RS: I myself don’t expect the moon to have a great deal of intelligence or life. It’s the most inert heavenly body we know. Venus, on the other hand, is a turbulent system with plenty of scope for chaotic perturbations and shifting systems of order. Jupiter has this extraordinarily turbulent surface. Saturn has delicately poised and no doubt oscillatory rings many of them sensitive enough to pick up fleeting changes and act as interfaces between the physical and mental realms. The moon seems rather lacking in all of these respects.
RA: Okay, maybe the moon is dumb. I’m not willing to concede that, but I see that some people would rather put their money on a different number. Of the brighter planets, Jupiter is probably the one that most people are familiar with. Jupiter and Saturn are visible in the sky almost like stars. They stay in the same position for a long time, so it’s easy to find them without a computer-controlled stellarator. So what about contacting Jupiter or Saturn?
TM: There’s plenty of exotic chemistry on Jupiter. The current thinking is that Europa is the most likely place in the solar system other than the earth to have life, because of its very dense, deep oceans, filled with liquid water. It maybe, in fact, that the entire thing is a drop of liquid water. There may be no solid form.
These other kinds of life I dare say live mostly in our fevered imaginations at this point. I mean the evidence for them is extraordinarily underwhelming I would think. The difficulty about this whole discussion about extraterrestrial intelligence, or nonhuman intelligence, is that the very nature of its nonhumanness makes it either elusive, uninteresting, or horrifying. It’s probably in a very narrow spectrum that we can have the experience of an I-Thou relationship. We can decide here and now that in fact the sun is alive and highly literate and so forth. It doesn’t greatly change our experience in the way that an extraterrestrial with which we could exchange information would. I think the recognition of intelligence if it’s not like ours, is going to be very difficult. I mean we can’t even have Croats and Serbs getting along together.
RA: But we’ve already encountered intelligence; let’s call it the “Transcendent Other” for the moment. Suppose it turned out that the Transcendent Other was not in hyperdimensional space; in other words beyond space and time, living on the other side of the Eschaton, but actually lived in a crater on the moon. That would not only be an interesting discovery but would completely change your whole idea about shamanic experience.
TM: So far, the only locators we’ve been able to find for these things are drugs. In other words, we can say this creature lives on the other side of 15 milligrams of psilocybin, but not on the other side of 75 milliliters of ayahuasca. These may not be satisfying as locators because we’re not used to thinking of molecules as standing for spatio-temporal locus.
RA: In John Dee’s system, everything represented a planetary intelligence.
RS: If we’re looking for guidance in what happens on Earth, and we certainly need it, we must recognize how we’re imbedded within the heavens, the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. Intelligences throughout the heavens could play an important role in guiding us.
We are fascinated by our own death, although we deny it and transfer it onto larger spheres. Now that we’ve achieved more or less the largest sphere in our search for the eventual death of the all and everything, perhaps we could extend the same consideration to creativity and birth and see the acorn, growing into the mature tree, as the ultimate principle of life. In these seeds, birth moments are distributed everywhere in space and time and throughout the reality of the universe.
CHAPTER 11
THE END OF REALTY
Rupert Sheldrake: I’d like to read a part of the last letter I received from my teacher, Father Bede Griffiths. He was an English Benedictine monk who lived for nearly forty years in India. He died in 1993 at the age of 86 in his ashram on the bank of the Cauvery river in Tamil Nadu, South India. I lived in his community for two years; it’s where I wrote my first book, A New Science of Life, which I dedicated to Father Bede.
His letter was written on All Souls’ Day, November 2, 1992, in response to our book Trialogues at the Edge of the West (now published as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness ).
My Dear Rupert,
I’ve just finished reading your Trialogues with Ralph and Terence. It is as near a map to the future that I have ever encountered, embracing every aspect of life as it is understood today. The only thing I find lacking in it is a sense of the mystical, of the unity which transcends all dualities. Your view of apocalypse is very impressive, but one must remember that all time and space is contained in the transcendent unity which embraces all the multiplicity. The Tibetans see this very clearly. All the multiplicity of forms is a manifestation of the one formless reality. I think that David Bohm’s idea of the implicate order is very meaningful.
RS: David Bohm, the quantum physicist, proposed that behind the world that we experience, the explicate order is an invisible, unmanifested source: the implicate order. Father Bede continues:
Chaos is the original undifferentiated unity, the prime matter of Aristotle, in which all forms are implicated. As consciousness emerges from the primal unity the different forms of being are gradually explicated. You can think of it as the emergence of form from the original chaos or the descent of form from the original spirit. Matter is form emerging from chaos; spirit is form in its original unity. In other words, matter is form emerging from the unconscious; spirit is form communicating itself to matter. Matter is the mother, the receptive principle (the yin), form is the father, the active principle (the yang). But all these principles are expressions of the differentiating consciousness, which itself is beyond differentiation. So from an undifferentiated consciousness we pass to a differentiated consciousness. Consciousness divides, but only to reunite.
The danger is that we get stuck in the differentiated consciousness, which is where we are now. But all differentiation leads back to a unity which transcends differences. This is the final state of nirvana, sunyata, or nirguna Brahma, Brahma without qualities. In the Trinity everything comes from its original source in the Father beyond differentiation, and comes forth in the Son in all the multiplicity of the universe, and returns in the Spirit to the original transcendent unity, but now in full consciousness.
This is how I see it, but you bring an abundance of new insights from science, which are new to me. In regard to education I think that it’s important to be based on traditional religion, whether Hindu, Christian, or American Indian. A tradition links you vitally with the past and enables you to grow. Of course, it can also prevent growth, but our call is precisely to allow the tradition to grow, and to be open to all the new insights which are offered us. But to start without roots in tradition I feel would be frustrating.
One point Father Bede is making is that in our first book we didn’t speak much about the transcendent source Although in the course of our discussions over the years, we have referred to it repeatedly, particularly in what Terence says about the cosmic attractor. This unity which Father Bede refers to contains all multiplicity, because it contains all the variety of forms in creation. When he talks about the unity which transcends all dualities, this transcendent unity which embraces all multiplicity, it sounds to me very like what Terence is talking about at the end of time.
Terence McKenna: I agree. It’s absolutely the same thing. I think that since the publication of Trialogues at the Edge of the West, we’ve tended more and more to address this precise issue. I don’t have any problem with any of it. It’s certainly part of the picture.
Ralph Abraham: I’m not sure we’ll ever get finished discussing this point. My own views of the mystical and the unity of phenomena in the world are still evolving. Actually, our interaction in our discussions continues to present different views about the details of this picture of the connectedness of all and everything. More specifically, I think our recent discussions have had the function of decreasing dualism somehow, especially in our dis
cussions about the heavens. When we talked about the location of heaven from a real-estate perspective, we arrived at a kind of integration into a unity of all and everything. As I listened to our discussion, I imagined a unity of the dualism of form and matter and energy, not only unified in a primal cause, or primal Eschaton, but through all time. In the present moment as well, there is the interaction of matter and spirit within the integrity of a single phenomenon or trans-temporal object. Even now the entelechy, or causal phenomenon, has a concept of time in it, which I think is more specific and special than, for example Brahma, the unity of all and everything—the spirit and the world in one.
We tried to integrate heaven and Earth in our discussion by locating a door to the paranormal dimensions at each and every point in ordinary space and time. This is a kind of timeless integration in which the whole of time becomes a kind of slice in this trans-temporal causal object. This is a little bit different, as I see it, from the idea of the Eschaton, the attractor at the end of time.
RS: This is the holographic matrix, all-in-everything model.
TM: It assumes that the higher, trans-temporal dimension can be accessed from anywhere in space and time. I suppose this is like the difference between individual and collective salvation, as one must believe that the individual at any point can truncate the process and cut to the chase, although clearly the species is locked in a larger drama that has to unfold according to its own dynamics before it’s completed.
RA: I agree that ordinary reality lives in space and time, and the individual subjective experience of time is exactly what it seems to be. From the individual perspective, the model, the master form, chaos, can be visualized within ordinary reality either at the beginning of time or the end of time. A truly transcendental vision sees time as a kind of lower-dimensional phenomenon in the all-embracing picture of the overall unity of reality.
RS: “Time is the moving image of eternity,” in Plato’s words in the Timaeus.
RA: And eternity is not at the end of time.
RS: I think we’ve run into a problem, because all the Platonic formulations are based on a cyclical view of the universe. Whereas the evolutionary view, which is Whitehead’s view and Terence’s view and my own view, are based on a different model of time, namely time as a development or movement towards an end or a goal. Because of evolutionary theory, the attempts in the twentieth century of theologians and philosophers to grapple with the problem of the eternity and unity of time have been different from the problems faced by their predecessors. Teilhard de Chardin tried to adapt traditional theology to the evolutionary view and in India, Sri Aurobindo put forth a similar evolutionary idea.
It’s one thing to have the image of a transcendent reality that generates endless cycles of recurrence: the great breath of Brahma, the Great Year, and that kind of thing. It’s another thing to have a model where the whole thing is developing toward a telos, an end, goal or cosmic attractor. This evolutionary view, which is fundamental to my own thinking, depends on an asymmetry in time, an increasing diversity of forms and the appearance of novelty as well. All these things are difficult to square with traditional theologies.
If you have the idea of cycles, then the transcendent and the temporal exist in some kind of ongoing, more or less eternal relationship. Time, as the moving image of eternity, goes round and round in circles, which is the closest approximation of eternal movement that the Greeks or anyone else could come up with. This is not the evolutionary version, where time moves increasingly faster and faster, as Terence tells us, towards some kind of cosmic culmination.
This has been a problem in Christian theology right from the beginning, because on the one hand the Christians inherited Greek Neo-Platonic philosophy. On the other hand, deep within the Judeo-Christian tradition is the idea of a process in time moving towards a culmination, an apocalypse, the Eschaton , the Messiah, the Second Coming, the Millennium. This tension has become exacerbated in this century because we’ve taken so seriously the evolutionary view, with its implication of a movement of things towards an end, a culmination, a goal. We now see the whole universe and life and human development under the aspect of evolutionary development. Previously, the idea was that the universe is more or less static once created, or cycling endlessly, with human beings engaged in this endless process.
RA: I wish that Father Bede were here to instruct us. I interpret his words to mean that the evolutionary or linear-progressive model is actually a denial of the mystical vision that he presents. Eric Voegelin described history, the past and the future, as radiating symmetrically from the present. Rather than locating the Eschaton in the present and considering evolution both ways, I would think it’s possible to envision time as an endless line. If time is thus regarded asymmetrically, where the past is considered to be more determined than the future, then today’s efforts will matter in the long run.
The space-time model of ordinary reality can still be seen in its entirety as an arena for the morphogenetic process, which stretches over all and gives us the asymmetry of ordinary perception of the process. This reconciles the model of evolution with the growth of the morphogenetic field and so on.
Nevertheless, there’s interconnectedness between the past, the present and the future, as part of a morphogenetic process stretching over the entire space-time continuum. It’s possible that pattern formation in the past is still taking place as we perceive it in the present. When we do archaeology we reconstruct the past, much as when we try to remember what we did or said yesterday, remembering selectively, introducing errors, which progress each day to different errors and so on. As far as consciousness is concerned, there’s a morphogenesis over the whole space-time continuum. In this context, we can unify the mystical view of the all and everything with the concept of linear evolution.
TM: However, I don’t think Father Bede would abandon orthodoxy, and the distinguishing characteristic of Western orthodoxy, whether Judaism, Christianity or Islam, is the absolute and uncompromised assurance that God will enter history at a certain moment. That’s the distinguishing characteristic of Western, as opposed to Eastern religion.
RS: Not will, but has entered history.
TM: And will again. It’s a promise that must be redeemed, and it’s completely counterintuitive, completely antirational. It makes far less sense than the endless cycling of Hinduism or the quietism of Taoism. There is an irrational insistence at the heart of Western religion, and I don’t think it will ever be traded away.
RS: There’s a fundamental asymmetry in our conception of time, built into the system from which Father Bede is speaking.
TM: Exactly. People forget, for example, that as recently as the early twentieth century Arnold Toynbee wrote a study of history in which he states that the culmination of history is the entry of God into three-dimensional space. This is considered modern historiography done in the Western tradition.
RS: There are two things one can say to that. First, in most esoteric formulations of the Christian view there is the entry of God at the end of time. In the more mystical view you have the idea of the entry of God all the time, in the lives of all believers. In this view, people are always potentially open to the spirit, because the spirit is that which is inspiring, dynamical, moving; it’s the novelty wave, if you like, because it’s that which causes change. The Christian view is not that God is undifferentiated; there’s always a trinity of Spirit, and Father, and the Logos or the Son, existing in relationship. The part of the trinity that’s a moving principle, the spirit, is always conceived of in moving images; as the breath, the wind, the fire, the flame, the flight of the bird. These movements are not predictable, at least in any ordinary sense. Jesus says to Nicodemus in John’s Gospel, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The idea is that the spirit is inherently unpredictable, a moving principle, present in all people,
all of nature and containing the element of surprise. There’s also the formal principle, the Logos, which gives things their form. The Logos evolves as creation evolves, and there’s always this dynamical Spirit within it.
There’s a sense in which the Christian view has never been particularly compatible with the Platonic view, or with an extreme monotheism, which has an undifferentiated, changeless, eternal unity, outside time. The Holy Trinity has process within it, the Spirit being the breath, the Word being the spoken word.
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