded on a cosmic scale. Yet we can equally well take another stance and argue that, since we exist, the universe must have generated us and hence have something of intelligence in it so that our existence is evidence of something yet to be understood.

Current science appears to conclude that even if it is supposed that life and intelligence might be understood in terms of known natural laws it would be impossible to compute this, even given the resources of the whole universe. If the whole universe acting as a super computer cannot predict life and intelligence, then maybe something fundamental is missing from such a world view. Some physicists now entertain the idea that our concept of natural laws as immutable must be challenged.

The idea that our intelligence is just a mechanical result of a material universe is then a belief. This belief is associated with a reaction against beliefs widely held in the past and associates with a corresponding belief in linear progress. It is a paradox, since belief in progress is to extol intelligence. Our thinking about evolution is still to a large extent an oscillation between Darwin and Wallace. Wallace pre-empted Darwin over the concept of evolution but also proposed that human evolution marked a different kind of process to natural selection.

Part of the reaction to previous beliefs is a social and political reaction against certain types of authority, which once held sway over the minds of men. It is almost as if a rejection of such old ideas as Angels or Gods is a reaction against the social powers that used such ideas as a way of enslaving people to obey their authority. The break down of control of thought by institutionalised religion is a remarkable thing. The twentieth century (going into the twentieth first century) dissolution of Communism is a more recent re-run of exactly the same phenomenon. The key element has been and remains natural science, which affords an access to ‘truth’ that is independent of social authority and corresponding belief systems, however weakly now in the face of geo-politics and capitalism.

It seems extraordinary that we can today make an appeal to nature to find out the facts, rather than turn to some entrenched authority to tell us. However, such a sweeping statement needs to be tempered by considering that some kind of natural science has been in evidence since the beginnings of modern man and subject to rise and fall. The recent growth of science – and democracy – may mark a change in the human mind that itself highlights the issue of intelligence, but in this case extending the question to include the idea of the influence of higher intelligence.

In simple terms, many people think that, considering the widespread evidence of stupidity and rampant egoism on this planet of ours, it is miracle that we exist at all and an even greater miracle that some kind of progress is possibly being made. This might be explained in terms of systemic properties of complex systems but these might also amount to a version of higher intelligence - ‘a rose by any other name’.

It is difficult today to think about higher intelligence because of certain entrenched habits of thinking. These entail thinking in terms of separate objects and thence of connections between them. If an idea of higher intelligence is proposed, it is taken to mean that there are intelligent entities other than human who are not only more intelligent than humans but unfortunately invisible (and inaudible and so on, though there are quite a number of people – believers - who claim the opposite). But, they may be invisible just because they are not entities or objects at all. The relation between humans and higher intelligence may be similar to that between matter and energy. Drawing such a parallel is to adopt another kind of thinking, in which objects or entities are not primary but relationships are. We can extend the correspondence by bringing into view the category of information to add to those of matter and energy. The relation of matter to energy to information may then be claimed to have a correspondence in the relation of matter, life and intelligence and even in another correspondence – as if changing the scale to use a musical analogy - in life, humanity and higher intelligence.

The idea of relations as primary connects with many similar notions such as that of process in contrast with equilibrium states and doing in contrast with being. For someone entrenched in the object view, this is difficult to get hold of, because we do not then have anything to ‘hold’. Speaking of the object view leads us to remember that it claims ‘objectivity’ and realize that the relational or process view will be characterised as ‘subjective’. The challenge of understanding intelligence does lead us into subjectivity.

The relational way of thinking has many exemplifications in modern thought, such as that of ‘coupling’ in which, for example, an organism is no longer regarded as a thing interacting with an environment but as something arising out of a coupled state in which we can never completely separate the one from the other. Such a way of thinking has also emerged with the idea of quantum entanglement, in which things are so engaged with each other that they form a coherent whole with unexpected properties in which there are no separable entities.

We assume that higher intelligence appears in an invisible guise: it is too complex, or too subtle, or too nonlocal to be discerned except by some of inference that is speculative to say the least. If we look for it we cannot find it. Yet, beyond inference, we may find in ourselves – both individually and collectively – points of access to this unseen reality. Such points of access exist because humans and higher intelligence are ‘entangled’ just as much as we are entangled with life and matter. But there is a stronger sense still in which access must be possible, if we adopt the view that higher intelligence is seeking to communicate with us. This is, naturally enough, closely linked with the idea that ‘something’ is pulling us forward into other realms of experience. Such an idea may have been formed in us from the experience of childhood in which we learned to think because we were part of a human complex containing adults already able to think and reflect and interiorised directed conversation inside ourselves.

Adoption of this analogy brings with it the possible view that we already have the capacity for higher intelligence, but that it needs development. The arising of any form of intelligence must also then entail much the same thing. As far as we can generalise, the raising of any system to a higher level requires the coupling of it with a higher system to begin with. This can mean that something in one form can engage with something of another form to create something new. Terms such as ‘coupling’, ‘engagement’, ‘entanglement’ and so on are strong meanings of the idea of relations. In some extreme views of the arising of human intelligence, it is even proposed that there was a physical fusion of two different natures, one of higher intelligence and one of animal intelligence. The idea that higher intelligence is seeking to communicate with us reaches an extreme form in the Biblical statement that the Angels ‘lusted after’ human females.

The view here is that higher intelligence is a feature of the universe that is being disclosed by evolution. In this view, human existence is a device for advancing this revelation and it stands in stark contrast with most common views today: either the universe is cold, indifferent and only ‘accidentally’ producing life and intelligence and we are quite alone in it, or there is some God that has chosen human beings as the vehicle of Its self-expression. In place of retrospective reflections on our molecular origins we can have a forward looking openness to our meaningful destiny. This need not be associated with the idea of any kind of ultimate super-being controlling everything. Just as we begin to appreciate that the universe is far more ‘alive’ than we ever thought (scientifically) before so we may begin to appreciate that it is also far more ‘intelligent’ than we ever allowed. This is to have a view in which the very fabric of the universe is seen as intelligent. And, it is highly likely that intelligence will not fit any simplistic hierarchical model, with Mister God on top. Maybe, there is no such thing as a ‘top’ at all. After all, a key feature of intelligence is that it produces surprises.

One way of access to higher intelligence is in our own creativity as expressed in bringing into existence new kinds of things. In our technology, we are seeking to realize intelligent machines. We are engaged in finding ways of blending our intelligence with mechanical systems such that apparatuses may emerge that are independently intelligent. By doing this, we are being drawn into the possibility of realizing how we ourselves came into existence. We are, after all, a type of intelligent machine. Instead of enhancing the claims that there is no guiding intelligence in the universe, technological advance may bring us to understand – perhaps for the first time - that it is a reality. We can only understand what we can do. Technology gives us a way beyond speculation.

We use the term ‘higher intelligence’ to signify what is more intelligent than us in a certain respect. It does not have to be universally ‘higher’. This bounded nature of intelligence is very important, because it does not, for example, have to include any moral dimension. There can be a higher intelligence of morality, or creativity, or vision but there may not be a higher intelligence in all these regards. It is even highly likely that merit along one dimension is compensated by demerit along another. It is not for nothing that the Bible speaks of the angels as discontent with the powers given to humans. A higher intelligence may be viewed rather as an elder in a community, with wisdom of experience but the failing powers of old age. Even this casual image provokes the thought that every form of intelligence is subject to growth and decay and hence there is the need for every higher intelligence to pass on its wisdom to the younger lesser intelligences - such as our own. By the time the transmission has been accomplished, the elders will have passed away. We have echoes of this in the myths that the gods have ‘gone away’ from us into a kind of limbo.

We claim that all the images we can form of higher intelligence, while failing to be anything that merits the name of evidence, are signs of an attempt by higher intelligence to communicate with us. Our very brains are expressions of this, very duplicates of the cosmos with their billions of relations. The feelings we can have of a guiding intelligence working within our lives are to be trusted in so far as they lead us to increase our intelligence. Disbelievers may be doing more to realise higher intelligence than believers, because they are being led into creative work that can show us something new.

The philosopher-mystic John Bennett proposed that, over millennia and more, higher intelligence has been gradually withdrawing from direct involvement in earthly affairs and that it is a necessity if our own intelligence is to develop. Intelligence does not develop by being told and made to do things, as any true educator well realises. We are in an age when the higher intelligence relative to this planet can only reach us very indirectly and we have to go a ways to link up. Without our own ‘free’ making of a step, no contact is possible. At the same time, a contact may not give us anything that we might expect or want.

Just as scientists expend considerable energy and thought to accessing profoundly hidden workings of the natural universe so we have to expend ourselves in accessing higher intelligence. There might be a big price to pay, such as a sacrifice of our entrenched attitude of separateness.

HUMANKIND SEES REALITY UPSIDE DOWN

Simple piety or reflection will lead many people to at least entertain the idea that what they ‘see’ as real is not so real in reality. But, for the most part, this will be taken in the manner of having some distortion, some inadequacy or incoherence, as in the famous utterance in the New Testament, ‘Now I see as in a glass, darkly’ (the ‘glass’ being what we would now call a ‘mirror’ but of an old kind capable of reflecting only a fraction of the light and full of defects). In mystical religion, particularly in Sufism, this ‘glass’ becomes the human heart and it is easy to understand why such a conception is strongly associated with ideas of purification and repentance. In mainline science, the glass is simply the form of perception we have, which has evolved with all else in the biosphere and serves our survival rather than any objective truth. Both scientific and religious views aver that it is our state of incarnate existence that precludes us from seeing reality, and that is why we need for example ‘technology’ or ‘revelation’ to help us out.

The idea that we see reality in a totally wrong way, completely upside-down to how it is, is too much for most and too simple for many. It is too much because it seems impossible that we could have it so wrong that we could continue to survive. (This was an agonising puzzle for me when I was younger and saw quite clearly on the one hand that nobody really knew what they were doing and, on the other, that some semblance of order in society was maintained.) It is too simple because the idea of ‘upside-down’ seems to imply that all we have to do is to ‘stand on our heads’.

Rudolf Steiner as an expert thinker grasped a simple idea. In a brilliant stroke he proposed that all the things we take as axiomatic in the world we take as known could be inverted and used to describe the ‘spirit’ or ‘astral’ world he was keen that people got to know. For example, say in this world the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then in the spirit world, it is the longest distance, and so on: effects come before causes, what contains something is smaller than what it contains, etc. He and his co-workers gave some of these ideas precise expression in what is called ‘projective geometry’ a sort of geometry that is inside-out to the one we learn at school.

The too much has been tackled in the past by Gnosticism. As the name implies, it is concerned with knowledge – gnosis in Greek having resonance with the Sanskrit jnana used in yoga – and has on its banner the slogan ‘The Truth shall make thee free.’ In some cases, the Truth is the Saviour, Who comes not to redeem us from sin but to liberate us from ignorance. In one of the classical schools of Hinduism, it is theorised that the very existence of individualised will is only possible through a concomitant ignorance. At one stroke, time and space, ignorance and will spring into being. So there are alternatives to the classical Gnostic view that ignorance is the result of an egoistic creative act by the false god, that we are held spell-bound in a false reality, as if asleep and dreaming, due to no fault of our own. In this false dream world things work out mechanically without the need for any act on our own part. It is truly a nightmare from which we are called to awaken.

On a completely different front, existentialism claims that we see the world wrongly because we believe it is really there and we have to deal with it. This makes the primary reality that of objects, or ‘things in themselves’ and alienates ourselves as subjects ‘for ourselves’ so that we have then to pretend that meaning is in us moving or changing objects! We are in the contradiction of trying to bring ourselves into world where we cannot exist. The world we believe in has no room for human acts, so that we can never perceive what it is that we do.

Some of these views carry with them the thought that there is a way out, or that some people or some beings are capable of seeing reality as it is. For scientists, this may be through a mathematical model. Julian Barbour tells us to ‘look through’ his mathematical model of Platonia and we will see that time does not exist. This may be close in some way to Galileo asking people to look through his telescope so that they can see what he was talking about. For shamans ancient and modern it may require ritual, drumming, drugs. John Lily used ketamine and isolation tanks to travel into different worlds of perception. For the Christian Gnostic, such as Philip K Dick, only the grace of God can awaken us – this is called amanuensis – and this may come through any form or means. There is a divine compassion striving to reach us, and reach us not in any statistical way – because that is the way of the demiurge or false god – but us as unique individuals in specific circumstances, in a way that allows our freedom. We do not know with whose voice God may speak to us.

The sheer thrill of this prospect is intense beyond measure. We should bear in mind that whole cultures such as the Hassidic lived day by day in anticipation of the ‘coming of the Messiah’. Any of us can have this state once we realise or believe that there is a reality we do not see and that this reality itself is trying to reach us. This last point has to be made over and over again. In this understanding, it is not our efforts that sets us free but the source of freedom itself, or God. But God moves in mysterious ways!

The usual objection to all this is just to say, ‘If there is a higher intelligence or divine reality, it appears to be pretty ineffective and not very smart. You propose some superhuman reality and then want us to believe it is almost impotent!’ The first reply to this objection is to quote the story in Rumi’s Mathnawi about seeing Jesus running away from something, where we learn that He is in retreat from stupidity in front of which even He is powerless. What is the essence – if it has such a thing – of stupidity, if not to will what is unreal? The second aspect is that what then happens by default is an aggregate mechanism capable of survival, dealing with food, shelter and so on. In this mechanism is Heidegger’s das man the ‘collective man’, the statistic. The divine reality cannot communicate with the unreal or the mechanical.

It is not the world that is divorced from reality but us. The very idea that higher intelligence is hidden or even absent is a reflection of our bizarre state of mind. Just a flicker of consciousness and we instantly see that higher intelligence is the very substance of reality.

This gives an unusual perspective on the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Eden is the state of being in higher intelligence, which means that, just to give a semblance of what this might mean, there is no divorce between thought and action.

Buried in the question of understanding higher intelligence is the issue of trying to convince others. This question arises in relation to all sorts of beliefs or commitments, such as Dawkins’ assertion that all biological reality should be subsumed under the metaphor of the ‘selfish gene’. It can be argued that such things as genes – selfish or not – remarkably parallel the concept of higher intelligence. The average person will never ever see a gene or know how information about it is gained. It is in this regard similar to HI. In many other aspects it is very different, but there is no a priori reason why HI should not be considered as something encountered by specialists using appropriate techniques and theories, just as poets can be looked at as more sensitive to meaning in language than the average.

Great energy is spent on trying to persuade other people of one’s point of view. Obviously, much of this has to do with convincing oneself. It might also have to do with practicing a kind of martyrdom! To suffer for one’s beliefs generally appears noble to the kindly disposed and foolish to the cynics. But in either case, there is a case of a passionate meme. The scientist Michael Polanyi introduced the substance of this idea in his seminal book Personal Knowledge (which can be taken as an antidote to Dawkin’s extrapolation of his selfish gene). Quite simply, certain memes seem to carry with them much of the sense of personal worth and survival. Thus, if I can convince others of what I believe then I feel myself increased or stronger. In the case of exposing myself to ridicule, denial and even physical danger I am identifying myself with an idea or thought as the very substance of what I am. If I do not have a thought or idea like that then I can feel myself as empty, weak, insubstantial. That is when we are vulnerable and become mere consumers. Consumerism is based on passivity or lack of passion and we have reached the point of assuming that we can buy meanings to fill ourselves.

It is not too big a jump to then say that passionate memes carry our sense of immortality, where the word ‘sense’ is used to convey some character of embodiment (a kind of subtle oxymoron). It is in the general nature of an idea that it is felt as outside the constraints of mortality, as conveyed in these lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The ‘black ink’ of writing is our modern medium of immortality, the articulate form of the generally assumed belief that we only live on in the ‘memories’ of others. The mortality of the organic persona is replaced by the relative immortality made possible by writing. Now, love is the passion of passions. In the Sonnets, the true subject passes from the writer, to his beloved and thence to love itself.

If, however, we cannot compose masterly sonnets, we are left with impressing others with who we are, which is heavily reliant on getting our passionate memes replicated in them.

The disturbing thing is that ideas are not our own. It is almost nonsensical to claim that we ‘have’ ideas as if they were our property. Making another jump, we can remark that this is why nearly all attempts to say what is essentially entailed in thinking at a higher level seem to concur that the secret is in not thinking. If passionate memes are on the level of our own basic human intelligence, then a higher intelligence is not a meme at all – rather it can be regarded as eating and excreting them, or in more inorganic terms as an engine for which memes are simply the fuel. This appears to us as our deepest conviction, that which we cannot doubt – though may not understand – because it always arises as prior to anything we can think. By striving to convince others, we hope to understand what we know absolutely – a hazardous task. As Descartes felt, conviction should be founded on what cannot be doubted. But finding out what this is always controversial because an individual’s conviction will always be perceived as merely personal to others.

Convincing others is contained within a larger phenomenon suggested by the writer, the beloved and the love of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is no accident that a trinity appears and we can find this expressed – though in different figures – in Calasso’s Literature and the Gods

Literature is never the product of a single subject. There are always at least three actors: the hand that writes, the voice that speaks, the god who watches over and compels. Not that they look very different: all three are young; all have thick, snaky hair. They might easily be taken for three manifestations of the same person. But that is hardly the point. What matters is the division into three self-sufficient beings. We could call them the I, the Self, and the Divine. A continuous process of triangulation is at work between them. Every sentence, every form, is a variation within that force field. Hence the ambiguity of literature: because its point of view is incessantly shifting between these three extremes, without warning us, and sometimes without warning the author.

We bring Calasso into the picture because of his all-important thesis of absolute literature, in which stories about the gods have evolved into writing that is the gods – in the guise of reaching universal laws. The use of the word ‘laws’ is a reference to the world of will, which is the ineffable source of what is intelligible at all. Absolute literature is the world of Novalis, Proust, Nietzsche and Joyce, which is always a world beyond belief and disrespectful of concepts and explanations. In this world, to discuss higher intelligence is no more to the point than to discuss railways; and what really matters is how the discussion is conducted. This is similar to but more subtle than what we called ‘the alternative inner message of the form’, with which idea we found that what is talked about is never what is at issue. We should repeat Pensinger’s dictum that the revolutions in twentieth century literature should be regarded more as experiments in reading.

To convince another or to articulate a love is to manifest a trinity. The Indo-European stream that issued in Christianity made itself in terms of a primordial relatedness, as symbolized in the Holy Trinity.

What is attempted in this book is essentially absurd, just because we can no longer speak about higher intelligence as an accepted feature of the universe – as Aquinas did in his discourse on the Angels – but have to manifest it in the way we express meaning. The move made in realizing the trinity means that we can no longer speak as if we could simply correspond words to things. By having always a ‘third party’ the game shifts. This can be partly illustrated by the thought that in writing about higher intelligence, we have also at the same time to write how we are writing or conceiving this subject. We cannot write about how. It is just as if everything we write must inevitably change the rules we are playing by.

In this perspective, the so-called materialism of our age and lack of belief (especially in modern European cultures in contrast with the USA) is no disadvantage at all. This is what Steiner realized a hundred years ago in his reflections on the rise of German materialism in the nineteenth century, which he insisted was an integral manifestation of the impulse of Christianity. In a way, it is only by trying to speak to people who not believe in higher intelligence that we can have a discourse that embodies it. We must beware, though, of then thinking in simplistic dialectical terms to focus on outcomes – that once we have a ‘synthesis’ we have arrived – because the intelligence of which we speak is in the relatedness or the dynamic. In a striking way, Heraclitus spoke of the soul as a ‘fire’ or process and not as an entity.

A further consequence of this dynamical way of approaching the subject is that we can regard what is usually called ‘thinking’ as only one foot of a tripod. The conviction of a person is just one third of the whole. Equally significant is the corresponding doubt that it entails – perhaps embodied in other people in terms of their contrary convictions – and a third component that is sometimes felt but never known. For many people, there is no need for this third factor. For others it is like the very medium in which we move and have our being. In Christianity, it can be associated with the Holy Ghost, as a principle that can encompass diversity of conviction. The German theologian Schleiermacher proposed that essentially Christianity should entail all other religions. This was a most powerful way of expanding the Gospel story of Pentecost when the gifts of the Sprit were visited upon the disciples and they spoke in tongues. It is the same in Buddhism – the Cambodian monk known as Bhante who died at age 110 in 1997 would say, ‘All are right. No one is wrong.’ And would laugh.

We need to add a footnote on what is meant by ‘higher’. This is a crude term and terribly vague. A modern person has to ask, ‘In what sense is this higher?’ because he will have in mind some ‘measure’ against which degrees of highness might become known, and every measure is fixed on a single property. Foremost in our minds is the religious story that although the angels are ‘higher’ than humanity, they were not given the gift of language as we were. In this story, some of the angels are filled with discontent! Being ‘higher’ then is not an all round benefit. In some respects, the higher is weaker. Why is this? One answer is that strength is a ‘lower’ property. Another is that if the higher were also strong – again according to some measure – then it would overwhelm the lower, which would have no freedom. That is maybe why we have the idea of God as ‘hiding’ from us. If He did not, we would be annihilated – as Krishna demonstrated to Arjuna on the field of battle. Thus we have an emergent concept of a higher that withholds itself. If it did not, it could not be higher, because the lower would disappear! The theme of the weakness of the higher is, of course, strongly reflected in the account of the meekness of the Saviour. Christianity is founded on the impossible premise of the supreme God being subject to the wickedness of men.

It is also very striking that Gurdjieff’s story of the unknown prophet Ashiata Shiemash shows him as having no special powers and relying on personal persuasion only to spread his message. There are no miracles in sight. Ashiata Shiemash simply reminds people of their forgotten conscience. All this conveys a sense of some cosmic or divine tenderness.

People who argue that there cannot be anything higher than man because it does not intervene to prevent cruelty and suffering completely ignores the need to reflect on what higher means. The fact that there is so much suffering and evil on the planet is itself a message to us. Every time we weep for the poor and afflicted we are awakening to the new world we are being called upon to create. By responding to the influences of higher intelligence we are ‘putting it in charge’. Only in this way can we ever hope to preserve our innate sense of responsibility together with our faith in a loving God.

To seek to respond to higher intelligence is not so much to become a believer but to become a discoverer - of what higher intelligence means. Yes, it is the opposite of science, for example, but the two are strictly complementary. It is not accidental that many of the greatest scientists have come to some trust in the intelligence of the universe, especially after their initial periods of discovery and innovation. As we go out into the universe, the universe is seeking us. How could it be otherwise?

In genetics, scientists have come to appreciate more and more the significance of the operation of reading the genetic code - to produce cell material and the processes of growth. This operation involves such things as RNA, amino acids and enzymes as well as features of DNA that previously were regarded as ‘useless junk’. What is brought to the reading of genetic information is as important as the information itself. A code without a reader does not mean anything. Reading can even change what the message is.

Let us jump to the world of spirituality. It is a fairly common thing to come across stories that suggest that a message is received in such a strong way that the whole life of the person involved is changed thereafter. A relatively minor though well-known example is the libertine Augustine overhearing a Christian singing a hymn outside his garden, which led him to convert. A more powerful example is that of the Ch’an master Hui Neng, living in poverty and collecting wood, overhearing a recitation of the Diamond Sutra and realizing that he was enlightened. There are many more such stories, which have been pointed to by the Gnostic writer Philip K Dick as examples of amenuensis – which means that the people involved woke up from their sleep or forgetfulness. He argued that we have forgotten who we really are and have as a consequence become the slaves of illusory worlds, such as he envisaged his contemporary USA to be.

We should point out however that there is a very common experience similar to these more esoteric examples, namely that of sexual arousal. A beautiful woman is attractive because of the biological chemistry of the men who find her attractive. Members of another species will not find her attractive at all. However, such conceits as regarding Helen as ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ are not mistaken either. It is the conjunction of the sexes that makes sex such a powerful force. In Plato’s Symposium he tells the myth of an original form of humanity in the shape of a sphere being divided into two, each half of which seeks the other.

The theme of waking up from sleep is a recurrent theme in some early Gnostic writings – the Jung Codex going so far as to speak of us awakening from a nightmare – but in the twentieth century its main proponent was Gurdjieff. For the most part, this has been taken up in a merely psychological way and ‘sleep’ treated as a defective kind of consciousness, which Gurdjieff claimed was the lot of nearly every person on the planet! Gurdjieff, perhaps echoing Plato, also spoke of a teaching encoded on a hide that was cut in two, the two halves then separated by vast distances. As recent theoreticians of consciousness such as David Chalmers have claimed, consciousness is inseparable from considerations of information. Indeed, Chalmers talks about consciousness as the ‘inside’ of information.

Common to these various threads is the idea that how things are seen is at least as important as the things themselves. We might also say – as they are read. And, instead of speaking of an ‘insideness’ of information in a dualistic way - inside versus outside – we might speak of information itself as having different levels of meaning. This was Bohm’s approach in his concept of active information, which we have referred to many times already. Chalmers’ model stops at the noumena of the human subject. But we can find systems – such as that of Kashmiri Shaivism – in which ‘subjectivity’ has many gradations, extending into the divine.

It is well know that the brain performs an extremely active role in perception, bringing constructs of its own making into conjunction with information gained ‘from the outside’. P K Dick explored the idea that we might carry in us a part of a message that only when we encountered a corresponding other part could we understand. His theory was based on his conviction that by some means this message – concerning who we really are and what is going on – was being hidden from us and we had to find a way of decoding the truth. The idea of some ‘secret’ information that is hidden from the mass of people is not uncommon and many popular best sellers feed on the wish-fulfilment of people to find hidden truths – for example, the truth about Jesus and the Grail as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, or the intense explorations of the Bible and Qu’ran using numbers and calculation.

This can all be dismissed as phantasy. Gurdjieff himself appears to have taken it very seriously, proposing in his concept of legonimism that wise people in the past had constructed cultural artefacts that could be read by what he called ‘initiates’. He also made some stringent remarks that most people cannot read at all, while later attempting to construct a legonomistic work in writing (All of Everything). What connects the stories of spiritual awakening, Dick’s decoding, Gurdjieff’s legonomism and Bohm’s idea of active information is that all involve a meaning that is precisely geared to the individual involved. In some way, seeing the truth is tightly coupled to what is generally called self-realization.

One way of explaining this is that all such ‘secret information’ concerns seeing through the mind. The mind is then seen as both a prison and an open door. This entails by implication a higher intelligence, which is then precisely what is not trapped in the mind but its liberator. This is, of course, akin to mysticism. But we should not confine our thinking only to the mystical. The philosopher Wittgenstein spoke of his task as ‘liberating the fly out of the bottle’ meaning that the mind is capable of enslaving itself and needs to be released from its own manipulations. Faced with this prospect, different people try different things – meditating themselves sick, reading books, going to teachers, and building quantum computers! As John Barrow points out in his intriguing book Impossibility, our minds have evolved in limited ways and there is no reason to suppose that they are capable of understanding the full depths of reality.

We face two different but complementary infinities. On the one hand, we face the awesome range and complexity of the knowable universe. On the other we are involved in a subjectivity that is ever elusive. But our culture is founded on the passionate belief that even though what we can grasp is utterly limited we can nevertheless find a way of decoding this limited material to give us access to the whole. We might have to qualify this statement by restricting it to the western civilization that emerged from the Indo-European, since the interplay of reason and faith that survived and grew through the Middle Ages in Europe did not survive, for example, in Islamic cultures just as the individualism of the west was marginalized in the east?

There is a crude idea of ‘secret knowledge’ in which it is supposed that somewhere there are hidden documents or some such that contain it (as in the idea that the secrets of Solomon’s Temple or the Grail are buried underneath Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland). This is a pervasive idea and comes down, for example, into current attitudes about intellectual property. Gurdjieff’s view was that knowledge was secret just because no one – or only a very few – could understand it. In fact, this was the classical view of the ‘esoteric’ defined by Aristotle as that which was known for long but not understood. In other words, it all stares us in the face but we just ‘don’t get it’.

This thought leads us to the widespread fascination we have with encryption. Vast sums of money are devoted to producing encryption and to cracking it. Yet, it is also highly relevant to any prospect of communicating with higher intelligence. John Bennett, in his Dramatic Universe, explored a scenario in which a higher intelligence sought to communicate with us through a simple device of using sequences of colored balls. This thought experiment has parallels with the events depicted in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, in which he ingeniously suggests that sequences of digits in the decimal form of pi (ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, but also of fundamental significance for mathematics and physics) were encoded with special information by a higher intelligence. The movie made of this novel brilliantly shows level upon level of meaning being uncovered from signals received from outer space, going from number sequences, to video, to instructions about building a machine for reaching the source of the signals. The theme of decoding instructions to build a device that can access the source is, as far as we know, a very recent realization. We cannot simply know, but have to do something.

Beyond being told is information that enables us to know. Because it enables, it must ‘fit’ us in a very precise way. Such information is very different from being told. The kind of distinction we are trying to state here has sometimes been put in terms of the difference between knowledge and understanding. Gurdjieff emphasizes this difference in many places in his writings but, in particular, when he says understanding cannot ever be given by one person to another. Though understanding draws on knowledge, it also entails going through experiences and making something of them. In a precise sense, going through experiences means to suffer, but we should not associate this word simply with pain and misery. When we add the factor of making something of these experiences, we also have the importance of doing. Gurdjieff affirms that understanding is what we can do.

In a classic science fiction story, the American writer Raymond Jones tells of a top physicist called by a governmental agency to an isolated house. There he meets other scientists and learns that the pervious owner of the house, who had recently died in a laboratory accident, appears to have invented an antigravity machine. All that remains of his work are a few pieces of mangled equipment, a strange library and a few fragments of notes. Being convinced by the authorities that this mysterious figure has succeeded in accomplishing what had been thought to be impossible, the hero of the story goes on to make a breakthrough of his own. The moral of the story is also fascinating in echoing what happened in the seventeenth century when a powerful influence on the emergence of modern physics was the belief engendered by myths about the existence in the past of an advanced science (variously associated with such figures as Enoch and Zoroaster), which encouraged people to attempt to ‘re-create’ it. A similar idea appears in the science fiction masterpiece filmed by Kubrick from a story by Arthur C Clarke in which a ‘monolith’ planted by alien intelligences is capable of transmitting mental images of better conditions of life to an early form of man and motivates some of them to move towards technology. This was, of course, the approach expressed by Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis in which book he argued that the Garden of Eden could be built once more on Earth.

A basic move of intelligence is to have a question that cannot be answered together with the conviction that it can be answered. Such a question is a piece of active information. It changes the game being played. It also changes how we read what is available to us. In Michael Polanyi’s view of ‘personal knowledge’ it is to be under the influence of a ‘heuristic field’.

Let me now introduce the concept of a heuristic field. We assume that the gradient of a discovery, measured by the nearness of discovery prompts the mind towards it. This was implied already in the chapter on Intellectual Passions, but not yet explicitly stated there. The assumption of a heuristic held explains now how it is possible that we acquire knowledge and believe that we can hold it, though we can do this only on evidence which cannot justify these acts by any acceptable strict rules. It suggests t hat we may do so because an innate affinity for making contact with reality moves our thoughts—under the guidance of useful clues and plausible rules—to increase ever further our hold on reality.

Taken literally, however, this picture would be misleading, since it once more describes the movement of the mind as a passive event. The lines of force in a heuristic field should stand for an access to an opportunity, and for the obligation and the resolve to make good this opportunity, in spite of its inherent uncertainties.

The feeling of being near to the answer, or on the verge of discovery, is widely known. It is even akin to a recognizable sensation. It amounts to being in a state in which one level or mind has already made the step while another has not, which is commonly but perhaps not very helpfully reduced to calling the former ‘intuition’ in contrast with the deliberate thinking of the latter. The intuitive mind can see forms, or visualize and sense in a preverbal way. There may need to be considerable work done to clarify the mechanical aspects that have to be rendered into words and mathematical symbols. However, the important point is that we would have no chance of making discovery without some kind of sensation or feeling to guide us. Everyone knows from childhood the game in which an object is hidden and someone has to find it, while companions call out ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ according to whether the seeker is coming near or going away from the hidden object.

‘No question - no discovery’ is an important guiding rule. One important feature of what we are calling a question is that it is like an active receptor (to mix meanings somewhat) or a ‘structured vacuum’. It is able to seek out elements that ‘fit’ to some degree. Only, it is crucial to keep on looking for an element that fits perfectly, or really fits. Simone Weil, in her essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies’, says:

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.

Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object, it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.

In the section on ‘Higher Intelligence as Conviction’ we had pointed to a basic trinity of operation and here we have it as the questioning, holistic and explanatory factors in which the decoding to be done is treated as within our own minds: it is the reading of the holistic into the linear, perhaps analogously to the reading of DNA into the development of an embryo. However, it has another level to it, when we consider that the holistic side of our minds (or brains) may be subject to subtle influences. If there is any case to be made for the reality of signals or influences coming from a higher than human level then it would be through this holistic side. The shape of this idea is similar to that in psychoanalysis, as reflected in Freud’s comment that ‘dreams are the royal road to the unconscious’. The meaning of the unconscious is highly controversial and here we simple invoke its sense as a kind of mind that is different from our usual one (geared to linearity in time, space and causation). The apparent proposition in some psychoanalytic theory is that this unconscious mind seeks to find itself in consciousness through dreams, images and associations. In a similar way, we can think of higher intelligence as evoking images in our holistic minds that attract and disturb us in ways that correspond to Polanyi’s description of the heuristic field.

It may be that even in principle we have no way of deciding whether this field is engineered by some ‘other intelligence’ or ‘our own’. Just as it is problematic to decide whether, say, the state of anxiety with which I awoke this day comes from me or is something I have picked up from the general psychic atmosphere. It is quite compelling, we would say, to picture this holistic side of mind as if it were akin to a receptor or mode of perception, accessing a world or landscape not of things but of images. We have found that even if one just adopts this picture for a while, plays with it a little, it can have a considerable impact; not least because it challenges our present view of mind which is rather that of a system that though itself ‘psyche’ looks only out into a world of things. One immediate effect we find is that there is a burgeoning sense of being on the threshold of wondrous things!

It is almost a commonplace in psychoanalytical thinking to regard many people, including very powerful people, as being driven by dreams or images they are not conscious of, because they are fixated into the world of things. Things of course can be made, owned and sold! The stuff of the inner world, which we have simplistically called ‘images’, cannot. It is not to be identified with the usual conceptions of ESP, because it does not concern the mental constructions we call our thinking minds. However, we can well understand why it is that such phenomena have such flawed precision, since they dwell in the holistic aspect of mind that is not governed according to the linearity of space, time and causation.

It becomes possible, now, to understand how it could be that there are influences of a higher order without any violation of our integrity as conscious, rational beings. The reason is that such influences, to become an integral part of ourselves, have to be made to be so by ourselves. That is why creative thinkers can be viewed as drawing on a more than human source and yet sincerely and properly believe that they are doing it all themselves.

At this stage, we can begin to consider what we have developed over the millennia to help us make use of what is appearing to us ‘from within’. This includes such elements of cultural life as mathematics, music and language in general. It also includes ways we have of coming together – in conversation, say – that enable a bridge to be formed between the two sides of mind.

Dialogue, or the supreme art as Plato called it, is a collective tuning device that operates through speech. As some psychoanalysts are beginning to suspect, there is a continuum of such an art that includes the dyad of therapist and client. Accessing the content of the holistic mind can be a co-operative effort between people. This is not surprising, given the proposition that this aspect of mind is ‘perceiving’ a subtle world that is always more than locked into an individual psyche. The ‘in here’ is ‘everywhere’.

It is intriguing to think of science as a collective enterprise of decoding insights into the nature of things. This is not to say that what is being decoded is the ‘noumena’ of Kant, the ‘thing in itself’ as some kind of absolute. It is simply another level of reality. What is striking is how uncomfortable most scientists are with dealing with their insights come from. To a very large extent, scientists focus their attention on the realm of demonstrable explanation after the fact of having an insight. The ‘ hypothetico-deductive method’ of science is based on the attitude that it does not matter how scientists come to their insights, and the only thing that matters is how they are able to prove them to others. As a consequence, scientists can be driven by deep-seated ‘images’ that they are not conscious of and do not deal with as such. They are aided in this semi-deliberate heedlessness by the fact that the holistic side cannot be brought out and shown in the public arena of scientific discourse. There are exceptions of course, such as Einstein’s frank and open discussion of his way of thinking and such renowned stories as Kekule dreaming the structure of benzene.

In no way would we claim that our vaguely identified ‘holistic mind’ is infallible as a guide to how things really are. This is mainly because of the factor of ‘things’ themselves. Are we dealing with what we take to be objects or something more mental? It is not surprising that a few scientists such as Bohm (and Wheeler though in a different fashion) came to the conclusion that there must be some primordial structure beyond the distinction between physical and mental that we habitually make, out of which knowable objects unfold. Though we cannot claim any certainty from the holistic mind we can argue that what it provides is always relevant. What this relevance is, is our task to make articulate. As the great physicist Feynman used to say, he has no trouble in principle with having an open mind towards any way out idea about the physical universe just so long as its proponent ‘puts the work in’ to show that it is reasonable to adopt it.

To make use of indications from the holistic mind, as we have suggested earlier, we have to make something that can ‘embody’ them. This can be an equation, or a theoretical model such as Turing’s ‘universal machine’, which he developed as a model of intelligence. In this guise, what we see in the world of cultural artefacts like these are like simulations of what we would dare to call ‘spirits’. Launched into the world, they have a life of their own. That is why we often speak of evolution making a turn from the biological to the mental and face the prospect of developing a new kind of life form that is not organic. We can fear these new entities because they are, in a sense, alien. And we complete a circle here, which started with the science-fiction conception of an alien intelligence transmitting information on how to build a machine that can in effect bring that intelligence into our world.

Fred Hoyle, that great British maverick of science, proposed a theory in which he portrayed a galactic alternation between silicon-based and carbon-based intelligence. The carbon-based evolves until it can generate silicon-based (computer) intelligence that is then capable of being spread over vast distances as the carbon-based form cannot, which scattered forms could then give rise to new organic lines of evolution on vastly distant planets, which would in turn evolve more inorganic forms. This theory is an original form of the older theory that life on earth was seeded from space.

Because such ideas are fermenting in our collective consciousness, it is not surprising that many people feel science to involve something alien and to be feared. This might be called ‘Trojan horse paranoia’! However, by the same stroke of imagination, it also allows for a sense of redemption or help coming through science. In this guise, science is as much a revelation as religion claimed to be, even though it has no Mr. God.

Apart from these wide-ranging speculations, we can also look at how each of us as individuals trying to make sense of our lives might draw on influences trying to reach us through holistic mind. The first thing to bear in mind is that the linear mind acts as a filter to reject most holistic information. Without this filter we could not sustain a stable picture of ourselves as ‘free agents’ operating in a world of space and time. The space and time of the inner world is very different from what we encounter through the existence of objects. Thus, in some fashion, the two sides of our mind are mutually exclusive. When they manage to come into mutual contact, we can feel quite distressed because we can see ourselves as ‘imprisoned’ in the physical world of space and time. It is this feeling that must have given rise to the Gnostic rejection of the external world. At the same time, it also gave rise to a vision of humanity as serving a role in bridging the two worlds.

If we are able to sustain awareness in both worlds, then we can begin to seek out ways of decoding useful information ‘from within’. However, we should remember that this inner or holistic information has more to do with how we see things, rather than concerning another kind of ‘things’. An approximation is to say that the holistic input offers us templates into which we can place what we know and do. This possibility arises in relation to what Ouspensky called ‘long thoughts’. Long thoughts ‘take place’ over months and years. The elements of which they consist may be fragments of data, or vague feelings, or apparently ephemeral images. We are reminded of Steiner’s view of angels as having ‘bodies’ that consist of what are to us mere fleeting moments, such as the glint of light on a distant pond. What we can discover is that in spite of the length over which such ‘thoughts’ take place and also their composition in fleeting moments, they have a coherence that can surpass our linear constructs (such as explanations). If we are able to pay attention in this realm – if we do not remain in forgetfulness or the filtered state – then we can often gain a sense of being informed. It really is as if there were an intelligence ‘behind the scenes’ trying to communicate a deeper meaning than those that govern our daily lives.

It is possible to develop the capacity to read such thoughts. Thus, for example, when we have an explanation, we can be cognizant of there being a complementary way of looking at the same material that is also in operation. This idea has produced some curious proposals and experiments. One of note is that if we record what someone says and play it backwards then we can hear things being said that are often more truthful than the apparent statement. In other words, if for example, someone is lying then the backwards recording will have them admitting to the deception! Whatever the actual merits of such a claim, it carries a very important insight: that side-by-side with any operation of the linear mind is an operation of the holistic mind and we can educate ourselves to listen to this. This is actually what a psychoanalyst is supposed to do.

It has a great bearing on how we explain the world or ourselves. However reductionist such explanations may be they must also invoke their complementary mode, which will not be an explanation at all but a revelation. Here the word ‘revelation’ is not being used in a religious sense, simply in the meaning that what is the case is being shown. This includes, for example, what is going in the person making the explanation and why he is making it in the way he is. The aspect of simply lying we referred to before is only a crude illustration. A reductionist explanation is not a lie, only so much is left out! Yet it is a useful clue to say that when someone makes an explanation in terms of mechanical causality, he is at the same time revealing a teleology.

To turn around and begin to listen to oneself as well as others in this way is revolutionary. The linear mind itself always wants to say that one thing is right and another wrong. To sustain both is to appear foolish in the sight of most other people. The idea of a complementary and very different meaning side by side with the standard linear one is, of course, the essence of the idea of the esoteric. Only, it is not as esoteric as it first might seem. We can refer again to the structure of ancient texts in which narratives or other descriptions were presented in a certain sequence but had built into them inner sequences’ presenting the same material in a different order. One had to be in the know to be able to recognize these inner sequences. The parallel with the strange idea of picking up on hidden messages going backwards in time we mentioned earlier is fairly clear. Going backwards in time is just one way of sequencing ‘otherwise’.

Joseph Needham picked up on an aspect of this in his book The Soul and Time, when he suggested the exercise of seeing what was going to happen to oneself as having already happened. The way we sequence our experience determines how we think. It has been pointed out that our usual sequencing is really retrospective, our usual linear mind structuring elements of experience to produce a story that sustains our belief in ourselves. Yet it is possible, at least to some degree and for a little time, to reverse the flow and see into a different kind of world. It is only in such a way that we can begin to shake free from some absurd notion of higher beings beaming down messages to us – in which we continue to think in terms of being free agents in space and time.

The prospect of ‘waking up’ proposed by Gurdjieff, therefore, entails a radical restructuring of the way we read our experience. This is what a change of level of consciousness really means. We access a different order of information. It is not the same as what happens when our psycho-organism is flooded with energy. We become able to decode the messages that are trying to reach us from within. We have to do this for ourselves. As Gurdjieff said, the only true ‘initiation’ is ‘self-initiation’. Most of what is taken as religious information about God is really there just to suggest to us that there is another way of reading our own experience. In this new reading, we may find our evidence of higher intelligence and also understand why it is that it can never be proved to exist.

The only ‘proof’ of higher intelligence would be to create it! In this is the profound paradox of technology, which might demonstrate higher intelligence while seeking to deny any such thing. Technology is the human embodiment of the demiurge, the ‘maker’ and servant of the people and we can see it as a simulation of higher intelligence, as in the ‘universal machine’ invented by Turing, the father of the computer.