Like the artist, the right brain’s repair work takes fragmentary, essentially chaotic mixtures of paint, rock, marble and sound, and from them it sculpts, moulds and presents something that is strikingly meaningful—something implicit and organised. In a sense our very consciousness, by partaking in the universe itself, is ‘repairing’ precisely by its bringing forth a new order of meaning into an essentially ‘damaged’ cosmos of forms struggling to become more than the sum of their parts.
To frame this argument in a larger context, we will return to the ‘new existentialism’ to explore the fundamental cosmological principles that affirm the enormous importance of consciousness, and the imagination, in the actualisation of the evolutionary metaphors.
The Cosmology of Deep Intentionality
An intrinsic part of Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’ is a cosmology, or what he called a ‘basic metaphysic’, which in its earliest form emerges in the chapter ‘World Without Values’ in The Outsider. For it is in this chapter that Wilson formulates the ‘background of values’ in which the power of our will—in its most active sense—can be most effectively exercised. His simple formulation runs thus: ‘No motive, no willing.’ However, by stating that ‘motive is a matter of belief’ Wilson underlines the importance of having something a priori believed in order to provide the motivation with a sufficient degree of will. Indeed, if belief lacked completely the individual would find motivation for doing anything at all impossible, leading to a complete negation of freedom. Wilson continues by saying ‘belief must be the belief in the existence of something; that is to say, it concerns what is real. So ultimately, freedom depends upon the real’ (1978: 49).
From this statement—that freedom depends upon the real—we then have to pursue the question: What is real? For most of us this question remains vague and difficult to articulate. Certainly, it is not an easy question to answer and has troubled philosophers for millennia. The idea of the real underlies epistemology—the investigation and theory of what can be known—and ontology; or that which underlies our very knowledge and experience of our being.
These are not abstract concepts dreamt up by philosophers alienated from both the world and themselves. In fact, these two concepts constitute what we recognise as significant elements of human consciousness in relation to other forms of consciousness. For example, PD Ouspensky understood consciousness not as a thing in itself, but a description of a state in which we become aware of one or more of our psyche’s functions. These ideas are, in a sense, historical developments within the domain of human consciousness, reflected in our cosmological development, and thus determine the psychological ambience in which man finds himself and his culture.
In fact, as EF Schumacher points out, man is ‘capable of being conscious of [his own] consciousness; not merely a thinker, but a thinker capable of watching and studying his own thinking’ (1978: 26). Furthermore, he identifies human consciousness as ‘recoiling upon itself’ and thus opening up ‘unlimited possibilities of purposeful leaning, investigating, exploring, formulating and accumulating knowledge’ (26). Of course, this uniquely human trait has equally enormous advantages and disadvantages, for as man knows more about the universe he can witness his stature decrease with his realisations—and yet, as we have seen, this can also work in the opposite direction by providing us with an evolutionary and optimistic impetus for motivation and development of a healthy will.
In both Beyond the Outsider (1965) and Super Consciousness (2009)—two books that span Wilson’s work from near beginning to end—Wilson outlines the history of philosophy to present ‘a basis for a new existentialism.’ For Wilson, the fundamental problem of the human situation is ‘the problem of the clash between man’s inner world and the alien world “out there”’ (1985: 85–86). Effectively he begins from this foundation of context—the ‘background of values’, or, one could say a cosmological framework that relates to man and man to the cosmos. From this point he argues that the Greek philosophers proceeded beyond this problem by simply rejecting the physical world. Therefore, for some Greek thinkers such as Socrates or Plato, only the world of ideas remained as the ultimate reality. Of course, this is reflected in Plato’s notion of the Forms, those immortal and perfect ‘ideas’ which lie outside of space and time. The split between spirit (or mind) and matter was clearly defined in Greek thought, and so much so that Socrates faced his death stoically believing that the spirit, in essence, is all that really matters. His mortal shell of mere matter, of course, would be shed and he’d be free to explore—in non-corporeal form—the world of spirit; the true home of the philosopher.
Whereas Plato believed that ‘ideas are the pathway to the infinite’, it was Aristotle who pursued and initiated the scientific method as we know it today. Aristotle unlike Plato focused upon the natural and material world and began to collect and correlate observable facts. Raphael’s 16th century painting The School of Athens in fact depicts Plato as pointing up towards the heavens while Aristotle, holding his hand horizontally—as well as his copy of Nicomachean Ethics under his other arm—in contrast to Plato’s ‘vertical’ world of ideas in which Plato represents the opposite of Aristotle’s either/or, logic-bound and matter-of-fact approach. In essence, Plato’s is more metaphysical in the sense that it proposes something a priori to everything else, a perfected world beyond the world of matter. Yet, even Socrates is the beginning of this ‘break’ from an even more spiritual tradition, and as one commentator has noted, the pre-Socratics were much more orientated towards an intimation and ‘intuition of the world in its entirety’ whereas post-Socratic philosophy ‘surrendered to logic, in the belief that everything could be apprehended and explained with the help of this new instrument’ (1993: 17).
In Super Consciousness: The Quest for the Peak Experience (2009), Wilson says that it was ‘Aristotle rather than Plato who exercised the greatest influence on the development of the Western mind’ (2009: 134). Indeed, he goes on to point out that the development of the great religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam were of ‘immense importance for the development of human culture’ for these provided a ‘backdrop of values’ in which civilizations and individuals were able to function in a meaningful universe, a development that was crucial for the development of human consciousness at that point in time. Wilson continues by pointing out the importance of St Augustine’s objection to science ‘on the grounds that it prevented man from focusing upon the most important thing of all—his relation to God.’ Gods, and higher intelligences for the people of the past, provided an ample amount of motive force to bolster the willpower behind the development of civilization. Moreover, it provided an impersonal goal that transcended the sense of contingency that would have been extremely dangerous for the evolution of man’s consciousness in those early stages.
Before further summarising Wilson’s overview of the history of philosophy, it is worth returning to the cosmological—as well as metaphysical––ideas that begin to emerge in our examination of the new existentialism. In The Breathing Cathedral Martha Heyneman says that, ‘Today, we see rising before us a new shape. We can see its dim outlines through the fog… but we haven’t yet come ashore. We don’t yet inhabit our new picture of the universe’ (2001: 18). Now, each of us in childhood similarly inhabits a cosmology that seems to us safe and basically well-meaning, yet as we grow older uncertainty sets in and we begin to feel uncertain about what can be known as well as uncertain about who we truly are. Again, this is an epistemological as well as an ontological realisation—a fundamental existential awakening that may be life-changing for some. Indeed, Wilson discusses in his essay ‘Science—And Nihilism’ his own breaching of his ‘cosmological comfort-zone’ when he was reading Einstein at about the age of ten. He says that he was suddenly ‘struck by a terrible thought’ when he thought about motion as being ‘relative’ for he suddenly saw how ‘parochial’ our earth-bound view is in the cosmic perspective. Quite ironically Wilson had been study
ing science because it gave him:
… a comforting sense of incontrovertible fact, of some universal truth, bigger than our trivial human emotions and petty objectives… But now Einstein was telling me that I could find no certainty in science. I was like a devout Christian who has suddenly been convinced there is no God. I felt as if I had been standing apparently on solid ground, and it had suddenly opened up beneath my feet [my italics]. (1998: 46–47)
This brings us back around to the idea of the real—that ‘solid ground’—being the motivating force behind the will. As a result of this realisation Wilson fell into a state of despair and despondency. It was enormously difficult for him to fight off the futility of all endeavours, intellectual or otherwise, after this frightening realisation of the unknowable void. There suddenly seemed an impossibility of knowledge, and as a result, an impossibility of being in its wake—for how can one go on living, at least satisfactorily, after such an earth-shattering realisation of our own universal insignificance?
Effectively it is this problem that the whole Outsider Cycle was pitted against, for it is the fundamental question of the Absolute Yes versus the Absolute No. The Romantics, as they are studied in The Outsider, certainly show many instances when they are able to feel sensations—intellectually as well as emotionally—that gave assent to a sense of universal optimism. And yet they were unable to pin it down—the next day each vision would be difficult to articulate, to be known, in the fullest sense of the word. Certainly, the vision, which may have been authentic and real, begins to recede, taking upon it a cadence of bitter and ironic unreality.
Certainly, they could capture these visions in powerfully evocative poems and vivid landscapes infused with vitality and ecstatic yea-saying, but so few of them were able to construct a philosophy strong enough to hold back the tumultuous currents of suicidal despair. The sense of ‘unreality’ returned with an overwhelming fullness of force. Wilson writes, ‘The Romantics… believed that the “moments of vision” cannot be controlled. Pushkin compared the poet’s heart to a coal which glows red when the wind of inspiration blows. But he cannot make it blow; he just has to sit and wait’ (2009: 9). It is this fundamentally passive and defeatist tone that underlies many of the romantics, and again, Wilson attempted to show an active methodology by which we could fully comprehend and integrate this fundamental sense of a greater reality, and allow the coal of the heart to once again glow with flame—but this time, by an act of motive force based on something existentially substantial and real.
In his introduction to Mysteries (1978) he also notes that there is something ‘fundamentally queer about the universe’ and that it ‘contradicts our assumption that there are no questions without answers’ and, most disturbingly, our very minds seem somewhat unsuited for thinking about these problems. This leads to many philosophers taking the position that human existence is basically a short, brutal accident that evolved a painful form of self-consciousness. For some philosophers and writers, such as the horror writer HP Lovecraft, the Romanian arch-pessimist Emil Cioran, to the contemporary British philosopher, John Gray, consciousness itself is a mournful agony that is better off not existing at all. Indeed, the latter seems to prefer the ‘silence of animals’: animals whose consciousness has not yet come to grips with time and what it infers—an end to its own being: death and universal contingency. Our sense of motive, in the face of a pessimistic view of reality, recedes proportionally.
A death-haunted mankind aware of his own demise in a meaningless cosmos results in the belief that the cosmos had best have remained uninhabited by mind. That is, the awareness of non-meaning is the most ironic development of all. From this point of view, their visions of an all-seeing, all-knowing God—in whatever shape or form—are perceived as a sadomasochist and should be disowned. None of them, apparently, seemed to see this as a type of projection implicit in their own philosophical conclusions. This, essentially, is what Wilson challenged in his Outsider Cycle.
Nevertheless, a cosmology ejected of all meaningful contexts and purpose is still a cosmology. That is, even if it is a chaos rather than a cosmos (cosmos is the Greek word for an orderly universe rather than a chaotic one). And in any cosmology, as Heyneman points out, our knowledge and imagination are entirely ‘contained, consciously or unconsciously, within it’ and, furthermore if ‘… the vessel is shattered and the image has no shape, impressions have no meaning.’ She continues:
We have no stomach for them—no place inside ourselves to keep them. We are immersed in them, they flow over our surfaces in a ceaseless stream, but we are unable to extract any nourishment from them to add to the structure and the substance of an understanding of our own upon which we might base a coherent and deliberate life. (2001: 6)
Again, we are back to Wilson’s original formulation that motivation—through belief or a cosmology—is a priori crucial for a healthy will. Once this has been shattered, one falls into a lower state of vitality, even despair, without any real reason to will anything at all. So, in effect, our beliefs and our cosmologies are fundamentally one and the same, for they are interior models of the universe. Now, what is real is not necessarily what is ‘out there’, but also ‘in here’; that is, within our deeper layers of consciousness. Indeed, it is reminiscent of what the Indian mystic, Nisargadatta Maharaj, meant when he said, ‘The real does not die, the unreal never lived.’ The ‘real’, in short, is also an act of becoming into being; it is a motive force that wills itself into existence.
Now this is the point where we can return to Wilson’s outline of philosophy and, more importantly for this essay, return to the UFO phenomenon. For the real question is: into what philosophical context do UFOs emerge into our human story? This is the same approach as descriptive phenomenology, for it attempts to understand the psychological reality of the UFO phenomena rather than the technological or physical reality. This is fundamentally the contradistinction between two modes of philosophic thought which Wilson identifies as the ‘two pockets in the billiard table of philosophy: materialism and idealism’ (2009: 178). What we might ask is how the UFO emerges from—or into—a collective philosophical zeitgeist, and if this is so, what does it signify philosophically as well as phenomenologically?
Jacques Vallée identified this problem in his book The Invisible College (1975), where he states that the UFO ‘constitutes both a physical entity with mass, inertia, volume etc., which we can measure, and a window toward another mode of reality’ (2014: 4). Vallée continues, ‘These forms of life may be similar to projections; they may be real, yet a product of our dreams. Like our dreams, we can look into their hidden meaning, or we can ignore them. But like our dreams, they may also shape what we think of as our lives in ways that we do not yet understand’ (2014: 4). This ‘hidden meaning’ is the occulted aspect of the UFO phenomenon, for it is this element that is most readily interpreted, and offers a unique insight into our philosophical categories and phenomenological attendance to a phenomenon so intrinsically linked with the unconscious mechanisms, of both the individual and society at large.
At this point it is worth returning to the genre of fiction that best navigates these ‘in-between’ territories—science fiction.
Stan Gooch in his essay ‘Science Fiction as Religion’10 provides an important idea which will help elucidate just why the genre of science fiction can provide glimpses into new and emergent metaphysics. For, where science fails—in providing meanings and speculations in the ‘large picture’ of human values—science fiction steps in and provides a ‘surrogate belief system’ and most of the modern cults—from such as Scientology to the Aetherius Society—have as their psychological aim a unification of ‘science and religion’. In Gooch’s words, ‘modern religion and science fiction, therewith seem to be struggling towards a common meeting point—though they have as yet not reached it.’ Science fiction realises that science cannot provide emotion and experience and, in doing so, compensates by trying to ‘infuse those elements into scientif
ic frameworks or cosmologies’, also, of course, science cannot allow itself to wonder, so again science fiction makes up for this lack.
In his 2016 novel The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts has his protagonist say—in truly Kantian fashion—that our ‘universe is being determined by the thing itself, and by say—the consciousness of the sentient beings perceiving the thing itself.’ The ‘thing itself’, of course, is Immanuel Kant’s notion of the noumenon, that which cannot be known outside of the limits of our perceptual ‘categories’. To return to Beyond the Outsider, Wilson describes Kant’s basic philosophy as being concerned with how the mind creates the universe as we perceive it. He continues to say that true, ‘there is an unknowable reality “out there”—the noumena, but it is unknowable precisely because it does not need to obey our laws, and so cannot enter our perceptions, or even our reason’ (1965: 91). Nevertheless, Wilson argues, it was the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte who went beyond this problem and asked the crucial question of: ‘Can I “create” the universe, and yet not be aware that I am doing so?’ (1965: 91).
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 6