Evolutionary Metaphors

by David J Moore

  The above is quoted from In Search of the Miraculous, one of the most comprehensive books that systematises the teachings of GI Gurdjieff. However, it is clear in the context of this essay that it constitutes an evolutionary metaphor, particularly with its correlation between ‘subjective’ man and ‘objective’ universe and vice versa. Gurdjieff places heavy emphasis on the study of the processes of nature. These processes, he argues, are sufficient for gaining insights into the mechanisms of man; and, moreover, if properly understood, enables man to transcend their ‘laws’. Gurdjieff’s ‘system’ is based primarily on the notion that the man who truly knows the mechanisms of the cosmos is, in some sense, above them, for by understanding one—truly and not superficially—he can understand the other, that is himself. Furthermore he makes the important distinction between ordinary knowledge and gnosis (revelatory knowledge), or self-remembering. That is, rather than of simply knowing something mechanically, we know it in a deeper, more intimate sense—we know more truly with all of its universal, objective and subjective correlates. This gnosis is essentially Wilson’s Faculty X, or what he called ‘relationality’. We don’t just passively glimpse ‘other times and places’; we know that they are entirely real.

  Interestingly there are symbols of wholeness, and this is precisely what the poet or artist—either consciously or unconsciously—is trying to achieve in his most visionary moments. There are also creative ‘flashes’ which enable someone to grasp wholes, which, once realised, relate to something else and so on until they constitute whole inner-landscapes of interrelated facts.

  One of the most famous of visionary poems is ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which was, he says, composed ‘in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium’ (1982: 12), in which he gained a vision—influenced from the night’s reading—which constituted a whole poem. During a brief nap, he seems to have been a witness to the unconscious creative processes. ‘[T]he images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort’ and upon awakening ‘he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines’ (1966 167). The conscious and unconscious processes are here blurred and intermixed: ‘images rose up as things’, these ‘things’ being manifestly perceptible. Also of interest is the fact that he was effectively unconscious, and beneath all this the ‘dream artist’ constructed its meanings in a type of logic usually unavailable to the conscious mind.

  In this moment of integrative unconscious thinking working with the act of creativity, Coleridge was unfortunately interrupted by a trivial matter of business—this, it turned out, diminished the ‘whole’, breaking it into fragments of a vague and distant memory. Nevertheless, Coleridge, with acute phenomenological insight, managed to grasp the very process of the loss of this vision and, significantly, its return:

  … all the charm

  Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair

  Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,

  And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,

  Poor youth! …

  The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon

  The visions will return! And lo, he stays,

  And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms

  Come trembling back, unite, and now once more

  The pool becomes a mirror. (1966: 167)

  The ‘thousand circlets’, here, is the left brain’s ordinary processing of time; its tendency to pixilation and to reduce things to ‘bits’. Our perception of life is choppy like a fast, unpredictable disorder of associations, yet, in moments of insight the stream pools into a reflective insight; that is, as one looks into the pool, it reflects its environment back far more accurately. The left hemisphere’s slowing down enables full images to be grasped by the right hemisphere—yet, significantly, it is in the stream of ordinary existence in which they are expressed, that is, in the form of something like Coleridge’s poem.

  Arthur Koestler remarked that the ‘poet thinks both in images and verbal concepts, at the same time or in quick alternation; each trouvaille, each original find, bisociates two matrices. The dreamer floats among the phantom shapes of the hoary deep; the poet is a skin-diver with a breathing tube’ (1966: 168). Certainly, Coleridge does seem to be in-between two states, and, once the harmonic was disturbed, he found himself more in one ‘stream’ of thought than the other. Temporarily he had slowed down his ceaseless perceptual ‘firing’—by being drowsy and under the effects of opium—and had grasped an emergent and whole image from the unconscious mind. He then managed, albeit before the disruption, to capture fragments of the vision in the form poetry.

  In Mysteries Colin Wilson cites the example of René Daumal’s experiment with tetrachloride, which he used to inhale in order to descend into similar timeless and imaginal regions of the unconscious. In this state he suffered typical ‘near death experiences’ in which his whole life flashed before his eyes, and, eventually even words began to lose their meaning. Daumal entered ‘an instantaneous and intense world of eternity, a concentrated flame of reality’ in which he experienced a new type—or mode—of knowledge (342). In this state there was an odd play on words and sounds, with unusual incantations and ‘formulas’ which effected, or even maintained, various elements of Daumal’s hallucinogenic visions. Ordinary words, by comparison, felt for Daumal too ‘heavy and slow’, ‘shapeless’ and ‘rigid’. Daumal continues:

  With these wretched words I can put together only approximate statements, whereas my certainty is for me the archetype of precision. In my ordinary state of mind, all that remains thinkable and formulable of this experiment reduces to one affirmation on which I would stake my life: I feel the certainty of the existence of something else, a beyond, another world, or another form of knowledge.17

  And yet, by contrast, the words that sustained both his vision and his own existence, Wilson remarks, are essentially a ‘symbolic recognition that all life is sustained by a continuous act of will, or “intentionality”.’ As we have seen, this is Wilson’s ‘basic metaphysic’ of a deep intentionality. It is an essential recognition that the force of life is in fact an extra-dimension of freedom consciousness—of the self-evolving kind—to enter the limited world of matter. Now, we may compare Coleridge’s broken ‘phantom-world’ to one of Daumal’s late poems:

  I am dead because I have no desire,

  I have no desire because I think I possess,

  I think I possess because I do not try to give;

  Trying to give, we see that we have nothing,

  Seeing that we have nothing, we try to give ourselves,

  Trying to give ourselves, we see that we are nothing,

  Seeing that we are nothing, we desire to become,

  Desiring to become, we live.

  (2004: 119)

  Each poem can be summarised by its initial loss of vision, its realisation of nothingness, but, in that ‘loss’, it aims to return to life—or, in Coleridge’s terms, with a pool that becomes a mirror. At the heart of each there is a sense of affirmation, or what another poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s called ‘dennoch preisen’—to praise in spite of. There is a limit, and once this is reached, felt existence, once again, returns to animate the very substratum of our being; our life and existence—intentionality, the primordial essence of being, underlies and animates a pure ‘becoming’, a stepping-up of complexification into ordinarily inanimate and unknowing forms. Gary Lachman refers to this as an ‘inner “event horizon”’. He continues: ‘“I” seem to emerge like a fountain gushing out of a “nowhere” that is nonetheless within me. It is as if I reach a kind of horizon, beyond which I cannot see… Perhaps that inner “event horizon” there is a place where the unobservable mind and the unobservable universe meet?’ (2013: 220).

  A ‘new knowledge’ or gnosis comes into play on the other side of the perceptual event horizon, and, in an
implicit sort of way it infers itself, rather like an evolutionary metaphor, through the dense, explicit nature of ordinary existence. Poets or people undergoing extreme and intense forms of consciousness are sometimes able to bring glimpses back, and, if they are capable enough, they create great pieces of art glistening with depths of meanings far beyond the artist’s ordinary consciousness. A descent into the unconscious makes one aware of the hidden machinery of our being, and indeed, our universe; we suddenly understand that just beneath the surface of existence is an animating force that works, in an odd way, on sound and manifestation—and, furthermore, it lies outside of time. It is, in fact, experienced and often described as if a part of a greater whole—this, of course, makes it difficult to articulate in a language unsuited to such conceptual enormity.

  Now, Daumal realised that in spite of this feeling of wholeness and interconnectedness, he himself stood outside of it—he was, he felt, somehow a distortion in its patterning. One could say that one mind is in fact a distortion from this unconscious activity, for it is precisely conscious of it; one mind is a discontinuity between two modalities of being and phenomenon. Whereas the ‘other’ mind—the right brain—is a part of this ‘other’ world in as much as the ‘spectator’ is a part of its own (separate) world. Both ‘I’s’ struggle to become aware of each other’s existence simultaneously. And yet, there is a relation between the two worlds and one, without the other, would be a hollow and autonomous world and the other, by contrast, a vast chaos of formlessness and vacillation. Both Daumal’s and Coleridge’s visions reminded them of this fact—one world is ‘nothing’, whereas Coleridge’s break from the ‘phantom-world’ is symbolised as an ever-increasing distortion of our vision: ‘… and a thousand circlets spread, / And each mis-shape the other.’ But, significantly, Coleridge goes on to write, ‘… soon the fragments dim of lovely forms / Come trembling back’. This is the point in which the two worlds correspond, and the frontiers cascade into focus.

  The essence of the living and the inanimate, the conscious and unconscious, is encapsulated in this extraordinary paragraph from van Vogt’s 1948 short story, ‘The Monster’:

  Out of the shadows of smallness, life grows. The level of beginning and ending, of life and—not life; in that dim region matter oscillates easily between old and new habits. The habit of organic, or the habit of inorganic. Electrons do not have life and un-life values. Atoms know nothing of inanimateness. But when atoms form into molecules, there is a step in the process, one tiny step, that is of life—if life begins at all. One step, and then darkness. Or aliveness.

  Van Vogt’s ‘monster’, in fact, is a human being that has mastered the molecular level of his being, and once awakened by an extraterrestrial race on a post-apocalyptic Earth, becomes an unstoppable force of willpower and foresight. One single step awakens the man, and once this happens, he is an unstoppable spearhead of the life force.

  Here the question arises: what is the essence and directive of being alive? If we blossom from some unseen dimension, then where is it we are emerging from? Once we have sketched out an approximate understanding of our own intentionality, and of our own inner world, we can begin to ‘become’ and live more consciously, and therefore freely. The stepping-up process of molecules into self-reflective, conscious beings that attempt to reach their own perceptual ‘event horizons’ tends to suggest that man thrives off an imagination that well exceeds our ordinary understanding of the evolutionary process. Man appears to want to embody the process himself—even steering it in accordance to his own will. Man, it is quite clear, is the ultimate intentional animal.

  Now Carl Jung had the same vision of man when he arrived in Nairobi to visit the Athai Plains. Upon viewing the game reserve, he saw spread out before him a ‘magnificent prospect’ comprising to the limits of the horizon game animals like zebras, warthogs, antelopes etc., which were silent but for the ‘melancholy cry of a bird of prey’. Reflecting upon it he felt that it was symbolic—and indeed, a literal vision—of ‘the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of nonbeing’ (1995: 284). Upon viewing nature as it is, he underwent a type of ‘cosmic consciousness’ in which the meaning of being became clear to him. Says Jung:

  Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in doing so we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clock-world fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no ‘new day’ leading to ‘new shores’, but only the dreariness of calculated processes. (1995: 284–285)

  One part of man is essentially invisible—that which cannot be seen are precisely the meanings that are attributed to both himself and his environment, the exercise of his ‘intentional self’. These meanings, of course, remain invisible until they are expressed; that is, until they are manifested into reality. When man works creatively, he brings forth this world in a dynamic between the invisible and the visible. Jung, in fact, quotes an alchemical dictum: ‘What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects.’ Indeed, the world in which he lives is more vast and complex for man than any other creature—the world is, in its most fundamental sense, a grand mystery. In partaking in the unfolding of his own existence, and in his own awareness of life and death, man is truly in a state of ‘in-between-ness’; between two worlds. Problems, such as psychological imbalance, existential angst, and so on, are essentially an issue of transmission between two modalities of perception—the problem between Whitehead’s ‘meaning perception’ and Wilson’s contrast between a worm’seye view and a bird’s-eye view of existence.

  We return back to the ‘cosmic viewpoint’, that imperative of the UFO and, of course, science-fiction literature and esotericism. Both represent the polar opposite of the modern conception of the provinciality of man. The repositioning of metaphors, of worldviews and cosmological frameworks, furthermore, draws us onwards and upwards; it is, in essence, the invisible dynamo of the imagination and, therefore, our greatest asset in improving the transmission between two worlds and two minds. The evolutionary metaphor, in a sense, is the bridge that leads to a staircase—or a ladder—to the windowed attic of human super-consciousness.

  The evolutionary metaphor is the working hypothesis that navigates implicit realities into explicit ones—the metaphor, being evolutionary, demands complexification as much as it requires control and discipline. For, without control, complexity becomes overwhelming, and this is the grave concern for Wilson’s outsider. The world of increasing complexity collapses under its own weight, that is, unless it has a guiding metaphor that pulls it into an understandable shape—a comprehensive structure that includes within itself a purposeful as well as dynamic future. Effectively it is the symbolic cultural equivalent of the mandala of which Jung drew upon to represent the symbolic inner-unity of man’s individual being.

  In one of Terence McKenna’s greatest speeches, he encapsulates what the outsider knows intuitively, and that is that ‘[man] was not put on this planet to toil in the mud’, and referring to the mechanistic and materialistic culture as ‘the machine’ he argues that we express our own evolutionary directive more purposefully by living creatively. The evolutionary metaphor provides a vision in which we, as McKenna argues, ‘maximize our humanness by becoming much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machine’—in inferring something beyond the limits of a pessimistic culture, it is, he demonstrates, a ‘civil rights issue’ in the sense that it is the suppression of the ‘religious sensibility’. There is, in the language of this essay, an obfuscation of the invisible worlds of the imagination that are the very life’s blood of consciousness and the evolutionary spirit.

  Meanings always infer something more, and the more meaningful it is, the less constricting and narrow consciousness becomes. The
evolutionary metaphor, insofar as it infers larger interdependent realities towards a larger and more inclusive whole, is fundamentally what Wilson meant by ‘relationality’. To use one of Wilson’s metaphors, ordinary consciousness is rather like a ‘piano whose strings are damped so that each note vibrates for only a fraction of a second’, but in our more ‘wider’ states:

  … the strings go on vibrating and cause other strings to vibrate. One thing suddenly ‘reminds’ us of another, so the mind is suddenly seething with insights and impressions and ideas. Everything becomes ‘connected’. We see that the world is self-evidently a bigger and more interesting place than we usually take for granted… We are simply in a state of wider perception—both outer and inner perception. (2008: 94)

  As I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this essay, it is fundamentally this vision of consciousness, man and the cosmos, which may allow the enigma of the UFO to shed its secrets. If it is, as reliable theorists like Mack, Strieber and Kripal believe it to be—as an evolutionary ‘wake-up’ call of sorts—then it requires that we meet anomalous phenomenon halfway and recognise that fundamentally it is consciousness that can transcend the material limitations precisely by presaging a greater comprehension of existence itself—both inside and out.

  A Convergence of Worlds

  This essay sought to explore the possible esoteric, philosophical, and cosmological frameworks with which one could begin to understand the mystery of the UFO and its related phenomenon. In doing so, I decided to begin from the fundamental recognition at the heart of Wilson’s new existentialism, that is: consciousness is intentional and can, in various situations, willed or unwilled, reach out and grasp the essential meanings that are implicit in existence.