Originally published in Psychologies magazine Feb 2011

Jane spent weeks organizing the office Christmas party. She booked the room, organized the entertainment and tickets, sent out the e-mails. The party went well and at its end, her manager stood up to make the customary speech. 'He didn't even bother to thank me,' Jane says. 'I was enraged. All the effort I'd put in and he didn't even acknowledge it. So I thought, 'If he doesn't value my work, I'm not going to value him either.' I felt I had to get back at him, so I was difficult and uncommunicative. Our working relationship deteriorated so much that I ended up leaving and taking another job. It was a big mistake, because in retrospect I realise I was happy with that job.'   

We all feel slighted when we're not given the respect we feel we deserve. Think about how you feel when someone forgets your birthday, or doesn't return your phone calls; or when you're not invited to a party which other people you know are going to, or aren't included in an important meeting at work. We often like to think of ourselves as altruistic, willing to offer help freely, but think about how slighted you feel when you give someone or lift or cook them a meal and they leave without saying thank you.

Watch yourself closely, and you'll probably find that you feel slighted in one of these ways almost every day - possibly even several times a day. Maybe a person didn't give you any eye contact when you spoke to them, or pushed in front of you in a queue. Perhaps you experienced rejection of some form, when your report was sent back for some more work, or a friend turned down an invitation.

Psychologists call slights 'narcissistic injuries' - they bruise our egos, make us feel belittled. Ultimately, all types of slights boil down to the same basic feeling: of being devalued or disrespected.

Slights may seem trivial, but they can have dangerous consequences. They can play on our minds for days, opening up psychic wounds which are difficult to heal. We replay the situation over and over again, until the hurt and humiliation eat away at us inside. This usually leads to an impulse to fight back, to avenge the damage to our self-esteem. This could mean slighting the person back: 'She didn't invite me to her party, so I'm not sending her a birthday card;' 'He didn't thank me, so I'm going to ignore him from now on.' A grudge may develop: you end up looking the other way when you pass the person on the street, or making bitchy comments behind their back. And if the person reacts to your resentment, it could end up in a full scale feud. A good friendship could dissolve into acrimony, a close family could needlessly fall apart.

Even more dangerously - especially with young men - slights can trigger a violent reaction. Criminologists have noted that many acts of violence stem from a sense of slight. The psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson estimated that two-thirds of all murders were the result of men feeling that they had been disrespected and acting to save face. In recent years, in the US there has been a disturbing rise in the number of 'flashpoint killings' - casual murders triggered by trivial confrontations. Typically, the flashpoint killer is a young man who becomes furious after feeling that he's been slighted in front of friends.

In one case, a teenager shot a man at a basketball match because 'I didn't like the way he was eye-balling me.' He went up to the man and asked, 'What are you looking at?' This led to insults and the shooting. One young woman stabbed another because she wore her dress without asking. Another young man became enraged after an acquaintance tried to shake his hand while he was eating, and shot him later outside the caf.

Our vulnerability to slights seems to point to fundamental insecurity inside us. The ego - our sense of self - is often fragile and easy to damage. Many of us feel a basic sense of separateness and incompleteness, which means that we're prone to feelings of insignificance. As a result, the ego needs to be continually boosted by affirmation. We need to be shown that we're important. A slight can be a terrible blow because it uncovers that latent sense of insignificance.

So what can we do to make ourselves less vulnerable to slights?

According to the personal performance consultant, Ken Keis - author of the book Why aren't you more like me? - the first step is simply to accept that we feel hurt. 'That sounds easy, but it's much easier for us to the mind to start obsessing about how evil the person who offended us is. Acknowledging the hurt stops us ruminating, which is the worst thing you can do. It just allows the slight to grow out of all proportion.'

Keis emphasises the importance of what he terms 'calling space.' 'Before you react to a slight, think about the consequences. Remember that nothing good ever comes from being easily offended. If you are, you'll lose your credibility. People won't want to work with you, or even spend time with you. The likelihood is that you feel slighted because you're expecting a certain type of behaviour and not getting it. So perhaps it's your expectations which need to change.'

Similarly, the counselor and psychologist Dr. Elliot Cohen points out that often slights stem from a mis-reading of a situation. 'If someone ignores you and you feel offended, it could just be that you're 'personalizing' the situation. It helps to take the perspective of the person who you think slighted you. Perhaps they were just in a rush, or didn't even see you. Maybe they were just being a little thoughtless or forgetful. And even if someone is genuinely rude or disrespectful to you, there could be reasons for that: perhaps they're jealous of you, or feel threatened.' 

Although it may not seem to be closely related, the practice of meditation can help too. Regular meditation can make us less affected by negative thoughts, and create a more grounded and stable sense of self, so that we're less dependent on respect and affirmation from other people. If you feel contented within yourself, why should it matter so much if other people sometimes disrespect you?

When we feel slighted, it may seem that the offence comes from the outside, but ultimately, we are the ones who allow ourselves to feel slighted. In the wise words of Eleanor Roosevelt, 'No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

The common types of slights:

being left out e.g. not being invited to a party which other people you know are going to, or being excluded from an important meeting at work.

being forgotten e.g. someone forgets to buy you a birthday present, or your partner forgets to buy you a valentines card; or you meet an old school friend and they don't recognize you.

being ignored e.g. you say hello to someone and they blank you, or a friend doesn't return your calls or e-mails; or you come up with some fantastic ideas at work but your colleagues don't pay attention.

rejection e.g. when a report you've written is sent back for more work, when you ask someone out and they turn you down.

when a favour or some help isn't appreciated e.g. when you give someone a lift, or cook them a meal or buy them a present, but they leave without showing any gratitude.

When people are rude or inconsiderate e.g. when someone pushes in front of you a queue, or doesn't apologise after bumping into you.

How to deal with slights

• First of all, accept that you feel hurt.
• Take the perspective of the other person. Did they really mean to slight you, or are you misinterpreting the situation?
• Don't ruminate over the hurt.
• Rather than automatically reacting with anger, ask yourself what the consequences of this will be.
• Practice meditation or other relaxation techniques to create a more grounded and stable sense of self.
• Remind yourself that as long as you respect yourself, no one else should have the power to offend you.

(published in Natural Health magazine, March 2011)

Dirty nappies, being woken up in the middle of the night, a house full of screams and squeals, food splattered all over the walls, toys strewn chaotically over the floor, no more late nights out, no time to read books or go on courses or retreats�What could be spiritual about bringing up children? Isn't spiritual development just one of the many things we sacrifice when we have kids?

Many spiritual traditions would agree with this view. That's why priests and monks have always been celibate. To be spiritual we're supposed to live apart from the normal world, in monasteries, forests or in the desert, meditating and praying in solitude. Nothing is meant to divert us from our spiritual practices - least of all a family, which takes up so much of our time and energy.

In India, there is a tradition that spiritual development belongs to a later stage of life - roughly after the age of 50. First we have to live through the 'householder' stage, bringing up and providing for our children, and living a 'worldly' life. But once our children are grown up, we can turn our attention to the inner world. We can start meditating regularly, and living more quietly and simply.

However, many parents find that - far from hindering it - bringing up children furthers their spiritual development. Seen in the right way, parenthood can itself be a spiritual path, bringing a heightened sense of love, wonder and appreciation.

The journalist Abi Foss was once a follower of the late controversial Indian mystic, Osho, who advised his female followers not to have children, as this would hinder their spiritual growth. 'Although I can understand why he said this to people who needed a lot of therapeutic work, I have to say that I totally disagree with him,' she says. 'I now have a four year old son and I can't think of anything better for your spiritual growth. Motherhood is the hardest yet most rewarding job in the world.

'When I was younger I was never in the same place. I was so restless, constantly travelling and never knowing exactly what I wanted. But having a child has grounded me, made me feel rooted. And I think you needed that sense of rootedness to develop yourself.'

Abi's little boy has taught her the true meaning of love as well. 'When you have a baby, you feel a love that you've never felt before. It's so deep it's overwhelming. And then you're wiping their bum, getting up every night for two years - that's what real love is. It's completely selfless.'

Natural Mindfulness

Part of the reason why bringing up children can be a spiritual experience is because children are such strongly spiritual beings themselves. They naturally have many of the qualities which, as adults, we try to cultivate through spiritual development.

For example, children are naturally mindful. They always live fully in the present, and the world is always a fantastically real and interesting place to them. As the child psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it, 'Babies and young children are actually more conscious and more vividly aware of their external world and internal life than adults are.' They have what she calls an 'infinite capacity for wonder' which we adults only experience at our highest moments - for example, when a scientist is inspired by the wonder of the physical world, or a poet is awestruck by beauty. As she puts it, 'Travel, meditation and Romantic poetry can give us a first-person taste of infant experience.'

I have three young children myself, aged one, three and seven. When I go walking with my baby son through the fields and paths close to our home, I'm always amazed at how long it takes us to get anywhere. What should be a ten minute walk by the golf course to the nearest post office can last anything up to 40 minutes. This isn't just because his tiny legs mean that he's a slow walker, but mainly because he stops every few seconds to examine everything. Trees, bushes, stones, leaves, wire fences, puddles, even discarded crisp packets and coke cans - everything is a source of wonder. His world is filled with fascinatingly different textures and colours and shapes and patterns and smells and sounds. He can spend ten minutes examining a leaf, staring at it, stroking it, brushing it against his face. One of the reasons why it's always so difficult to get him out of the bath is because he loves to just sit there and pour water down from a cup, transfixed by the bubbles and splashes and ripples.

Normally I walk to places like an arrow heading to its target - focused on my destination, paying little attention to my surroundings, my mind on other things. But walking with my children has reminded me to stop and look. It's reminded me that almost everything is fascinating if you just take the trouble to pay attention to it. I've realised the joys of just ambling along, staring at the sky, looking at the plants and bushes and trees around me, taking in the reality of the moment rather than thinking about the future or past.

Becoming Children Again

This illustrates one of the most positive effects of having children: they help us to become children again ourselves. As Dr. Elliot Cohen - a psychologist at Leeds Metropolitan University who has a 1 year old baby - describes it, 'There is a new life helping you to see the world anew. In the Jewish spiritual tradition, there is an idea that through having children, you become more child-like yourself. You see the world through the eyes of child, with a new freshness and intensity.'

There is a similar idea in the Taoist tradition. The ancient Chinese Taoist text the Tao Te Ching advises us to 'Return to the state of the infant', and says that the person who 'has in himself abundantly the attributes (of the Tao) is like an infant.'

As Elliot Cohen notes, 'In Taoism, the ideal is to be as spontaneous and curious as a child, with that openness to experience. And the same applies on a physical level too. The aim of the Taoist cultivation practices - like Tai Chi and Chi Gung - to help the body to become as supple and flexible as a child's body. Your body should reflect your mental attitude, with the same openness and flexibility.'         

The playfulness of children can bring out the child in us too. As Abi Foss says of playing with her four year old boy, 'The innocent playfulness of children is really priceless. Your own children can bring you back to that innocent place. My head might be full of worries, but when my little boy and I do silly things together and we fall about laughing, all that stress disappears, it brings me right back into the moment.'

Beyond Selfishness

All the world's spiritual traditions tell us how important it is transcend our own selfishness, to stop seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe, and trying so hard to satisfy our own desires. They advise us to help and serve others, so that we can move beyond our separate ego, and connect to a transcendent power. Buddhism even suggests that desire is the root of all suffering in our lives, and that the only way to become truly content is to overcome desire itself - literally, to stop wanting and to accept our lives and ourselves as they are.

The eightfold path of Buddhism aims to cultivate this selfless state, and ideally the path of parenthood can too. It's impossible to be a good parent without being prepared to put your children first. As anyone who has stayed up through the night with an ill child knows, parenthood is all about self-sacrifice. As Alison Gopnik puts it, 'Imagine a novel in which a woman took in a stranger who was unable to walk or talk or even eat by himself. She fell completely in love with him at first sight, fed and clothed and washed him, gradually helped him to become competent and independent, and spent more than half her income on him�You couldn't bear the sappiness of it. But that, quite simply, is just about every mother's story�Caring for children is an awfully fast and efficient way to experience at least a little saintliness.'

The poet William Wordsworth described how children see the world 'apparelled in celestial light,' with 'glory and freshness of a dream.' Wordsworth also describes how, as we become adults, this vision 'fades into the light of common day.' However, having children of our own helps us to reawaken some of the 'celestial light.'

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant too, when he told his disciples, 'unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.' This makes sense if we think of the 'kingdom of heaven' as a place not in the hereafter, but potentially in the world now. Heaven is the state of wonder and natural well-being which children exist in - and through being in their company, we can re-enter that kingdom. 

Treating Parenthood as a Spiritual Path

• Don't be tempted to rush your child; try not to be impatient at their slowness. Walk at their pace and be mindful with them. 
• Try to cultivate children's fresh, intense vision. Imagine how the world looks through their eyes.
• Let them 'teach' you the marvels of the world around you. Be as open and curious as they are, not taking anything you know for granted.
• Give yourself wholly to play with them, allowing yourself to step outside your mental world of worries and responsibilities

How to Stop this Natural Spirituality Disappearing in you child

• Don't be irritated when children ask 'Why?' questions. Encourage their sense of wonder.
• Try not to be irritated by their exuberance and excitement - wear ear plugs in necessary!
• Try to limit the amount of time they watch TV or playing computer games
• Encourage them to use their own creativity, by inventing games or drawing or painting
• Have periods of quietness, relaxation and meditation, which make them feel more at home within their own being

(Originally published December 2010, on non-dualityamerica.com)

From the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, separateness seems to be a basic part of the human condition. Most human beings experience themselves as egos trapped inside their own mind-space, observing a world which seems to be out there , on the other side of their skulls. As a result, the normal human state is one of aloneness. We re always onlookers rather than participants. We can communicate with other people by speaking, writing or gesturing, but they will never be able to truly know us, or to share our thoughts and feelings. Our inner being will always be sealed off from them.

Ego-separation also creates a sense of incompleteness. Because we re separate from the world, we re like fragments which have broken off from the whole, and so feel a sense of insufficiency. There s a kind of hole inside us which we spend most of our lives trying to fill (but very rarely manage to), like cats who were taken away from their mother at birth and who are always hankering for affection and attention to try to compensate for a sense of lack. Born-again Christians mean something close to this when they say that there is a god-shaped hole inside us although in my view traditional religion can t fill the hole either, only provide the same (ultimately incomplete) consolation as wealth or success.

As a result of this aloneness and incompleteness, we don t feel completely at home in the world. We re not completely rooted here, and so feel somehow adrift, as if we don t fully belong, like people who have travelled around the world so much that they no longer feel at home anywhere. Whereas traditional indigenous peoples seem to perceive the world as a benign and benevolent place, to us it seems indifferent and even vaguely malevolent.

In addition, our ego-isolation generates a basic sense of insecurity and insignificance. Our own ego is so tiny and so flimsy in the face of the enormous world out there , like a tiny wooden beach shack at the edge of a vast ocean. We feel dwarfed by the sheer weight of the phenomena and events taking place out there . How can we possibly have any significance in relation to them? How can this fragile entity inside our heads stand up to the might of the world?

The Wider Effects of Separateness

However, the effects of this separateness reach far beyond the individual. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the sense of separateness is the root cause of the constant conflict, warfare and oppression which have blighted human history. The human sense of incompleteness generates a craving for possessions, power and status, as a way of trying to complete ourselves and compensate for our inner discord. We try to complete ourselves - and make ourselves significant - by gaining power over other people or by collecting wealth and possessions. This desire for wealth and power is the root cause of warfare and oppression too, coupled with the reduced empathy which separateness causes. The separate self walls us off from other human beings, makes it difficult for us to 'feel with' them and to experience the world from their perspective. This makes it possible for us to be violent and cruel to other people, since we can t sense the suffering we cause them. So we oppress and exploit them in the service of our own desires oppress women, members of lower classes or castes, different races, so that we can gain more power, status and wealth.
The sense of separateness is also the root cause of our abuse of the environment. It means that we experience a sense of 'otherness' to nature, and that we can't sense its aliveness, and as a result we don't feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.

Why Separateness?

I wouldn t exactly say that separateness is an illusion, as many non-duality teachers would. Not an illusion but an aberration - something which exists but shouldn t. Children don t experience separateness; they exist in a state of natural relatedness to the world. This is one of the reasons why childhood is so wonderful because the child feels connected to everything around them, in a participatory flow with all experience, with no in here or out there.
There are also many other peoples in the world who even as adults don t exist in a state of separateness. Most of the world s indigenous peoples don t see themselves as separate to their environment. They feel a strong sense of connection to nature, an awareness that they are a part of the web of creation (and one which is no more important than any other). As Tim Ingold writes of the Batek Negritos of Malaysia, for example, They see themselves as involved in an intimate relationship of interdependence with the plants, animals and hala [spirits] (including the deities) which inhabit their world. Or as the Cherokee Indian scholar Rebecca Adamson points out, for indigenous peoples the environment is perceived as a sensate, conscious entity suffused with spiritual powers through which the human understanding is only realised in perfect humility before the sacred whole. The Hopi use the term Novoitti for the concept of living in harmony with nature, while the Tlingit (also of North America) call it Shogan.

The anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl believed that essential characteristic of native peoples was that the limits of their individuality are variable and ill-defined. He noted that, rather than existing as self-sufficient individual entities, indigenous peoples sense of identity was bound up with their community and their land. He cites reports of native peoples who used the word I when speaking of their group and others who see their land as an extension of their self, so that being forced away from their land would be tantamount to death. (This is why native peoples are often prepared to commit suicide rather than leave their lands.)

The naming practices of certain peoples suggest this too. For us, a name is a permanent label which defines our individuality and autonomy. But Australian Aborigines, for example, do not have fixed names which they keep throughout their lives. Their names regularly change, and include those of other members of their tribe. Other native peoples use tekonyms terms which describe the relationship between two people instead of personal or kinship names.

The sense of separateness seems to be a quirk of our psychological development. For us, it slowly develops as we move into adolescence, becoming firmly established in our late teens. The ego develops as a structure, creating a sense of inner-ness and walling us off .

Witness the massive change which occurs when a child enters adolescence. Especially with boys, the freshness and joy of childhood gives way to dullness and confusion. After being a part of the glorious flow of experience, we re suddenly outside the world, alone inside our own mental space. This is why adolescents have such a strong need for belonging. Their new sense of separation makes them feel so vulnerable that they need to reinforce their identity by being a part of groups or gangs, or by following fashions. More bleakly, this is also why most murders are committed by young men, in response to perceived slights or insults. With their new fragile sense of identity, young men are liable to take offence at any kind of trivial affront, making them feel belittled and creating an instant desire to take revenge and regain their lost status.

I remember this transition clearly from my own adolescence. After a carefree childhood, I suddenly felt locked inside myself, alone with thoughts and feelings which no one else would ever be able to experience. Along with that, I felt an acute self-consciousness. I was aware of every movement I made and every word I spoke, so that I couldn t do anything naturally anymore. I felt exposed when I walked down the street, aware that people could have been looking at me from their windows.

As they grow into adulthood, most people deal with the fragility and vulnerability of the self by taking on roles and attachments. They take on the roles of their jobs, attach themselves to certain beliefs strengthening their identity with labels such as socialists , atheists or muslims or attach themselves to ambitions, to knowledge they ve accumulated, to their self-image as important or powerful people, or emotionally attach themselves to other people These roles and attachments become the scaffolding of the ego, propping it up and at the same time, they reinforce separation, making the individual walled off .

Awakening From the Sleep of Separateness

However, no matter how far into separateness we fall, in a sense it s never more than superficial. No matter how strong the ego becomes, it s never more than a construct. Everyone experiences moments when separateness temporarily fades, and we become part of the unity again. These are what I refer to as awakening experiences. They frequently occur when we re walking amongst natural surroundings, when we re dancing or running, during or after sex, listening to or playing music. In these situations, the normal chattering of the ego which is the normal fuel of the ego, maintaining it as a structure becomes quiet, leading to a softening of its boundaries. Separateness dissolves and we re afloat on the ocean of Being again, immersed in the glorious is-ness and aliveness of the world.

Tellingly, in these moments there is always an identity shift. We feel that we ve become someone else, a deeper, more grounded self which seems more authentically you. The ego-self we identified with before seems like an imposter, a limited and shallow trickster who somehow deluded us into thinking it was our identity.

There are also many cases of extreme loss or intense turmoil, when all of the ego s building blocks its roles and attachments are broken away. A person might be diagnosed with cancer and told they only have a few months left to live; an alcoholic might reach rock bottom and be on the point of suicide; a person might become seriously disabled through injury or illness; or they might suffer from the trauma of bereavement, depression, the destruction of hopes and beliefs, and so on. In most cases, these forms of loss simply bring sadness and suffering, but for a minority of individuals, they can trigger a spiritual awakening. With all its scaffolding broken down, the normal ego-self dissolves away, and our deeper, truer self emerges in its place, like a butterfly from a caterpillar. The person feels re-born, like a different person inhabiting the same body, with a new sense of meaning and connection.

In all of these experiences, there is a sense of coming home, back to our original oneness, the harmony which both as an individual and as a species we fell away from. It was always there it is always here. It s just that our separate selves deluded us into thinking we were asleep.

A few years ago, feeling serene and exhilarated after a meditation, I decided to go for a walk. It was a beautiful evening - clear blue sky beginning to get dark, orange where the sun was going down, a few stars beginning to shine through. I walked around the field near my house several times, looking at the sky, amazed at how beautiful it was. My mind was quiet and I felt full of vitality. I began to feel as though I was being engulfed in the sky, and my normal sense of space was changing. The sky didn't seem 'up there', it seem to be around me, a part of me. I felt that the blue black space around me was alive, that the universe was a living being. Every time I stared at the sky, the feeling grew stronger. It only stopped when my mind started thinking again.

Most of us have experiences like this from time to time, when the world becomes more real and beautiful. Natural phenomena like trees, rocks and the sky become alive, and reveal their inner being to us. An atmosphere of harmony seems to fill our surroundings, which may intensify into a radiant energy or 'spirit-force' which pervades all things. We feel a tremendous sense of well-being and the world becomes a benevolent and meaningful place. Our normal sense of separation fades away; all things seem related, as if they're expression of one essential oneness, and we feel a part of this oneness too.

These experiences are sometimes referred to as 'higher states of consciousness' or 'spiritual experiences'. However, in my book Waking From Sleep, I suggest that rather seeing them as transcendent or 'higher', we should see them as natural. I believe these experiences represent a way of seeing and relating to the world which was once normal to human beings, but which we have lost.

It's possible to see normal human consciousness as a kind of 'sleep' which we wake up from in these moments. Most people are asleep in the sense that their perception of the world is automatic, so that they aren't able to sense the is-ness and alive-ness of our surroundings. They're also asleep in the sense that they see all things as separate to each other, and experience themselves as separate entities, as egos enclosed in their mental space with the rest of the world 'out there.' Seen through this state of consciousness, life seems meaningless, and the universe may appear an indifferent and even hostile place.
This state of consciousness is extremely dangerous, and can be seen as the root of our species' reckless disregard for the environment. Since we see the natural world as inanimate and as something other to us, we have no qualms about abusing it. We see it as nothing more than a supply of resources to use for our own for our own devices, without responsibility.

However, I believe that this state of sleep is really a psychological aberration, and that it is actually natural and normal for us to be 'awake.'

Natural Wakefulness

For example, many of - if not all of - the world's indigenous peoples, experience this 'spiritual' vision of the world as a normal, everyday state. This heightened perception is one of the reasons why they have such a reverential attitude to nature: they sense that rocks, soil and rivers are alive, with a being or consciousness of their own. As the Cherokee Indian scholar Rebecca Adamson points out, for indigenous peoples 'the environment is perceived as a sensate, conscious entity suffused with spiritual powers through which the human understanding is only realised in perfect humility before the sacred whole.' The Hopi use the term Novoitti for the concept of living in harmony with nature, while the Tlingit (also of North America) call it Shogan.

Similarly, it seems that indigenous peoples don't experience the kind of sharp duality between themselves and the world which is our normal state. They feel a strong sense of connection to nature, an awareness that they are a part of the web of creation (and one which is no more important than any other). As Tim Ingold writes of the Batek Negritos of Malaysia, for example, 'They see themselves as involved in an intimate relationship of interdependence with the plants, animals and hala' [spirits] (including the deities) which inhabit their world.'

However, we have all glimpsed this natural spiritual state in our own lives too, even if we don't remember it: when we were young children. Young children are awake to the is-ness and radiance of reality in the same way that indigenous peoples are. In fact, this is one of the best things about having children: they teach us to see wonder in the world again. They have an insatiable curiosity, are amazed and fascinated by all kinds of 'mundane' things which most adults take for granted and scarcely pay any attention to. Their experience seems much more real than ours, so that the world appears a much brighter, more colourful, complex and beautiful place. As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it, 'I believe that babies and young children are actually more conscious and more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are...I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris.'

The Loss of Natural Wakefulness

All of this begs the question: if this state of 'wakefulness' was once natural to us - both as individuals and perhaps as a species - why do we (and did we) we lose it?

The answer is the same in both cases. As a species, we lost this state because of the over-development of the ego. At a certain point in our history, we developed a heightened sense of individuality, and began to experience ourselves as egos occupying the space inside our heads, with the rest of reality 'out there' (I describe how and why this development occurred in my earlier book The Fall). As well as creating a disconnection between ourselves and nature, this ego began to monopolise our psychic energy, so that there was less energy available for us to devote to perceiving the is-ness of the world. Our attention was 'switched off' to the phenomenal world in order to fuel the ego's functioning.

And this is also what happens as we grow into adults. Young children don't have a strong sense of ego, which is why they are awake to the is-ness of the world and feel a sense of connection to it. But gradually, as the ego becomes more developed, we 'fall' into separateness and automatic perception. The world which was once so full of wonder becomes a separate, shadowy, half-real place.

However, human beings have always felt instinctively that our normal consciousness is limited and striven to attain temporary higher states of consciousness - or as I call them, 'awakening experiences.' Throughout history people have used a variety of methods to do this, including fasting, sleep deprivation, psychedelic drugs and meditation. Sometimes awakening experiences happen accidentally, through contact with nature, playing or listening to music, playing sports, or during sex. All of these activities can give us access to the world of is-ness, meaning and one-ness which is normally hidden from us.

Over the years, I have collected hundreds of examples of these experiences, from friends, acquaintances, students and strangers. Nature is one of the most common triggers of the experiences. Here, for example, a student of mine describes an experience she had while swimming in a lake in a Canada:

I felt as though I was the only person there, the only person in the world. I swam out as far as I could, to the middle of the lake and just looked around, treading water. I could see no houses, no people, no cars or roads. I could hear no noise, just may arms splashing. I felt completely alone, but part of everything, I felt at peace. All my troubles disappeared and I felt in harmony with nature. It only lasted a few minutes but I remember the sense of calmness and stillness and it soothes me now.

Dancing is another common trigger. For example, here's the experience of a friend of mine who used to be a Morris Dancer:

We were dancing outside on a beautiful day, surrounded by the hills. As we were dancing I started to feel as if it wasn't me who was doing it anymore. I didn't have to think. It was just dancing me, and it was the best I ever danced. I felt like I was just a channel for the music. Everything fell into place with the other members of the group. We weren't individuals anymore, we were whole body of six people. There was no division between us. I felt an expansion of awareness into space. I was dancing in the space in the middle of the hills. I was part of this vast background.

Awakening experiences have two basic sources. They can be caused by a dramatic change to our normal physiology or brain chemistry, which is why fasting, sleep deprivation and drugs can cause them. They can also be caused by what I call an 'intensification and stilling of life-energy,' through meditation, yoga, general relaxation, listening to music etc. This happens when our minds become quiet and still, and when we're inactive and relaxed. We conserve energy that we normally expend, and so life-energy builds up inside us, filling us with a sense of well-being, and fuelling our perceptions, so that we look at the world with more intense and fresh vision.

If we know what causes them, we should be able to generate awakening experiences whenever we desire. But ultimately, we need to make wakefulness our normal state again. We need to wake up for ourselves, to become free of the illusion of separation and of the psychological discord which fills our lives with suffering. We need to wake up for the sake of the human race as a whole, in order to become free of the social chaos and conflict which have blighted the last few thousand years of history. And we need to wake up for the sake of the earth. The only sure way to avoid ecological catastrophe and live in harmony with nature is to transcend our sense of separation to it, and learn to sense its alive-ness and sacredness again.

The Roots of Human Insanity and How Spirituality can make us Sane Originally published in Green Spirit, Winter 2007

To an impartial observer - say, an alien zoologist from another planet - there must be very compelling evidence that human beings suffer from a serious mental disorder, and are perhaps even insane.
The last few thousand years have been an endless catalogue of insane behaviour. Recorded history is an endless catalogue of wars, and the story of the brutal oppression of the great mass of human beings by a tiny privileged minority. The terrible oppression of women which runs through history - and which still exists in many parts of the world - is another sign of this insanity, as is the hostile, repressive attitude to sex and the body which most cultures have shared.

In addition to this insane collective behaviour, an alien zoologist might see signs of mental disorder in the way that many of us behave as individuals. He or she would be puzzled by the fact that human beings seems to find it so difficult to be happy. Why do so many people suffer from different kinds of psychological malaise - for example, depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation - or else spend so much time oppressed by anxieties, worries and feelings of guilt or regret, and negative emotions like jealousy and bitterness? And why do so many people seem to have an insatiable lust to possess things? Why are we prepared to go to such lengths to obtain material goods which we don't actually need and which bring no real benefits to us? In the same way, many people have a very strong craving for status and success; they dream of being famous pop or TV stars, and try to gain respect from others by wearing particular clothes, possessing status symbols or going to certain places or behaving in a certain way. 'Why aren't human beings content just to be as they are?' the observer might ask himself. 'Why are they so driven to gain wealth and status instead of accepting their situation and living in the present moment?'
Primal and Prehistoric Peoples

However, there are many groups of people in the world who don't seem to be touched by this insanity - or at least, who weren't until recent times. 'Primal' peoples like the Australian Aborigines, the tribal peoples of Siberia, Lapland, Oceania and other isolated areas, generally had a very low level of warfare, if any at all. They also have high status for women, and are strikingly egalitarian and democratic. Almost uniformly, anthropologists have been struck by how naturally content and carefree these peoples seem, as if they are free of the psychological malaise which afflicts us.

Even more strikingly, archaeological records indicate that prehistoric human beings were free from this insanity too. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found almost no evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history - that is, right from the beginnings of the human race until 8000 BCE. Archaeologists have discovered over 300 prehistoric caves around the world, dating from 40,000 to 10,000 BCE, not one of which contains any images of weapons or fighting.

Prehistoric peoples have no signs of male domination either. On the contrary, they seem to have worshipped the female form. Their major art form was small statuettes of naked women, often with exaggerated breasts and hips. Literally tens of thousands of these have been found across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These societies apparently had no different classes or castes either. For archaeologists, one of the most obvious signs of inequality are grave differences. Later societies have larger, more central graves for more 'important' people, which also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more 'important' graves than women. But the graves of prehistoric peoples are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no wealth.

The Over-Developed Ego

This suggests that there is a fundamental difference between us and primal or prehistoric peoples, a difference which gives rise to the collective and individual insanity which plagues us. Why should they be free of the insanity of warfare, oppression and materialism? I believe that this fundamental difference is what might be described as our 'over-developed ego.'

We appear to have a more pronounced sense of individuality - or ego - than primal peoples. According to the anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, for example, the essential characteristic of primal peoples was their less 'sharpened' sense of individuality. In his words, 'the limits of their individuality are variable and ill-defined.' He notes that, rather than existing as self-sufficient individual entities - as we experience ourselves - their sense of identity is bound up with their community and their land. He cites reports of peoples who use the word 'I' when speaking of their group and others who see their land as an extension of their self, so that being forced away from their land would be tantamount to death. (This is why primal peoples are often prepared to commit suicide rather than leave their lands.)

The naming practices of certain peoples suggest this too. For us, a name is a permanent label which defines our individuality and autonomy. But Australian Aborigines, for example, do not have fixed names which they keep throughout their lives. Their names regularly change, and include those of other members of their tribe. Other native peoples use tekonyms - terms which describe the relationship between two people - instead of personal or kinship names. On the other hand, our sense of ego is so defined and strong that many of us experience a basic sense of separation to nature, other human beings and even our own bodies. We are self-sufficient individuals who can exist apart from the natural world, our communities and even each other.
I believe this over-developed ego is the fundamental madness from which we suffer from, and the root cause of our insane behaviour. Intense ego-consciousness is a state of suffering. It brings a basic sense of isolation, of being separate from other people and the rest of reality. We experience ourselves as fragile entities trapped inside our own heads with the rest of the world 'out there,' on the other side. And our egos send a constant stream of 'thought-chatter' through our minds, a chaos of memories, daydreams, worries and fears which disturbs our being and creates a constant state of anxiety.

In addition, because we live in our thoughts so much, we find it very difficult to live in the present, and to appreciate the reality and beauty of the world in which we live. The world becomes a dreary, half-real place, perceived through a fog of thought. As a result of this, most people feel a basic sense of incompleteness and discontent. And this negative state is the basic source of the cravings for possessions and power and status, which are a way of trying to complete ourselves and compensate for our inner discord. We try to complete ourselves - and make ourselves significant - by gaining power over other people or by collecting wealth and possessions.

And in turn, this desire for wealth and power is at the heart of warfare and oppression. But just as importantly, our strong sense of ego means that it's difficult for us to empathise with other people. We become 'walled off' from them, unable to 'feel with' them and to experience the world from their perspective or to sense the suffering we might be causing them. We become able to oppress and exploit other people in the service of our own desires.

Perhaps the desire for wealth and power, minus the ability to empathise, is the root of warfare and the oppression of women and other social groups. Maybe it's also the root cause of our abuse of the environment. It means that we experience a sense of 'otherness' to nature, and that we can't sense its aliveness, and as a result we don't feel any qualms about exploiting and abusing it.

Beyond the Ego

However, there is a method of healing our inner discord and transcending our insanity: through 'transpersonal' - or spiritual - development. The whole purpose of transpersonal development is to transcend our intensified sense of ego, to blunt its walls of separateness and quieten its chaotic thought-chatter so that we can begin to experience a new sense of inner content and a new sense of connection to the cosmos and to other beings. This is what the practice of meditation aims to do: to generate a state of inner quietness in which the ego fades away. And this is what happens when we dedicate our lives to serving others rather than following our own selfish desires: separateness begins to fall away as we develop a heightened sense of compassion, a shared sense of being with other people and other creatures.

As we transcend the intensified sense of ego, we begin to see the world as a meaningful and harmonious place. We become able to live in the moment and accept ourselves and our lives as they are, without wanting. And we also move beyond the social insanity of warfare and oppression. Since there is no discord inside us, we no longer crave for wealth and power, and now that we are no longer separate, we have the ability to empathise with other beings, and so become incapable of abusing or exploiting them. When the ego is transcended, all of the madness of human behaviour fades away, like the symptoms of a disease which has now been cured. That is the only true sanity, and perhaps the only way in which we can hope to live in peace and harmony on this planet.

Originally published in Green Spirit magazine, 2007

Throughout almost all recorded history, and in most cultures throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, there has been a massive gulf between men and women. They have had a very different social status, sharply differentiated roles and apparently different personalities. It's almost as if men and women have been members of different species with almost nothing in common, who have been thrown together to by mistake.
In almost all cases women's status has been and still is in many cultures much lower than men's. It was taken for granted that women were inferior intellectually and morally; that they were, in the words of the misogynistic philosopher Schopenhauer, 'childish, foolish and short-sighted something intermediate between the child and the man.'(1) Until recent times, in most countries over Europe, the Middle East and Asia, women couldn't own property or inherit land and wealth, and were frequently treated as mere property themselves. In some countries they could be confiscated by money lenders or tax collectors to help settle debts (this was, for example, a common practice in Japan from the seventh century CE onwards). In the 'enlightened' society of ancient Greece where the concept of democracy supposedly originated women had no property or political rights, and were forbidden to leave their homes after dark. Similarly, in ancient Rome women unable to take part in social events (except as employed 'escort girls') and were only allowed to leave their homes with their husband or a male relative.

In parts of the Middle East, these attitudes have persisted to the present day, and it's only very recently that the status of women has begun to increase slightly. Over the last few years Qatar and Bahrain, for example, have given women the right to vote and to stand for election, and the Kuwaiti parliament recently passed a law giving women the same political rights as men.

Wherever women's status is low, the duties and roles of men and women are usually sharply defined. In most cultures, they have practically lived in two different worlds: men in the external world of work, culture and politics, and women in the internal world of childcare, cooking and cleaning. In some societies like Ancient Greece or Rome or modern day Saudi Arabia women were/are effectively imprisoned in the internal world for much of the time. And at the same time, men were excluded from women's domain (at least to an extent). Until recent times they were denied access to the birth of their own children and to usually only played a minor role in childcare.

Traditionally, men and women have had distinct kinds of minds too. Many studies have shown that women have a stronger capacity for empathy than men, that they have a strong tendency for caring and compassion, and for forming relationships. Typically, men tend to have strong 'systematizing' brains, and to be more autonomous and less empathic. In one study, for example, women have been shown to be significantly better at 'reading' people's emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Other research has shown that women's friendships tend to based on mutual help and problem sharing, whereas men usually develop friendships based on shared interests, such as sports and hobbies. (2)

Men also seem to have a stronger need for power and status than women. Research has shown that men and women have different speaking styles. Women's conversations usually last longer, because of their use of more 'back channel support', such as nodding, smiling and other gestures. If they disagree, they tend to express their opinion indirectly rather than making a statement, helping to avoid confrontation. On the other hand, men tend to more blunt and opinionated. They use more imperatives and tend to 'talk over' more. (3) As the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen puts it, 'men spend more time using language to demonstrate their knowledge, skill and status.' (4)

Men and Women in Indigenous Societies

However, in most of the indigenous cultures of America, Australia, Africa, Oceania and other areas, these male/female distinctions scarcely seemed to exist. *
In these cultures the status of women was generally equal to men. In pre-colonial America, for example, matrilinear and matrilocal societies (where property was passed down the female side of the family, and men went to live with the bride's family after marriage) were common. Women there usually had large degree of authority: they often had the job of nominating new chiefs, for example, and when agreements were made between Indian groups and early Europeans, documents had to be signed by women, since the marks of men carried no authority. In addition, Native American women were usually free to end their marriages at any time. A woman of the Pueblo culture, for instance, could divorce her husband simply by placing his possessions outside her door, at which point he would return to his mother's house. In pre-colonial Africa, women were often chiefs and village leaders, and councils often had female members. (5) Similarly, in Tahiti, women could become chiefs, were free to play sports with men, and had a great deal of sexual freedom. (6)
In these cultures the roles of men and women were more flexible and interchangeable too. Men and women of the Copper Eskimos culture of Northern Canada, for instance, would often swap their roles, so that women would go hunting while the men stayed to cook and look after the children. In pre-colonial Africa, the concept of female domesticity didn't exist, and women were extremely active in economic affairs. As the historians Lamphear and Folola write, for example, 'women dominated important areas of the economy, controlling many facets of agriculture productions, the flow of commerce, and a wide variety of industries and crafts.' (7) Anthropologists have also found that Tahitians didn't have a 'gender schema' that is, any set roles for men and women and that men would frequently do domestic chores and take over childcare. (8)

In these cultures the differences between the male and female psyche don't appear to be as strong either. The anthropologist Robert Levy, for example, found that 'men in Tahiti were no more aggressive than women, nor were women gentler or more maternal than men.' (9) Generally, the men of indigenous cultures appear to have been more 'feminine' in our sense of the term. They apparently had a greater capacity for empathy, and didn't seem to strongly possess the typically 'male' drive for status and power.
 
* It's always a difficult issue whether to use the past or present tense when speaking of indigenous peoples, since so many of their cultures have now been severely disrupted. Most of the anthropologists I've taken my evidence from observed indigenous peoples at earlier times, when their cultures were less disrupted, and so in this article I'll mostly use the past tense.

Gender in Prehistoric Times

There is some evidence that men and women were much closer together in prehistoric times too. So far as we can tell, all over the world in prehistoric times women's status was just as high as men's. The artwork, the burial practices and the cultural conventions of human societies from the Palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods of history (that is, the Old Stone Age and the early part of the New Stone Age) show a complete lack of evidence for male domination.

In fact, the feminine form seems to have been venerated during these periods. Depictions of the female body seem to have been the main form of artwork throughout prehistory. Archaeologists have discovered tens of thousands of female figurines (or statuettes) throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, usually showing women with enlarged breasts and hips. There are also many engravings and carvings of vaginas and womb-like tombs with small 'vaginal' openings. This veneration of the female has led some scholars to suggest that many prehistoric societies worshipped a goddess. (In my view, however, this is little more than assumption; I think it's more likely that prehistoric peoples were non-theistic, with the same sense of an all-pervading spirit-force as many contemporary indigenous peoples.)

The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas spent much of her life excavating and reconstructing an 'Old European' civilisation which flourished from around 7000 to 3000 BC (and later in some more isolated areas, such as Crete). 'Old Europe' as she called it stretched from Italy in the east to Romania in the west, and from Greece in the south to Poland in the north. There were many towns with up to several thousand inhabitants, who were highly skilled at engineering, crafts and art. Some of their temples were several stories high, their houses had up to five rooms with furniture, they built the world's first drainage systems and roads, and practised crafts like basket weaving and pottery, and arts like sculpture and painting.

Even more importantly, however, Old European culture seems to have been free of the pathological aggression, conflict and oppression which characterised later civilisations. Some observers have suggested that their culture (and that of Catal Huyuk, a similar early culture in present day Turkey) was matriarchal, but the truth seems to have been that the terms matriarchy and patriarchy had no meaning, since neither sex attempted to oppress the other. There seems to have been complete equality between the sexes. Like many indigenous cultures, Old European societies were often matrilinear and matrilocal, and their artwork often shows women as priests or in other positions of authority. There are also no differences in male and female graves, in terms of their size or position.

Similar egalitarian cultures have been found all over the world during this period. According to the historian and geographer James DeMeo, in North Africa during the sixth millennium BCE, communities were 'cooperative, productive and peaceful in character, without social stratification or strong man rule.' (10) Their artwork contains many scenes of dancing and music, and shows women playing an active role. In ancient China, women seem to have been the heads of clans, and children seem to have taken their mothers' surnames. As another scholar, Brian Griffith, notes, 'the ancient word for family name (xing) is a compound of symbols for woman and bear, suggesting a typical matrilineal totem-clan.' (11)
 
The Closing of the Gender Gap
If this is our past, it seems that we are beginning to turn full circle. In my view, one of the most significant cultural changes of the last 300 years or so has been the closing of this gap between male and female, in terms of men and women's status, gender roles and even their personalities.

The status of women began to rise towards the end of the 19th century. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 the revolutionaries presented a list of their grievances to the Estates General, 33 of which were demands by women for more rights. In the same year the American constitution was ratified, and its use of the terms 'people' and 'electors' rather than 'men' implied the recognition of women's rights as well as men's. Under the influence of these changes, the world's first ever major feminist tracts appeared. In 1792 Mary Wollstoncraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in England, while two years later Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel's On the Civil Improvement of Women appeared in Germany. Over the following decades, women gained the right to hold their own property independently of their husbands, to earn their own wages, to sit on juries, to enter professions like law and medicine and to go into higher education. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country to give women full voting rights, and Australia followed suit in 1902. Women in America and Great Britain had to suffer for longer, but were finally given these rights in 1928 and 1920 respectively. Of course, even in the present day, women don't have complete equality with men (men's wages are still higher, for instance), but massive advances have been made.

Particularly over the last few decades, there has also been a blurring of gender distinctions. According to Riane Eisler, the 1960s was a period when 'women and men frontally challenged restrictive gender stereotypes of male dominance and female subservience.' (12) Men became increasingly feminine, both in terms of their appearance and their attitude. And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have the popular notions of the 'new man', who helps out with childcare and domestic chores, and the 'househusband' who is happy to take care of domestic duties while his wife follows a career. And at the same time, of course, more and more women are rejecting their old gender schema and taking on traditionally 'male' roles. Men and women have entered each other's domains, so that it's no longer easy to distinguish them as separate areas. We have come close to the interchangeable gender roles of unfallen cultures.

And to some degree these changes in role have, it seems, been accompanied with a change in character. The strong distinction between the male and female psyche also appears to be fading away. The 'new man' has a more typically feminine psyche; he is more sensitive and empathic, less aggressive and self-assertive.
You might argue that these changes are just the result of social and cultural developments. Contraception and technological advances such as the washing machine, vacuum cleaner and other labour saving devices have enabled women to escape from domestic duties and enter the old male domain. No doubt this is true to a degree, but I believe that the changes are a sign of something more significant. They are part of an overall shift which has been taking place for the last 300 years or so, a collective movement beyond the separateness and selfishness of the ego. One sign of this has been a growing ability to empathise with other human beings and other creatures which, again during the last half of the 18th century, led to the animal rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, more humane treatment of the disabled and homeless, the abolition of brutal forms of punishment such as branding and public flogging. Another sign has been a new sense of the rights of individuals and the unfairness of privilege, which during the 19th century led to the rise of socialism and spread of democracy. And more recently, there has been a new openness towards the human body and sexuality, a new reverential attitude towards nature, and a massive upsurge in interest in spirituality and self-development.

In my view, all of this suggests that the old strong human ego (primarily the male ego) is slowly being transcended, that the walls of separateness which have divided human beings from one another (and from other beings, nature, and even from their own bodies) have started to fade away. And this collective psychological change is, I believe, an evolutionary movement, perhaps occurring in response to our present dire predicament. After all, the over-developed male ego is primarily responsible for this predicament, and unless the pathological behaviour which springs from it is checked, we will surely self-destruct as a species.
The primary taking place here is the 'feminisation' of men. The male ego which has been the root of warfare, conflict and social oppression throughout recorded history has begun to soften. The male psyche has begun to move towards the female; after thousands of years of duality, the male and female have begun to merge. And this is completely natural, since spiritual development both for the individual and for our species is a movement beyond boundaries. As we grow spiritually, we move beyond the distinctions of nationality, race or gender. Rather than being enclosed within our personal world of desire and fear, our sense of identity spreads to include human beings, other creatures and the whole cosmos. The superficial separation of physical difference gives way to an underlying sameness. At the core of our being, we are without identity of any kind. We are neither male nor female, human or animal, but spirit.

Notes

• Schopenhauer, A. (1930). The Essays of Schopenhauer. London: Walter Scott Press, p.65
• Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. London: Allen Lane.
• Wareing, S. (1999) 'Language and Gender.' In Thomas, L. & Wareing, S. (Eds.), Language, Society and Power. London: Routledge.
• Baron-Cohen, op. cit., p.52.
• Lamphear, J. & Falola, T. (1995). 'Aspects of Early African History.' In Martin, P. & O'Meara, P. (Eds.), Africa. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
• Service, E.R. (1978). Profiles in Ethnology. New York: Harper and Row.
• Lamphear, J. & Falola, T., op.cit., p.95.
• Wade, C. & Tavris, C. (1994). 'The Longest War: Gender and Culture.' In Lonner, W.J. & Malpass, R. (Eds.), Psychology and Culture. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
• In ibid., p. 124.
• DeMeo, J. (1998). Saharasia. The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World. Oregon: OBRL, p.225.
• Griffith, B. (2001). The Gardens of their Dreams: Desertificaiton and Culture in World History. London: Zed Books, p.167.
• Eisler, R. (1987). The Chalice and the Blade. London: Thorsons, p.199.

At first sight the human race's future seems so bleak that a pessimist might be forgiven for believing that we might not even have very much of a future. After all, there are certainly very good grounds for pessimism if we look at the world's present environmental predicament.

A report published last year by a number of organisations - including the World Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge University - shows that environmental destruction is accelerating at an alarming rate. According to the report, the world's freshwater resources are being dangerously depleted, with half of the available resources being used already, and the figure increasing by 6% a year. As well as this, since 1970 the consumption of wood and paper has increased by two-thirds, consumption of the world's fish resources has doubled so that now they are 'in serious decline', carbon dioxide emissions have doubled and are continuing to increase, and, perhaps most worryingly of all, the overall situation is getting worse now that many 'developing' countries are growing economically and beginning to deplete their own supplies of natural resources.

It's also clear that Global warming has already begun to cause serious problems to the world's climatic system. Figures recently released by the world's insurance industries show that 1998 was the by far the worst year on record for natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. In fact during this one year the world suffered more than twice as much damage than in all the decade of the 1980s, and scientists expect the situation to get worse, with the world entering a 'new era' of hurricanes. 
The Indo-Europeans
An observer from another planet would probably come to the conclusion that the human race has agreed to some sort of collective suicide pact, perhaps decided that life isn't worth living after all, and resolved to make themselves an extinct species within the next hundred years. 

Or perhaps they would look back at history and come to the conclusion that this self-extinction was more or less inevitable right from the beginning. Because we can, in fact, trace the existence of the particular human group which is mainly responsible for the problems back thousands of years - back to around 4000 B.C., for example, when a group of human beings who archaeologists later called the Indo-Europeans began to branch out from their homeland in the steppes of Southern Russia.

At this time most of Europe was inhabited by Neolithic peoples who, as the archaeological evidence shows, lived in a very similar way to the native inhabitants of the continents of America and Australasia. As Riane Eisler shows in her important book The Chalice and The Blade, these people were artistic, spiritual and felt a strong sense of connection to nature. Their societies were remarkably egalitarian and non-hierarchical, with women afforded the same status us men. They worshipped goddesses rather than male gods, and, perhaps most strikingly, there is an absence of fortifications in their settlements and of warrior images in the art they have left us which suggests that they weren't aggressive or war-like. 

The Indo-Europeans were different, however. The archaeological evidence makes it clear that they were a war-like people who worshipped 'the power of the blade' rather than nature, whose gods were all male and whose society was rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal. And when, at around 4000 B.C., the Indo-Europeans began to enter the territories occupied by the Neolithic peoples the outcome was probably inevitable : they 'conquered' the whole of Europe and parts of Asia, and the old European culture of the Neolithic peoples was replaced by a new one based on their values. 

Over time these Indo-Europeans subdivided into many different groups - they became the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Germanic peoples and many others. But no matter how culturally divergent they became they retained the basic Indo-European value system, and developed similarly patriarchal, hierarchical and war-like societies, worshipping male gods and developing a concept of nature as an enemy to be conquered and exploited. 

These original Indo-Europeans are the ancestors of modern Europeans, of course, and of modern North and South Americans and Australians too. It was their development of chariots and horses as a form of transport which enabled the original Indo-Europeans to conquer old Europe, and, thousands of years later, the ship-building and sea-faring prowess of the 'Indo-Europeans' of western Europe enabled them to cross the oceans to distant continents. And there, from the !6th century onwards, they destroyed the native American and Aborigine cultures with the same ruthlessness that their ancestors had destroyed the old European Neolithic culture, and replaced them with new societies firmly based upon the old Indo-European 'dominator' principles. 

The Old State of Being 

What this suggests is that there was something wrong with the Indo-European 'state of being' right from the beginning. Above all, what characterises the modern American or European (or the old Indo-European) mentality is a highly developed sense of ego.
 In contrast to native peoples like Aborigines or native Americans (and probably the Neolithic peoples) we experience ourselves as sharply defined 'selves' which live inside our brains and ou r bodies and exist in complete separation to other human beings and to nature. Because of this, we're literally more 'selfish' - that is, our own needs and desires are usually much more real and more important to us than the welfare of other species, the environment as a whole, or even other people. And it also means that we tend to live inside our heads instead of actually in the world. We're so busy thinking and worrying and planning that it's unusual for us to actually give our attention to our surroundings, which means that the natural world isn't as real to us as it is to other peoples who haven't got such strongly developed egos. 

Perhaps the original Indo-Europeans developed this state of being because of the hostile climatic conditions in which they originated - in the steppes of southern Russia - which meant that they had to develop a certain selfishness and a competitiveness to survive, which peoples who originated in more pleasant climates didn't need. And we can certainly see the roots of our present environmental problems in this state of being - the lack of connection to nature, and the lack of a sense of the 'alive-ness' of natural things which has resulted in us treating nature something 'other' to us which we're entitled to conquer, abuse and exploit. 
A New State of Being

Looking at the problem from this perspective also makes it clear what is required for us to overcome our present problems and ensure our species' survival. Since the fundamental problem is our state of being, we need to collectively develop a new state of being. 

We need to overcome our sense of ego-separation, develop and new sense of connection to the world and a new sense of spirituality - in fact, to develop a state of being similar to that of native peoples and of the old Neolithic peoples. 

This might seem to be another cause for pessimism. After all, how can we expect hundreds of millions of people to somehow transform themselves in this way, especially when it seems that they've only got a very limited amount of time to do it in? But this is, in fact, one of the biggest sources of optimism in our present predicament - because there's a lot of evidence which suggests that such a widespread transformation actually is taking place. 

We can see this most clearly in the amazing growth of the 'personal development' movement over the last forty or so years, the massive upsurge in interest in eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, spiritual practices like meditation and yoga, and in other 'alternative' spiritually based practices like Reiki healing, Rebirthing, Shamanism etc. Research conducted by Peter Russell (reported in his book The Awakening Earth) showed that this interest in self-development is the fastest growing trend in the modern world, with the number of people who are involved in it one way or another doubling every four years. 

It's also evident in a slightly more obscure way from the increasing restlessness which seems to be spreading through our societies. More and more people are, it seems, finding themselves unable to live the 'ordinary life' which is expected of them, in which they're supposed to live in exactly the same 'life-situation' for years on end, doing the same jobs and going through the same daily and weekly routines and restricting themselves to a narrow range of experience. There seem be an increasing number of 'misfits' or 'drop-outs', people who switch from one job to another instead of sticking to one career, who go travelling around the world, who find the routine of work to soul-destroying to put up with and resign themselves to life 'on the dole', or people who perhaps do live an ordinary life with jobs and mortgages but feel as if they're trapped and ache to break free. This suggests that there's an increasing alive-ness spreading amongst people, an increasing desire for experience and unfamiliarity, and a growing realisation that the purpose of life isn't just to 'get on' in the world and to enjoy yourself by treating yourself to material goods and sensual pleasures. 

There's also an increasing spirit of empathy spreading through our societies which we can also see as evidence that a collective change is taking place, since it suggests that people in general are becoming less selfish and separate. Studies of life in previous centuries - such as Colin Wilson's A Criminal History of Mankind - make it clear that our ancestors were generally much more cruel and indifferent to other people's sufferings than us. As Wilson writes, 'Our present concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Doctor Johnson would simply have condemned it as a dangerous sentimentality.' But since then, and especially over the last forty years or so, people seem to have developed a much more pronounced ability to identify with and to feel for others (including the members of other species). In recent decades this has manifested itself in, for example, better treatment for disabled people, a decline in racism, more equality and social acceptance for gays, an increase in vegetarianism etc. 
Morphic Resonance

It seems obvious that this change is taking place in response to the dangers we're facing. Perhaps it's being caused by a deep-seated survival impulse somewhere within the collective being of our species, or perhaps, in some mysterious way, nature herself may be engineering it. 

After all, it's not just a question of making ourselves an extinct species - if our ecological destruction continues it'll have terrible consequences for all life on earth, and probably set back the process of evolution by millions of years. So perhaps the sheer catastrophic weight of the crisis has triggered a response from nature, and she's implemented a sort of 'check' similar to the natural 'checks' which some animal species undergo when their populations have grown too big. 

A pessimist might say that even if all this is true it doesn't make much difference because there's nowhere near enough time left for a collective transformation like this to occur. After all, the change only seems to have affected a minority of people so far, and it's probable that if our ecological destruction continues for a few more decades it'll already be too late. 

But this is where we come in. We don't have to just leave it to nature to spread this new state of being throughout our species, because we can, in a very real sense, help to spread it ourselves. As the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has shown, the changes which individual members of a species undergo affect the species as a whole. When some members of the species develop a new trait its 'morphic resonance' builds up, making it easier for other members of the species to develop the same trait, until eventually, when the morphic resonance has built up sufficiently, the trait is taken on by all members of the species, and becomes a part of the 'species blueprint' which members of the species develop in accordance with from the moment of conception. So for us this means that by developing ourselves spiritually and moving towards a new state of being, we're prompting other human beings around the world to do the same. We're influencing them, building up the morphic resonance for this new state of being, and eventually, when a certain 'threshold number' of human beings have moved towards it, the state of being will permeate our species as a whole, and become as natural to us as our present one is. 

The responsibility for the human race's future doesn't, therefore, just lie in the hands of governments, global corporations or environmental groups; it lies with every one of us. We all have a choice to make. If you like you can forget about the future and just spend your life enjoying the hedonistic spoils of capitalism, earning and spending money and trying to become more and more successful so that you can earn and spend even more, in which case you'll be adding your signature to the human race's death warrant. On the other hand you can make spiritual development the main purpose of your life, in the knowledge by changing yourself you're helping the whole the human race to change - in which case yougrll be helping to lead our species away from a catastrophic future, and towards a new harmonious one.

WHY TIME SEEMS TO SPEED UP AS WE GET OLDER (originally published in New Dawn magazine, Sept-Oct 2007)

I'm six years old, in the car with my parents and brother, travelling back from our annual two week holiday in Conwy, North Wales. It's dark and the journey seems to take forever. I lie in the back seat, watching the orange streetlights and the houses pass by, and wonder if we're ever going to get home.
'Are we nearly there yet?' I ask my father.
'Don't be silly,' he says. 'We only set off half an hour ago.'
My mum plays the 'Yes/No' game and 'Twenty questions' with us to make the time pass faster. We listen to the radio for a while. Then I fall asleep. When I wake up it seems like I've been in the car for an eternity and I can't believe we're still not home.
'Are we nearly there yet?' I ask again.
'Not far now,' says my father.
We play some more games and finally I recognise the streets of our suburb of Manchester. I feel bored and miserable and tell myself that I'm never going to spend as long in a car ever again.
The journey from Conwy to Manchester took two hours when I was a child and still takes roughly two hours now (although slightly less due to improvements in roads). I made the journey again a few years ago and couldn't believe how short it seemed now, from my adult perspective. Those two hours - which seemed like an eternity when I was 6 - were nothing. My girlfriend was driving, and we chatted, listened to tapes, watched the Welsh countryside give way to the urban sprawl of north-west England, and we were back in Manchester almost before we knew it. It was a little frightening - what had happened to all the time that two hours contained when I was six years old?
A year or so ago I made another journey which gave me an indication of how much more quickly time is passing to me now. This was a 15 hour plane journey, from Singapore to Manchester, which also seemed to last forever. I'm not a very good flyer and it wasn't a very good flight: we flew into two typhoons over India and it was rocky almost all the way. I hoped I'd be able to 'kill' some of the time by sleeping but it was impossible. Every time I drifted off my anxiety woke me up again. Failing that, I hoped I'd at least be able to make the time pass quickly by distracting myself with the in-flight entertainment or with books and magazines, but my mind stubbornly refused to move from the moment to moment reality of the situation. I was aware of every minute passing, and as a result time seemed to drag horribly. Every time I checked the clock - which was every few minutes or so - less time had gone by than I expected.
My subjective sense of how long that journey took is, I realised recently, very similar to my sense of how long my childhood journey to Conwy took. To me they seemed to involve roughly the same amount of boredom and impatience and to last for roughly the same amount of time. This suggests that what was two hours to me as a child is equivalent to 15 hours to me as an adult - which means, rather frighteningly, that time is now passing around seven times faster than when I was a child.
This story appears to fit with most people's experience. Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We've all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year; how you're just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques and you realise that it's almost over; how your children are about to finish school when it doesn't seem long since you were changing their nappies
Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone - including college students - feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to 'reproduce' the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.
We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have 'settled down.' We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines - the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks' holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we're on a turntablewhich is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour (1).

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call 'forward telescoping': our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children - when we look back at these and other significant events, we're often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it's already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born. As one 83 year old man told me, 'I can never guess how long ago things happened. People ask me things like 'When did so and so get married?' or 'When did so and so die?' and I'm always way out. If I say it was two years it turns out to be 5 years. If I say six months, it's two years.' The same holds true for national and international events, like the deaths of famous people, natural disasters and wars: studies have shown that people usually date these too recently as well. And perhaps this is because time is speeding up for as we get older. Time is moving more quickly than we think. It doesn't seem like four years since a friend died or a baby was born, or since a famous person died, because during those four years time has been speeding up without you realising, making every month and year shorter than the one before.

The Proportional and Biological Theories

So why do we experience this speeding up of time?
One popular answer is the 'proportional' theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. This theory seems to have been first put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that, as William James describes it, 'the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life - a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.' (2) At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it's inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, so that seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30 a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, and so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.
There is some sense to this theory - it does offer an explanation for why the speed of time seems to increase so gradually and evenly, with almost mathematical consistency. One problem with it, however, is that it tries to explain present time purely in terms of past time. The assumption behind it is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don't live our lives like this. We live in terms of much smaller periods of time, from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits, independently of all that has gone before.
There are also biological theories. One of these is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children's hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks 'cover' more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they're moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time - after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock's point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours' time against a normal clock.
Also from a biological perspective, there is the 'body temperature' theory. In the 1930s the psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments which showed that body temperature causes different perceptions of time. Once, when his wife was ill with the flu and he was looking after her, he noticed that she complained that he'd been away for a long time even if he was only away for a few moments. With admirable scientific detachment, Hoagland tested her perception of time at different temperatures, and found that the higher her temperature, the more time seemed to slow down for her, and the longer she experienced each time period. Hoagland followed this up with several semi-sadistic experiments with students, which involved them enduring temperatures of up to 65C, and wearing heated helmets. These showed that raising a person's body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. And the important point here may be that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is 'expanded' to them. And in a similar way, our body temperature becomes gradually lower as we grow older, which could explain a gradual 'constriction' of time.

The Perceptual Theory
However, in my view, the speeding up of time we experience is mainly related to our perception of the world around us and of our experiences, and how this perception changes as we grow older.
The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process - the more information there is, the slower time goes. This connection was verified by the psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Ornstein played tapes to volunteers with various kinds of sound information on them, such as simple clicking sounds and household noises. At the end he asked them to estimate how long they had listened to the tape for, and found that when there was more information on the tape (e.g. when there were double the number of clicking noises), the volunteers estimated the time period to be longer. He found that this applied to the complexity of the information too. When they were asked to examine different drawings and paintings, the participants with the most complex images estimated the time period to be longest.
I have tested this myself with a simple experiment with music. During a course, I asked the participants to listen to two pieces of music. One was a mad, frenetic piano concerto by Rachmaninov, with notes cascading at a rate of about 10 per second. The other was a piece of ambient music by Brian Eno, which floated gently and sedately across the room. We listened to the pieces for different periods of time and I asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed. If time perception is related to information, they should have experienced more time for the Rachmaninov piece. It contains a lot more information than the Brian Eno piece - many times more notes, tones and different instruments. All of this extra information should have stretched time.
And this is what the results showed. We listened to the Rachmaninov piece for 2 mins 20 secs, and the average estimate was 3 mins 25 secs. We listened to the Brian Eno piece for 2 minutes, while the average estimate was 2 mins 32 secs - still an over-estimate, but a lower one.
And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of 'perceptual information' that they take in from the world around them. Young children appear to live in a completely different world to adults - a much more intense, more real and more fascinating and beautiful one. As the psychologist Ernest Becker writes, in childhood we experience a 'vision of the primary miraculousness of creation,' and our perceptions of the world are 'suffused...in emotion and wonder.' This is one of the reasons why we often recall childhood as a time of bliss - because the world was a much more exciting and beautiful place to us then, and all our experiences were so intense. Children's heightened perception means that they're constantly taking in all kinds of details which pass us adults by - tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. All of this information stretches out time for children.
However, as we get older, we lose this intensity of perception, and the world becomes a dreary and familiar place - so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. After all, why should you pay attention to the buildings or streets you pass on the way to work? You've seen these things thousands of times before, and they're not beautiful or fascinating, they're just...ordinary. As Becker describes it, we 'repress' this intensity of vision. 'By the time we leave childhood,' he writes, 'we have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience' (3). Or as Wordsworth puts it in his famous poem 'Intimations of Immortality', the childhood vision which enabled to all things 'apparelled in celestial light', begins to 'fade into the light of common day.' (4) And this is why time speeds up for us. As we become adults, we begin to 'switch off' to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less 'stretched' with information.

Old and New Experience

And once we become adults, there is a process of progressive 'familiarisation' which continues throughout our lives. The longer we're alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.
There are two basic reasons why this happens. On the one hand, as we grow older there is progressively less newness in our lives. The life of a 20 year old woman is still full of new experiences. She's still discovering new kinds of music, food, literature and other new hobbies and interests. She might be experiencing her first serious romantic relationship, learning to drive, flying and going abroad for the first time, discovering new towns or the countryside close to where she lives and so on. When she has these new experiences she is free of the de-sensitising mechanism; she perceives the 'raw experience' of the world and processes a large amount of perceptual information.
The same person at the age of 30 might still be having a few new experiences. She might be having a baby, going abroad to another country she's never been to before, learning a new language, or starting a new job. But by the time she reaches 40 the world contains much less unfamiliarity. Her life probably consists mainly of the repetition of experiences which she's had hundreds or thousands of times before. She works at the job she's had for the last 20 years, goes home to the same house she's had for the last ten, devotes her free time to the same hobbies and interests she discovered when she was 20, goes away at weekends to the same countryside, to the same foreign country every year, and so on. Because of this the de-sensitising mechanism has a greater hold over her. She's hardly ever free of it, which means that she absorbs much less perceptual information.
But if there was the only reason why our perceptions become less fresh - and why time speeds up - as we get older, there wouldn't be much difference between the time perceptions of a 40 and a 60 year old person. Most of us use up almost all of our 'stock' of new experience by the time we reach middle-age, and so there would be no real reason why time should appear to move faster for a person at these different ages. However, the second reason why our perceptions become less fresh is probably that as we get older all the experiences we've already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less real. In William James' words, 'each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine.' (5) As well as experiencing lots of new things, a woman at the age of 20 is still quite 'fresh' to the phenomenal world around her - but over the next 20 years, she'll look at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees hundreds of thousands of times, so that more and more of their realness will fade away.
Incidentally, this link between time and information can explain other aspects of time too. One of the 'laws' of psychological time which I set out in my book Making Time is that 'time seems to slow down when we're exposed to new environments and experiences.' This is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows to take in much more information. Another of the laws is that 'time goes quickly in states of absorption.' This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is very little 'cognitive information' in our minds, since the concentration has quietened the normal 'thought chatter' of the mind. On the other hand, time goes slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn't occupied and a massive amount of thought-chatter flows through our minds, bringing a massive amount of cognitive information.

Slowing Down Time

On the positive side though, if we know why time speeds up as we get older we aren't powerless against it. If we know that this is caused by familiarity, then we make an effort to expose to ourselves to as much newness in our lives as possible - not just new environments through travel (although this is very important), but new challenges, new situations, new information, ideas, hobbies and skills. As the expansion of time which we often experience when we go to foreign countries shows, newness and unfamiliarity stretch time. If we regularly expose ourselves to unfamiliarity, we can experience more time in our lives, and so effectively live for 'longer.'
If you spend all the years of your adult life doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area, doing the same things with the same people in your free time, then it's inevitable that you experience a swift passage of time. But if you change jobs regularly, regularly travel to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly to you. In this way, it's possible for a person who dies before the age of 40 (like the French poet and explorer Arthur Rimbaud, who I wrote about recently in New Dawn) to live for 'longer' than a person who dies at the age of 80.
A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be 'mindful' of our experience. There are some people who seem to be as affected by familiarity than others, and see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. These are the kind of people - sometimes seen as eccentrics by those around them - who often begin sentences with phrases like 'Isn't is strange that ?' or 'Have you ever wondered ?' They're the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at a beautiful scene of the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon above the rooftops; or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they've never them before. Poets and artists often have this kind of 'child-like' vision - in fact it's this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. These people will be less affected by the first time law of psychological time than others; time may well speed up for them, but perhaps not to the same degree.
And in a sense, we can cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be 'mindful.' Instead of focusing our attention on the 'thought-chatter' in our heads or on tasks or distractions like TV or computer games, we should try to live in the present, to give our attention to the experiences we're having and to our surroundings. When you're having a shower in the morning, for example - instead of letting your mind chatter away about the things you've got to do today or the things you did last night, try to bring your attention to the here and now, to really be aware of the sensation of the water splashing against and running down your body and the sense of warmth and cleanness you feel. Or on the way home from work on the bus or the train - instead of mulling over all the problems you've had to deal with at work or daydreaming about the attractive girl you met last night, focus your attention outside you; look at the sky, at the houses and buildings you pass, and be aware of yourself here, walking amongst them.
Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the 'there and then' of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.
In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn't have to speed up as get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it's also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

References

1.     Quoted in James, W. 1950. The Principles of Psychology. NewYork: Dover Press, Chapter XV.
2.     Ibid.
3.     Becker, E. 1973.The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, p.50.
4.     Wordsworth, W. 1950. Poems. London: Penguin, p.71.
5.     James, op.cit.

(an essay accompanying Lost Found Time, an anthology of poetry published by Stockport Arts)

In the poems of this collection time is never a straight line. It is a multi-layered thing which curves, folds in on itself and changes direction and perspective. In 'Cairo', for instance, the poem found on a battered table decades ago coalesces with the poem of the present, and both echo with the hieroglyphic symbols of thousands of years ago. 'Applying the Coup de Grace' hints at the confusion of direction which comes with time, the sense of moving forwards as we pass through days and weeks into the future, and at the same time moving backwards through the act of remembering. 

Our normal perception of time, however, is of a kind of arrow that moves from the past through the present to the future. The present flashes for an instant, and is swallowed up by the past straight away, where it stays forever. This view of time tinges our lives with sadness. In the back of our minds we're always aware that time is running away from us. Even when we enjoy ourselves we're aware that time is passing and that soon the situation which produces our enjoyment will no longer exist. Even when we remember the good times in our lives there's a tinge of sadness at the fact that we can never go back there, that those people and those places no longer exist. Time seems to be destructive. It takes things away and doesn't give us anything in return. It takes away our youth, our good looks, our health, our friends and relatives. And eventually, of course, it takes us away too.

Many poets and philosophers have bemoaned this destructive power of time, and felt that it makes our lives meaningless and tragic. A sense of the inevitability of time passing and moving us towards our own deaths runs through Shakespeare's plays, for instance. As the line from Macbeth goes, 'All our tomorrows are but brief candles that light the way to dusty death.' To the German philosopher Schopenhauer, the continual passing of time meant that happiness was an impossible condition. As he wrote, 'In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change it is impossible to imagine happiness.' 
Fortunately, however, this isn't the whole story. There's a great deal of evidence suggesting that this linear view of time is only really a kind of illusion, and that in reality the dividing lines between the past, present and future are not solid, and can easily fall away. 

This is suggested by some of the most fundamental ideas and theories of modern physics. They tell us that the idea that time flows in one direction doesn't make any sense, and that in reality the whole of past and the future are here now, existing side by side with the present. According to the physicist Robert Penrose, for example, 'The way in which time is treated in physics is not essentially different from the way in which space is treated...We just have a static-looking fixed 'space-time' in which the events of our universe are laid out.' Similarly, one eminent British physicist, Julian Barbour, has recently suggested that the reality of the universe is a static realm which he calls 'Platonia', where all past, present and future events co-exist.

The world's great mystical traditions tell us exactly the same thing. In the real sense of the term, a mystic is someone who manages to refine and intensify his or her own being, usually through spiritual practices like meditation. He or she looks at the world with a more intense consciousness than normal, and has a fuller vision of reality, in the same way that a powerful beam of light illuminates more than a dimmer beam. And amongst other things, mystics unanimously tell us that our normal view of time is an illusion. As the German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, 'There is only a present now; the happenings of a thousand years ago, a thousand years to come, are here in the present.' 

Physics describes the fundamental reality of our universe. If it tells that linear time is an illusion, then it's not surprising that many of us have experienced what we could call 'altered perceptions of time'. These might be experiences of 'precognition', in which we glimpse the future before it's happened, or predict events before they occur with an accuracy which goes beyond coincidence. On the other hand, we might have experiences of 'retrocognition' - a lesser known phenomenon in which we step into the past, and see our surroundings as they were at an earlier historical time. 

This type of retrocognition is quite rare, but there's another kind which we experience quite frequently. Occasionally the past becomes incredibly real to us, so vividly real that we have the sense that it's still there. You might be listening to the radio and hear a song which you haven't heard for years, and which you associate with a particular period of your life. As you listen the song takes you back to the situation you were in when you heard it before, and suddenly it's as if a door opens. You can sense the atmosphere of the flat you were living in at the time, experience the same feelings and thoughts you had then. You sense it all so vividly that it seems to be more than just memory. It's not just a replay of some impressions on a screen inside your head - you sense somehow that these past events and scenes still exist. 

This is what Proust experienced when he tasted a biscuit he used to eat when he was a child. He was suddenly awakened to the reality of his past life, which was no longer a dream-like haze of memory but a living and breathing reality. As a result he felt as though he had slipped beyond linear time and beyond everyday reality. 'The vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory,' he writes. 'I had ceased to mediocre, accidental, immortal, mediocre.' And this experience inspired him to begin his massive recollection of his early life, In Search of Lost Time. 

Three poems in this book are cut ups taken from Proust, and all of them arise from the same intense re-experiencing of the past. In 'Lamps', for example, there is so much colour and texture and vivid sensory detail that the poet is surely not just recalling the scenes and events but actually experiencing them all again. And through being framed in poetry, these past scenes and situations are captured in the present, so that they'll never be able to slip into the fog of the past again. 

All of these poems come from a place beyond linear time, where intense recollection turns into something more, and the dividing lines between different tenses fade away. They remind us that, just outside the parameters of our normal consciousness, the past is still with us. They remind us that, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, 'perfect, bright experience never falls to nothingness'. 

(This article was published in New Renaissance magazine Vol. 8, No. 2)

Modern humans have lost touch with their inner "true self". Silence and stillness are a means to recovering happiness and contentment. In the modern world silence has practically ceased to exist. 

The human race has stamped its authority over the planet Earth not just by covering its surface with concrete and destroying its plant and animal life, but also by burying the natural sounds of the Earth beneath a cacophony of man-made noise. We live our lives against the background of this cacophony, with the jagged mechanical sounds of urban-industrial society continually assaulting our ears: the roar of cars, aeroplanes and trains, the clanging and thudding of machinery, the noise of building and renovating, the chatter of radios and TVs in other people's cars and houses, and pop music blaring from every conceivable place. But nothing, of course, has done more to obliterate silence than the car. In the modern world it's very difficult to go anywhere where there's no possibility of being disturbed by the sound of passing cars, and the only chance that city or town dwellers get to experience something of the quietness which existed everywhere in the pre-car world is sometimes on Sundays, when the mad rushing to and fro of modern life slows down. This quietness seems so foreign now that it seems difficult to believe that a hundred years ago and before it was everywhere all the time. Back then this quietness would even have filled the busiest city centres, which would have probably had a noise level equivalent to that of a modern small village.

There's also more noise than ever before inside our houses. It's unusual to go into a house nowadays where there isn't at least one television set chattering away somewhere, even if the residents aren't actually watching it, and other forms of home entertainment compete against TV to produce the most noise: radios, CD players, computer and video games etc. In fact the only sound which is largely absent from people's houses nowadays is the voices of their occupants actually talking to one another.

Living in the midst of all this noise is bound to have a bad effect on us. All man-made noise is fundamentally disturbing we find the sound of birds singing or of wind rushing through trees pleasing, but mechanical noise always jars and grates. And since we live our lives against a background of mechanical noise it follows that there's always an undercurrent of agitation inside us, produced by the noise. This noise is certainly one of the reasons why modern life is so stressful as well. In modern life our senses are bombarded with massive amounts of external stimuli our fields of vision are always crowded with different (and constantly shifting) things, and our ears are bombarded with a bewildering variety of sounds, all of which clamour for our attention. Our senses have to absorb and process all this material, which takes up a lot of energy, and means that we're liable to become drained of energy or 'run down' easily. We can get out of this state by removing ourselves from all external stimuli and letting our energy-batteries naturally recharge themselves i.e., by relaxing. But there's so much external stimuli around in the modern world and people are so unaccustomed to the absence of it, that we may never be able relax properly, which could mean living in a permanently 'run down' state.

This lack of quietness has also meant is that people are no longer used to silence, and have even, as a result, become afraid of it. Along with inactivity, silence has become something which most people are determined to avoid at all costs, and which, when they are confronted with it, unnerves them. People have become so used to the frantic pace and the ceaseless activity of modern life that they feel uneasy when they're left at a loose end with nothing to occupy their attention even for a few moments, and they feel equally uneasy when the noise they live their lives against the background of subsides. Why else is it that they need to have their radios and televisions chattering away in the background even when they're not paying attention to them?

In other words, in the modern world silence has become an enemy. And this is a terrible shame, because in reality silence is one of our greatest friends, and can if it's allowed to reveal itself to us have a powerfully beneficial effect on us.

Inner Noise

It's not just the noise outside us which causes us problems, though, but also the noise inside us.

In the same way that the natural quietness and stillness of the world around us is always covered over with man-made noise, the natural quietness of our minds is constantly disturbed by the chattering of our ego-selves. This chattering fills our minds from the moment we wake up in the morning till the moment we go to sleep at night an endless stream of daydreams, memories, deliberations, worries, plans etc. which we have no control over and which even continues (in the form of dreams) when we fall asleep. This 'inner noise' has as many bad effects as the mechanical noise outside us. It actually creates problems in our lives, when we mull over tiny inconveniences or uncertainties which seem to become important just because we're giving so much attention to them, and when we imagine all kinds of possible scenarios about future events instead of just taking them as they come. It means that we don't live in the present, because we're always either planning for and anticipating the future or remembering the past 'wandering about in times that do not belong to us and never thinking of the one that does' as Blaise Pascal wrote. And this constant inner chattering also means that we can never give our full attention to our surroundings and to the activities of our lives. Our attention is always partly taken up by the thoughts in our minds, so that wherever we are and whatever we're doing we're never completely there.

It's probably possible to say that there's also more of this 'inner noise' inside human beings than there's ever been before. The hectic pace and the constant activity of our lives, the massive amount of external stimuli we're bombarded with, and the barrage of information which the mass media sends our way, have made our minds more restless and active. We've got to juggle dozens of different problems and concerns in our minds just to get by from day to day, and every new thing we see or every new piece of information which is sent our way is potentially the beginning of a whole new train of thought to occupy our minds.

The True Self

Ultimately, the most serious consequence of both this inner chattering and the noise and activity of the modern world is that they separate us from our true selves.

Our 'true self' might be called the ground, or the essence, of our beings. It's the pure consciousness inside us, the consciousness-in-itself which remains when we're not actually conscious of anything. It's what remains when our the activity of our senses and the activity of our minds cease. The sense-impressions we absorb from the world and the thoughts which run through our minds are like the images on a cinema screen, but our 'true self' is the cinema screen itself, which is still there even when there aren't any images being projected on to it.

Experiencing this 'consciousness-in-itself' can have a massively therapeutic effect. It brings a sense of being firmly rooted in ourselves, of being truly who we are. We also have a sense of being truly where we are, realising that before we were only half-present, and everything we see around us seems intensely real and alive, as if our perceptions have become much more acute. But above all, we experience a profound sense of inner peace and natural happiness. As the Hindu and Buddhist traditions have always held, the nature of consciousness-in-itself (which means the consciousness inside us and the consciousness which pervades the whole universe) is bliss. Getting into contact with the pure consciousness inside us enables us, therefore, to experience this bliss. Indeed, it could be said that it's only when we do this that we can experience true happiness. Usually what we think of as happiness is hedonistic or ego-based that is, based around pressing instinctive 'pleasure buttons' or around receiving attention and praise from others and increasing our self-esteem. But the kind of deep and rich happiness we experience when we're in touch with the ground or essence of our beings is a natural, spiritual happiness, which doesn't depend on anything external, and doesn't vanish as soon as the thing which produced it is taken away. It's a happiness which comes from experiencing the divine inside us and also the divine inside everything else, since the pure consciousness inside us is the same pure consciousness inside everything else, and the pure consciousness of the universe itself.

Making Contact with the True Self

Whether we're in touch with this 'true self' or not depends on how much external stimuli our senses are taking in from the world around us, and on how much activity there is going on in our minds. 

If there is a lot of noise, movement and activity taking place around us then we can't help but give our attention to it; and in the same way, when there is a lot of 'inner noise' taking place we have to give our attention to that too. And when our attention is completely absorbed in this way either by external stumuli on their own, such as when we watch TV; by 'inner noise' on its own, such as when we daydream; or by both of them at the same time it's impossible for us to be in contact with our 'true self' to any degree, in the same way that it's impossible to see a cinema screen in itself when it's full of dancing images. Being in contact with our 'true self' is a state of attentionless-ness, when our minds are completely empty.

What we have to do if we want to get into contact with this part of ourselves is, therefore, to withdraw our attention from these things. And this is, of course, what we do when we meditate: first of all, we remove ourselves from external stimuli, by sitting in a quiet room and closing our eyes. And then there's only 'inner noise' standing between us and consciousness-in-itself, which we try to quieten by concentrating on a mantra or on our breathing. If we manage to stop the inner noise (and therefore stop our attention being absorbed in it) pure consciousness immerses us and we become our true selves.

And this brings us back to the most serious problem caused by the massive amount of external stimuli (including noise) which our senses are bombarded with in the modern world, and by the intensified 'inner noise' which modern life generates. It's not just a question of completely closing yourself off to external stimuli and shutting down 'inner noise', so that you can experience a state of total immersion in pure consciousness. It's possible to have a foot in both camps, so to speak to live a normal life in the world, being exposed to external stimuli and experiencing inner noise, and at the same time still be rooted in your real self. That is, it's possible to be partially immersed in consciousness-in-itself, and for your attention to be partially absorbed by external stimuli and inner talk. But this can only happen when there is just a moderate degree of both of the latter.

It would probably have been quite easy for our ancestors to live in this way, because they weren't exposed to a great deal of external stimuli and because their lives were relatively slow-paced and stress-free, which would have meant that their attention needn't have been completely absorbed by external stimuli and inner talk. Perhaps this even partly explains why native peoples seem to possess a natural contentment which modern city dwellers have lost because their more sedate lives mean that they're able to be in touch with the ground of their being as they go about their lives, and that they can therefore continually experience something of the bliss of which is the nature of consciousness-in-itself.

For us, however, this has become very difficult. There's always so much noise and activity both inside and outside us that our attention is always completely absorbed, so that we can't be in contact with our real selves. We spend all our time living outside ourselves, lost in the external world of activity and stimuli or in the inner world of our own thoughts. We're like a person who plans to go away for a few days but finds so much to occupy them in the place they go to that they never go home again, and never again experience the peace and contentment which lie there. This is certainly one of the reasons why so many people nowadays seem to live in a state of dissatisfaction because they've lost touch with the natural happiness inside them. That natural happiness has been buried underneath a storm of external stimuli and what Meister Eckhart called 'the storm of inward thought'.

As a result of this it's essential for us, in the modern world, to go out of our way to cultivate silence ourselves. Circumstances may oblige us to live in cities, and our jobs may be stressful and demanding, but we're still free to remove ourselves from external stimuli and to try to quieten our minds by meditating, going out into the countryside, or just by sitting quietly in our rooms. We don't have to fill our free time with attention-absorbing distractions like TV and computer games, which take us even further away from ourselves. We should do the opposite: stop our attention being absorbed like this so that we can find ourselves again.

We need silence and stillness to become our true selves and to be truly happy. 'Be still,' said Jesus, 'and know that I am God.' But he might have added, 'and know that you are God.'

(Originally published in New Dawn, no.95, March-April 2006)

If you asked them what life was like in prehistoric times, most people would conjure up an image like the famous opening scenes of 2001: Space Odyssey - groups of hairy savages grunting and jumping around, foaming at the mouth with aggression as they bash each over the heads with sticks. 
We take it for granted that life was much harder then, a battle to survive, with everyone competing to find food, struggling against the elements, men fighting over women, and everyone dying young from disease or malnutrition.

A whole branch of science has grown up around this view of the human race's early history. This is relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain all of the negative sides of human nature as adaptations which early people developed because they had some survival value. Evolutionary psychologists explain traits like selfishness and aggression in these terms. Life was such a struggle that only the most selfish and aggressive people survived and passed on their genes. The people with gentle and peaceful genes would have died out, simply because they would have lost out in the survival battle. Evolutionary psychologists see racism and war as natural too. It's inevitable that different human groups should be hostile to one another, because once upon a time we were all living on the edge of starvation and fighting over limited resources. Any tendency to show sympathy for other groups would have reduced our own group's survival chances.

But fortunately we don't have to believe any of this crude nonsense. There is now a massive amount of archaeological and anthropological evidence which suggests that this view of the human race's past is completely false. Life for prehistoric human beings was far less bleak than we might imagine.

Take the view that life was a struggle to survive . The evidence suggests that the lives of prehistoric human beings were a lot easier than those of the agricultural peoples who came after them. Until around 8000 BCE, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers. They survived by hunting wild animals (the man's job) and foraging for wild plants, nuts, fruit and vegetables (the woman's job). When anthropologists began to look at how contemporary hunter-gatherers use their time, they were surprised to find that they only spent 12 to 20 hours per week searching for food -between a third and a half of the average modern working week! Because of this, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers the original affluent society. As he noted in his famous paper of that name, for hunter-gatherers, The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves (1). 

Strange though it may sound - the diet of hunter-gatherers was better than many modern peoples'. Apart from the small amount of meat they ate (10%-20% of their diet), their diet was practically identical to that of a modern day vegan - no dairy products and a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, roots and nuts, all eaten raw (which nutrition experts tell us is the healthiest way to eat.) This partly explains why skeletons of ancient hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and robust, and show few signs of degenerative diseases and tooth decay. As the anthropologist Richard Rudgley writes, We know from what they ate and the condition of their skeletons that the hunting people were, on the whole, in pretty good shape. (2) The hunter-gatherers of Greece and Turkey had an average height of five feet ten inches for men and five feet six for women. But after the advent of agriculture, these had declined to five feet three and five feet one. An archaeological site in the lower Illinois Valley in central USA shows that when people started cultivating maize and switched to a settled lifestyle, there was an increase in infant mortality, stunted growth in adults, and a massive increase in diseases related to malnutrition.

Hunter-gatherers were much less vulnerable to disease than later peoples. In fact, until the advances of modern medicine and hygiene of the 19th and 20th centuries, they may well have suffered less from disease than any other human beings in history. Many of the diseases which we're now susceptible to only actually arrived when we domesticated animals and started living close to them. Animals transmitted a whole host of diseases to us which we'd never been exposed to before. Pigs and ducks passed the flu on, horses gave us colds, cows gave us the pox and dogs gave us the measles. And later, when dairy products became a part of our diet, we increased our exposure to disease even more through drinking milk, which transmits at least 30 different diseases. In view of this, it's not surprising that with the coming of agriculture, people's life spans became shorter. 

The transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a settled agricultural one began in the Middle East at around 8000 BCE, spreading into Europe and Asia over the following millennia (and developing independently in some places). Many of the world's cultures have myths that refer an earlier time when life was much easier, and human beings were less materialistic and lived in harmony with nature and each other. In ancient Greece and Rome this was known as the Golden Age; in China it was the Age of Perfect Virtue, in India it was the Krita Yuga (Perfect Age); while the Judeo-Christian tradition has the story of the garden of Eden. These myths tell us that, either as a result of a long degeneration or a sudden and dramatic Fall , something went wrong . Life became much more difficult and full of suffering, and human nature became more corrupt. In Taoist terms, whereas the earliest human beings followed the Way of Heaven and were a part of the natural harmony of the universe, later human beings became separated from the Tao, and became selfish and calculating. 

Many of these myths make clear references to the hunter-gatherer way of life - for example, the Greek historian Hesiod states that during the Golden Age the fruitful earth bore [human beings] abundant fruit without stint, while the early Indian text the Vaya Purana states that early human beings frequented the mountains and seas, and did not dwell in houses (i.e. they lived a non-sedentary way of life). The garden of Eden story suggests this too. Originally Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, until they were forced to leave the garden and forced to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything. It appears that, at least in part, these myths are a kind of folk memory of the pre-agricultural way of life. The agricultural peoples who worked harder and longer, had shorter life spans and suffered from a lot more health problems must have looked at the old hunter-gatherer way of life as a kind of paradise.
Warfare and Social Oppression
There are other significant reasons why these peoples would have seen earlier times as a Golden Age.
 There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that prehistoric human beings were much less war-like than later peoples. Archaeological studies throughout the world have found hardly any evidence of warfare during the whole of the hunter-gatherer phase of history. There are, in fact, just two indisputable cases of group violence during all of these tens of thousands of years. A cluster of sites around the Nile Valley show some signs of violence from around 12,000 BCE. The site of Jebel Sahaba, for instance, has a grave containing the bodies of over 50 people who apparently died a violent death. And in south-east Australia, there are some signs of inter-tribal fighting - as well as of other kinds of social violence such as the cranial deformation of children - at several different sites dating from 11,000 and 7,000 BCE. 
Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilisation suggests several other examples of prehistoric violence and warfare, but all of these are dubious, and have been dismissed by other scholars. For example, Keeley sees cut marks on human bones as evidence of cannibalism, when these are more likely to be the result of prehistoric funeral rituals of cleaning bones of their flesh. He also interprets highly abstract and stylised drawings in caves in Australia as depicting battles, when they are open to wide variety of other interpretations. In this way, as the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson remarks, Keeley's rhetoric exceeds his evidence in implying war is old as humanity. (3) 

The lack of evidence for warfare is striking. There are no signs of violent death, no signs of damage or disruption by warfare, and although many other artefacts have been found, including massive numbers of tools and pots, there is a complete absence of weapons. As Ferguson points out, it is difficult to understand how war could have been common earlier in each area and remain so invisible. Archaeologists have discovered over 300 cave prehistoric art galleries , not one of which contains depictions of warfare, weapons or warriors. In the words of the anthropologist Richard Gabriel, For the first ninety-five thousand years after the Homo sapiens Stone age began [until 4,000 BC], there is no evidence that man engaged in war on any level, let alone on a level requiring organized group violence. There is little evidence of any killing at all. (4) 
There seems to have been equality between the sexes in prehistoric times too. The fact that women provided so much of the tribe's food strongly suggests that they had equal status, since it's difficult to see how they could have low status while performing such an important economic role. The healthy, open attitude ancient hunter-gatherers had to the human body and to sex - shown by the massive numbers of sexually explicit images and objects archaeologists have discovered - suggests this too, since the oppression of women appears to be closely linked to a sense of alienation from the human body, and a negative attitude to instincts and bodily processes. 

Contemporary indigenous peoples are sexually egalitarian too. Before European conquest and colonisation, many of them traced descent and ownership of property through the mother's rather than the father's side of the family. And as the anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, in immediate return hunter-gatherer societies (that is, societies which live by immediately using any food or other resources they collect, rather than storing them for later use), men have no authority over women. Women usually choose their own marriage partners, decide what work they want to do and work whenever they choose to, and if a marriage breaks down they have custody rights over their children. (5) 

In prehistoric societies there were no status differences between individuals either. There were no different classes or castes, with people who had more power and possessions than others. For archaeologists, the most obvious signs of social inequality are differences in graves, in terms of size, position and the goods which are placed inside them. Later agricultural societies have larger, more central graves for more important people, which also have a lot more possessions inside them. Men generally have more important graves than women. But the graves of the ancient hunter-gatherers are strikingly uniform, with little or no size differences and little or no grave wealth. 

Almost all contemporary hunter-gatherers show a striking absence of any of the characteristics that we associate with social inequality. The anthropologist James Woodburn speaks of the profound egalitarianism of immediate-return foraging peoples and emphasises that no other way of human life permits so great an emphasis on equality. (6) Foraging peoples are also strikingly democratic. Most societies do operate with a leader of some kind, but their power is usually very limited, and they can easily be deposed if the rest of the group aren't happy with their leadership. People don't seek to be leaders - in fact if anybody does show signs of a desire for power and wealth they are usually barred from consideration as leaders. And even when a person becomes a leader, they don't have the right to make decisions on their own. Decisions are made in co-operation with other respected members of the group. 
The Ego Explosion
All of this strongly argues against the idea that prehistoric human being were brutes whose only concern was survival, and whose lives were full of cruelty and conflict, as men competed against each other for status and food and sex.
Warfare, social oppression and male domination - and an existence that was nasty, brutish and short - belong to a later phase of human history. Evidence from artwork, cemeteries and battle sites suggests that there was an eruption of these social pathologies during the 4th millennium BCE, starting in the Middle East and central Asia. The root cause of this change seems to have been environmental. Around this time massive areas of land which had been fertile for thousands of years started to turn into desert. This happened all over the Middle East and central Asia, creating the massive belt of arid or desert land which runs across from the Steppes of southern Russia to the Arabian and Iranian deserts. The groups who lived in the area - including the original Indo-Europeans and Semites - were forced to flee and look for new fertile lands, causing massive waves of migrations.

This environmental disaster seems to have changed the psyche of these peoples. Whereas before they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now they became aggressive, hierarchical and patriarchal. Over the following centuries. they spread over the Europe, Middle East and Asia, killing and conquering the peaceful Old World peoples they came across, including the civilisation of Old Europe (which was reconstructed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas). By 500 BCE, these peoples had more or less completely conquered the whole of Eurasia, leaving only a few indigenous peoples such as the Laplanders of Scandinavia, the tribal peoples of Siberia, and the indigenous peoples of the forests and hills of India. In mainland Europe the only surviving non-Indo-European indigenous peoples were the Basque people of northern Spain (who amazingly still survive today) and the Etruscans of Italy, who were soon to be wiped out by the Romans. 

In my book The Fall, I try to explain how these people were (and are) different from the peaceful peoples who came before them. My theory is that the environmental catastrophe (the drying up their fertile lands) caused an Ego Explosion . These peoples developed a stronger and sharper sense of identity, or of individuality, which made them feel more separate to nature and to other people, and more liable to be aggressive and to lust after power and status. We - modern day Eurasians - are the descendents of these peoples, and we have inherited their strong sense of ego. This is still the main difference between us and indigenous unfallen peoples such as the Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and the peoples of Oceania, and the reason why they have much more respectful attitude to nature than us, and a more spiritual vision of the universe. Our strong sense of ego walls us off from other people and nature, makes us unable to sense the alive-ness of the world around us, and may ultimately be responsible for our extinction as a species. 

However, there are some signs that, as a culture, we are slowly transcending the fallen psyche, and going beyond our ego-separateness. Over the last three hundred years or so, there has been a new spirit of empathy growing, which has led to less cruel treatment of children and animals, less severe punishments for criminals, the women's movement, the abolition of slavery, the socialist movement, a new respect for nature, a more open and healthy attitude to sex and the human body and so on. And there has been a new sense of the sacred and of the possibility of self-transcendence, which has led to a massive upsurge of interest in esoteric/spiritual philosophies and practices like paganism, shamanism, Buddhism, meditation and so on. There are signs that we are reconnecting with nature, regaining our sense of the aliveness of the world and of the hidden mysteries of the cosmos. The characteristics of the prehistoric golden age may be slowly re-emerging. The only question is whether there is enough time left for these characteristics to emerge fully, before the old fallen psyche leads us to self-destruction. 

The idea that human history is a gradual but continual progression - starting from a state of savagery, with generations slowly making technological and social advances and passing these down, and leading to the pinnacle of western European civilisation - is a leftover from the Victorian era, part of the same colonial mentality which saw primitive indigenous peoples as subhumans who could be justifiably conquered and killed. Rather than a progression, the last 6000 years of war, oppression, misery and hardship are the result of a painful degeneration from an earlier, healthier state. We may finally be moving forward now - but only in the sense of turning a full circle, and rekindling glimmers of ancient harmony. 
References

• Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine de Gruyter,. p.36. 
• Rudgley, R. (2000). Secrets of the Stone Age. London: Random House, p. 36. 
• Ferguson, R.B. (2000). 'The Causes and Origins of Primitive Warfare.' Anthropological Quarterly, 73.3, 159-164, p.159.
• Gabriel, R. (1990). The Culture of War: Invention and Early Development. New York: Greenwood Press, p. 21.
• Ingold, T., Riches, D. & Woodburn, J. (Eds.). (1988). Hunters and Gatherers, Volume 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Oxford: Berg.
• Woodburn, J. (1982). 'Egalitarian Societies.' Man, 17, 431-51, p.432.

(Published in the Scientific and Medical Network Review, Winter 2006-7)

Since Europeans first arrived on the shores of the 'New World,' one of the greatest sources of culture clash between European colonists and indigenous tribal peoples has been their different attitudes to nature.

Indigenous peoples throughout the world have been consistently appalled by European peoples' lack of respect for the natural world, and systematic abuse of nature. They generally feel a strong sense of empathy and kinship with nature, and perceive natural things as alive. But in contrast, Europeans have generally seen nature as little more than a supply of resources to be exploited. We - at least most of us - treat natural things as objects with no inner life or being. We have no sense of empathy with them - how we could have, since as far as we're concerned they have no being to empathise with? And since they are just things with no interior, there's no reason why they should have any value for us, except as resources.

One of the European concepts which indigenous peoples like the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines found most difficult to understand was that of the ownership of land and natural resources. Ownership implies a position of superiority and dominance. Since we European peoples know that we are conscious and alive ourselves, and perceive natural phenomena as not being alive and conscious, we feel that we're superior to nature, as a master is to a slave, and so feel entitled to dominate it. But indigenous peoples' sense of the sacredness and alive-ness of nature means that they could never take this attitude. Even as communities, they rarely see themselves as owning land or natural resources in the sense that we understand the term. As the anthropologist Colin Scott notes, to the Cree Indians, 'no one, not even the Creator, owns land.' (1) At the most, they might see themselves as looking after it on behalf of the Great Spirit. This attitude often worked in European colonists' favour, since many Native American groups saw the idea of selling areas of land as an absurd joke, and let the Europeans buy them for almost nothing.

This respect for nature appears to have an underlying spiritual source. Natural phenomena are alive because they are pervaded with Spirit. Trees, rocks and mountains are animate because of the spirit-force - the Life Master or Great Spirit - which flows through them. Almost all - if not actually all - indigenous peoples have a concept of this 'spirit-force.' I have been collecting examples of these terms from my readings of anthropological and religious texts for years, and have lost count of the number I have. To give just a few examples, in America, the Pawnee called it tirawa, while the Lakota called it wakan-tanka (literally, the 'force which moves all things'). The Ainu of Japan called it ramut (translated by the anthropologist Monro as 'spirit-energy' (2)), while in parts of New Guinea it was called imunu (translated by early anthropologist J.H. Holmes as 'universal soul'(3)). In Africa the Nuer call it kwoth and the Mbuti call it pepo. Indigenous peoples (at least those whose cultures have not severely disrupted by now) therefore generally respect nature because they see it as the manifestation of Spirit. To damage or destroy natural phenomena would be a crime against Spirit itself, and disturb the harmony of the world. And since they sense that they are manifestations of Spirit too, these peoples feel a sense of kinship with nature, a sense of sharing identity with it, which contrasts with the sense of 'otherness' to the natural world which we normally experience. The Australian Aborigines perceive that all things have their own 'dreaming' - that is, their own inner life, or subjectivity. They can't conceive of themselves as being separate from nature since to them, in the words of another anthropologist, Lynne Hume, 'Everything is interconnected in a vast web of sacredness.' (4) 

Most modern Eurasian peoples clearly do not have this awareness of Spirit in the world. Rather than being a commonly perceived everyday reality, for us the concept of an all-pervading Spirit only appears in mystical and esoteric traditions, such as the brahman of Hindu mysticism, or the Dao of Chinese Daoism. (5) We have apparently become blind to Spirit in the world - and this is, presumably, why we do not sense natural things as being alive. 

But there is evidence that this wasn't true of earlier of inhabitants of Europe and Asia. It appears that the earliest Europeans had the same kind of reverential and empathic attitude to nature as the Indigenous Americans and Australian Aborigines. This is suggested by the artwork of 'Old Europe', for example, the culture which was unearthed and reconstructed by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Old Europe flourished between 7000 BCE and 2500 BCE, covering large parts of southern, central and eastern Europe. And alongside its apparent peacefulness and egalitarianism, one of the most striking things about Old European culture is its artwork, which is full of beautiful natural images. These were practically everywhere in their villages and towns - images of the sun, of water, serpents and butterflies, painted or drawn on the outside and inside walls of houses, in shrines, on vases and bas reliefs. There are also numerous drawings of 'cosmic eggs,' and representations of goddess figures as part human and part animal, suggesting that there was a sense of the interconnectedness of nature. Old European culture survived longest in Crete, whose isolation protected it from Indo-European invaders until around 1500 BCE. And the artwork of the ancient Cretans - or Minoans - shows the same sense of wonder. According to the archaeologist Nicolas Platon, for instance, the art work of the ancient Cretans showed a 'delight in beauty, grace and movement', and an 'enjoyment of life and closeness to nature.' (6) It's obviously impossible to say for sure that this indicates that these people had the same 'spiritualised' vision of the world as many indigenous peoples, but, as Riane Eisler points out, the archaeological evidence suggests 'a view of the world in which everything is spiritual (inhabited by spirits) and the whole world is imbued with the sacred: plants, animals, the sun, the moon, our own human bodies.' (7) 
The Intensified Sense of Ego 

So what is it that makes 'civilised' Eurasian peoples apparently different from most indigenous tribal peoples, and even the Neolithic peoples of Europe? Why do we, as a culture, suffer from a pathology of alienation from nature? And why, as a result, have we abused the life-support systems of this planet to the point of imminent ecological catastrophe? 

Some authors believe that our ancestors saw the world around them as animate and sacred place until fairly recent times. One view is that we lost this vision of the world due to the influence of Christianity, which taught our ancestors that human beings are supposed to have dominion over the rest of creation, that we're the only living beings with souls, and that God is apart from the world. Other scholars believe that the real problems started later, and that this soulless vision of the world was the result of the scientific paradigm created by Descartes and Newton around four centuries ago. But while there's no doubt that these factors have engendered and encouraged our abuse of the environment, in my opinion there is a more fundamental reason for our pathological attitude to nature: the particular kind of psyche we have, through which we experience reality, and relate to the world. 

The fundamental psychic difference between indigenous peoples and modern Eurasians is, I believe, that we have a stronger and sharper sense of ego than them. According to the early 20th century anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the essential characteristic of indigenous peoples was their less 'sharpened' sense of individuality. In his words, 'To the primitive's mind, the limits of the individuality are variable and ill-defined.' (8) He notes that, rather than existing as self-sufficient individual entities - as we experience ourselves - indigenous peoples' sense of identity is bound up with their community. He cites reports of primal peoples who use the word 'I' when speaking of their group, and also notes that indigenous peoples' sense of individuality extends to objects they use and touch. A person's clothes, tools and even the remains of meals and their excrement are so closely linked to them that to burn or damage them is thought to death or injury to the person. (This is one of the principles by which witchcraft is believed to work.) Similarly, George B. Silberbauer notes that, to the G/wi of the Kalahari, 'identity was more group-referenced than individual. That is, a person would identity herself or himself with reference to kin or some other group.' (9)

In other words, most indigenous peoples don't seem to exist as personal, self-sufficient egos to the same extent as European peoples. The naming practices of certain peoples suggest this too. For us, a name is a permanent label which defines our individuality and autonomy. But for indigenous peoples this often isn't the case. Among the Balinese, for example, personal names and even kinship names are rarely used. Instead they commonly use tekonyms - i.e. terms which describe the relationship between two people. As soon as a child is born, the mother is called 'mother-of ___' and the father is 'father-of ____'; when a grandchild is born they become 'grandmother-of ____' and 'grandfather-of ____.' Similarly, Aborigines do not have fixed names which they keep throughout their lives. Their names regularly change, and include those of other members of their tribe. 

Some colonists actually became aware of the problem, and realised that they would never be able to fully 'civilise' the natives unless they developed their sense of 'self-ness.' Senator Henry Dawes put his finger on it when he wrote of the Cherokees in 1887, 'They have got as far as they can go [i.e. they are not going to progress any further], because they hold their land in common There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation.' (10) The English missionaries in Australia tried various measures to develop the aborigines' sense of individuality. They made them live in separate houses and tried to stop going into each other's. They baptised them so that they would think of themselves in terms of permanent name, instead of the fluid aboriginal names which could change and include the names of other tribe members. It didn't work though - the aborigines never developed a sense of personal ownership over their houses and the possessions inside them. They wandered in and out of each other's houses all the time, and continually swapped possessions.

Indigenous peoples' less intense sense of ego leads to a respectful attitude to nature because they don't experience a sense of otherness to the world; their own identity can't be separated from the world around them. They experience a shared sense of being with the rest of the cosmos, a natural intersubjectivity, which means that there is always an empathic connection between them and natural phenomena. On the other hand, our stronger sense of individuality creates duality and separation. The shared sense of being is disrupted, as we become 'walled off' within our own egos. We become separated off into islands of individuality. We generally exist in a state of 'ego-isolation' which means that we are always one step removed from the world, and can never participate in it. 

And as for the difference between us and earlier European peoples, there is evidence that this intensified sense of ego may have arisen at particular historical time. The archaeological record reveals the first signs of strong sense of individuality during the 4th millennium BCE, among certain Middle Eastern and central Asian groups. In prehistoric times almost all communities had communal burial grounds, but during the 4th millennium BCE, individual burials took over. Up till this point, people were buried anonymously too, with no markers and no possessions. But now people were buried with identity and property, as if their individuality mattered, and as if they thought it would continue after death. As the Swedish archaeologist Mats Malmer has written, these new burial practices (and the new emphasis on private property linked to them) are part of a 'surprising change [that] occurred in Europe, a new social system giving greater freedom and rights of personal ownership to the individual.' Referring specifically to the beginning of the third millennium BCE, he calls these new European peoples 'the first individualists.' (11) Texts and inscriptions from the fourth millennium BCE are more concerned with individuality and personality, and around this time new myths appeared throughout Europe and the Near East that show, in Joseph Campbell's words, 'an unprecedented shift from the impersonal to the personal.' (12) 

The root cause of this intensification of individuality - the 'Ego Explosion', as I have called it - may have been environmental. Until the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, the Middle East and central Asia had been fertile and full of animal and plant life, but now a process of severe and widespread desertification occurred. Rainfall decreased, rivers and lakes evaporated, vegetation disappeared and famine took hold. Farming became impossible, and lack of water made hunting treacherous. The areas had been intensely populated (at least compared to other parts of the world at this time) but now there was a mass exodus of animals and people from the region, as groups migrated in search of more fertile areas. 

These peoples may have developed a 'sharpened' sense of ego in response to this environmental disaster. Perhaps as their lives became more difficult - as their lands became fertile and later they were migrating away from their homelands - people were forced to develop a greater logical problem-solving ability, a greater ability to think discursively and analytically to deal with the new difficulties. And perhaps these difficulties encouraged a new spirit of selfishness, as people began to put their own individual needs before those of their group. Some major psychological change certainly seems to have happened to these peoples. The peoples who migrated away from the Middle East and central Asia from the 4th millennium BCE onwards - including the Indo-Europeans, the Semites and the forebears of peoples such as the Finno-Ugrics, the Turks, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Shang and the Sarmatians - appear to have been a new type of human being, with a completely new attitude to life, and a new type of culture. As well as showing signs of a new sense of individuality, these peoples were also much more war-like than any groups before them. The archaeological record shows a sudden eruption of warfare at this time, as these groups fought against each other for new land and as they conquered 'indigenous' Neolithic peoples like the Old Europeans. These groups also appeared to have had the world's first ever strongly hierarchical and patriarchal societies, to have worshipped anthropomorphic gods (often male warrior gods) and, judging from their artwork (which contains few natural images but a massive number of scenes of violence and depiction of weapons), they appear to have lost a sense of reverence for nature. And all of these characteristics were, I believe, the consequence of the new intensified sense of ego which these peoples developed. Even in our time, warfare, patriarchy, social oppression and other social and psychological pathologies can be seen as the inevitable consequence of an 'over-developed' sense of ego. (I try to explain how the ego gives rise to each of these pathologies in my book, The Fall.) 

The Loss of Awareness of Spirit 

In other words, it was this 'Ego Explosion' which made us - since most of us are Indo-Europeans too, and we have inherited the psyche through which we are aware of and relate to the world from our ancestors - different from the world's indigenous peoples.

And it's also, I believe, this intensified sense of ego which is the root cause of our alienation from nature, and our abuse of the natural world. Rather than seeing Christianity, materialistic science or capitalism as being the cause of our pathology, these ideologies should themselves be seen as results of the dualistic and de-spiritualised vision of the world which our psyche generates. 

The Ego Explosion led to a 'de-spiritualised' vision of the world because, now that the ego became a much more powerful feature of the individual's psyche, what might be called a 'redistribution of psychic energy' occurred. The powerful new ego 'gobbled up' the psychic energy which had previously been devoted to present-centred awareness, to the act of perceiving the immediate is-ness of the phenomenal world. This energy was diverted to the ego; as a result we could no longer perceive the world the same intense, vivid vision, and our attention became 'switched off' to the presence of Spirit. The phenomenal world became a shadowy, one-dimensional place, and natural phenomena became lifeless objects. In Australian Aboriginal terminology, we lost the ability to 'enter the dreaming' of natural phenomena. 

Healing the Pathology

All of this might make our predicament seem hopeless. If the fundamental problem is the particular psyche through which we experience the world, then presumably the only way for us to survive as a species would be for our psyche to change, for us to somehow transcend our separate sense of ego and regain a sense of connection to nature and an awareness of Spirit in the world.

 And how could a change like this take place? After 6000 years, why should we change now?

There are, however, many signs that a process of change is underway. Since roughly the mid-eighteenth century, major cultural changes have occurred which can be seen as the result of a general inner psychic change, a movement beyond the separate sense of ego. At this time, particularly in western Europe, a new wave of empathy seemed to emerge, a new ability to sense the suffering of other human beings - and animals too - and a new emphasis on the rights of other individuals. This led to the women's movement, the animal rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, more humane treatment of disabled people and homeless children, and the abolition of brutal forms of punishment such as branding and public flogging, as well as an end to the use of the death penalty for trivial crimes (prison or transportation started to be used instead). In other words, the pathologies which the intensified sense of ego gave rise to started to be transcended, suggesting the walls of separateness which divided human beings from one another (and from other beings and the rest of the natural world) had faded away to some degree.

This process also gave rise to the socialist movement of the 19th century, and the spread of democracy. And more recently there has been a healing (at least partly) of the most powerful pathologies which came from the Ego Explosion: the hostile attitude to sex and the human body. Adolescent and extra-marital sex have become more acceptable, as has the display of naked flesh, and once taboo topics such as menstruation and female sexuality can now be discussed more openly. And most pertinently for this essay, over the last few decades a more reverential attitude to nature has developed, as shown by the environmental and ecological movements. There has been a return to the empathic and respectful stance towards nature of primal peoples, an awareness of a shared sense of being with nature and a sense that natural phenomena possess their own being or subjective dimension (their own dreaming, in Aboriginal terms). 

In my opinion these developments are too significant to be merely the result of social or cultural factors. I believe that they are the result of a psychic change which the human race is undergoing collectively, an evolutionary movement which may be occurring in response to our present dire predicament. The real question is whether there is enough time for this transition to manifest itself completely. After all, although this process appears to be gaining in strength as time goes by, it's still really only a minority movement. It hasn't yet brought the kind of sweeping changes that we need. The isolated ego still holds sway, with its alienation from nature and desire to dominate the world, and is still pushing the human race towards self-destruction. 

But this may be where we come in. It's possible for us to add our own individual efforts to the natural process of change. After all, the whole purpose of spiritual development is to try to transcend the intensified sense of ego, to erode away our walls of ego-separateness and bring us back into union with the cosmos. And every change we make to our own individual psyche will resonate with our species as a whole, and take us a little further along the path to transformation and survival. 

Notes

• Scott, C. (1997). 'Property, Practice and Aboriginal Rights among Quebec Cree Hunters.' In Ingold, T., Riches, D. & Woodburn, J. (Eds.). Hunters and Gatherers, Volume 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Oxford: Berg, p. 40.
• Monro, N.G. (1962). Ainu Creed and Cult. New York: Columbia University Press, p.8.
• In Levy-Bruhl, L. (1965). The Soul of the Primitive. London: Allen & Unwin, p. 17.
• Hume, L. (2000). 'The Dreaming in Contemporary Aboriginal Australia.' In Harvey, G. (ed.), Indigenous Religions. London and New York: Cassell, p.
• It is, of course, debateable whether tribal people's concepts of all-pervading Spirit correspond with mystical concepts such as Brahman and the Dao. But I believe that the literal meanings of these concepts and the available descriptions of them make this almost impossible to doubt. Here is a description of Spirit-force given by a member of the Pawnee tribe, for instance: 
  We do not think of Tirawa as a person. We think of Tirawa as [a power which is] in everything and moves upon the darkness, the night, and causes her to bring forth the dawn. It is the breath of the new-born dawn (in Eliade, 1967, From Primitives to Zen. London: Collins, p. 13). 
  And compare this with the following passage from the Hindu Upanishads, describing the presence of brahman within the manifest world:
  Shining, yet hidden, Spirit lives in the cavern. Everything that sways, breathes, opens and closes, lives in Spirit Spirit is everywhere, upon the right, upon the left, above, below, behind, in front. What is the world but Spirit? (in Happold, 1986, Mysticism. London: Penguin, p.146.)
• In Eisler, R. (1987). The Chalice and the Blade. London: Thorsons, p. 32. 
• Eisler, R. (1995). Sacred Pleasure. Shaftesbury: Element, p. 57.
• Levy-Bruhl, L. (1965). The Soul of the Primitive. London: Allen & Unwin, p.68.
• Silberbauer, G.B. (1994). 'A Sense of Place.' In Burch, E.S. & Ellanna, L.J. (Eds.), Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research, Oxford: Berg, p. 131.
• Wright, R. (1992). Stolen Continents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p.363.
• In Keck, L.R. (2002). Sacred Quest. West Chester, PA: Chrysalis Books, pp. 47-8.
• In Baring, A & Cashford, J. (1991). The Myth of the Goddess: The Evolution of an
  Image. London: Arkana, p. 154.

(published by thinkdeeply.com, 2003)

Read any book about the history of the World and it's likely that you'll be left with one overriding impression: that human beings find it impossible to live in harmony with one another. Books on world history usually begin with the 'first' civilisations of Sumeria and Egypt, which arose at around 3000 BC, and from that point until the present day, history is little more than a catalogue of endless wars. 

According to one famous statistic, for every one year of peace in human history there have been 14 years of war. Think back to your history lessons at school - if they were anything like mine, all you can probably remember of them are the names of Kings and Queens and the names of the wars which were fought during their reigns (here's a few just off the top of my head: the War of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Seven Years War, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession etc.) 'Just think how lucky you are,' I remember a teacher telling my class once. 'If you'd been born at any other time in history you'd all be sent off to fight in some foreign country and the chances are you wouldn't come back.'

War seems to be natural to human beings - or at least to male human beings, since war has always been an almost exclusively male occupation. There seems to be something wrong with us, a kind of restlessness and constant dissatisfaction which means that we have to create conflict. Most modern scientists would probably agree with this, and suggest that there's a strong genetic and biological basis for war. They would point to the fact that the purpose of life is genetic survival, and that this means competing with other living beings for food and territory. Or they might point to the theories of the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who showed that all animals have an instinct to establish an area that belongs to their family or tribe, and to stop any other animals encroaching on it. In human terms this would mean that wars occur when groups are struggling against each other to establish territory for themselves, or when 'invaders' encroach upon a group's established territory. 

Before War

However, there's a major problem with the view that war is natural: the fact that human beings haven't always waged war against each other. On the contrary, there's a lot of evidence which suggests that war is only a fairly recent historical development.

Most pre-historians (that is, historians who investigate the centuries before the civilisations of Sumeria and Egypt) and archaelogists agree that the 'age of war' only actually began around 5,000 years ago. Before then, it seems, human beings did live in a kind of harmony with each other. Until around 10,000 BC all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, and all the evidence we have suggests that, as the Anthroplogist Robert Lawlor writes, 'the so-called primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle did not include the activity of warfare as we know it.' 

One way to verify this is to look at the peoples in the world who lived as hunter-gatherers until very recently. The different tribes of the Australian aborigines, for example, very rarely fought against each other, and even when they did it was common to 'ritualise' the conflict into a fight between two individuals. A representative of each tribe would be chosen, and the two men would stand motionless, about 25 metres apart, and throw spears at each other. When one of them was wounded the 'war' would be over. 

The Native Americans became much more war-like as a result of their conflicts with European colonists, and certain tribes (like the Aztecs and the Sioux) were always aggressive, but in general war was a much less prominent part of life for them than for Europeans. For them 'war' usually only meant short sporadic raids, in order to find slaves or victims for sacrifice, and attacking sides would usually stop fighting as soon as they suffered casualties, believing that nothing was worth the loss of their own people. They never fought long battles, and very rarely invaded other tribes' territory and tried to conquer them. 

At around 10,000 BC the agricultural revolution began - people started to 'settle down' into villages and townships, where they cultivated crops and domesticated animals. Some historians see this as the beginning of the 'age of war', but the historical evidence doesn't support this. The period of history from 10,000 BC until 3000 BC was also, it seems, a time of peace. Archaelogist's diggings from this period show, as the historian Lewis Mumford wrote, 'the complete absence of weapons.' Villages were built in easily accessible areas, and didn't have walls around them, which suggests that there was no threat from invaders. The cave and vase drawings which have survived from this period show no weapons or scenes of fighting. But perhaps most impressively, some Neolithic cultures existed for thousands of years, and show no sign of being damaged or disrupted by war. This is true of the ancient town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey, for example, and of the neolithic civilisations of Malta and Crete (at least until their ultimate destruction by Indo-European invaders). As the archaelogist J.D. Evans writes of the neolithic cultures of Malta, for example, 'No more peaceable society seems ever to have existed.' 

The Age of War

But this age came to a very abrupt end. During the third millenium BC the whole of Europe and much of the rest of the world erupted with war. 

A people who archaelogists now call the 'Indo-Europeans' were largely responsible for this - they branched out from their homeland in the steppes of Southern Russia and waged war against the peaceful neolithic tribes, gradually conquering the whole of Europe and beyond. But there were other war-like peoples too, all of them based around central Europe and Northern Africa: the Egyptians, the Mesopotanians and the Semitic peoples. As Ken Wilber writes in Up From Eden, 'The simple fact is that, around the 3rd millenium BC, especially in Sumer...modern massive warfare of one state against another was born.'

From this point on war became a central part of human life. Villages and towns began to be built inland and on hills, where they were less vulnerable. Whereas the 'Old Europeans' had worshipped goddess figures who symbolised the fertility and benevolence of nature, people now began to worship warrior gods - fearsome and cruel gods like Yahweh of the Old Testament. People were buried with weapons, to help them to defend themselves in the afterlife, and their artwork was filled with images of war. 

Other kinds of conflict and violence became rife too. Pirates roamed the mediterrean, attacking ships and coastal settlements, and robbery became so widespread that, as the Greek historian Thucydides notes, writing in 500 BC, 'in ancient times, all Greeks carried weapons because their homes were undefended and intercourse was unsafe.'

And we've basically been fighting ever since. 

The 'Ego Explosion'

It's generally agreed that the cause of this transition was a change in the human psyche - or at least in the psyche of the peoples who were responsible for this eruption of war. 
Some writers have used the phrase the 'brain explosion' to describe the rapid growth of the human brain during our evolution, and it's equally apt to use the phrase 'ego explosion' to describe what happened during the third millenium BC. All the evidence suggests that these peoples developed something which human beings had never had before: a strong sense of individual identity, an internalised sense of 'I' which they could use to talk themselves with and make decisions - in other words, a strong sense of ego. This isn't to say that people before then didn't have a sense of being individuals, or that the other peoples in the world who didn't undergo this development don't have this, but it seems that at this time, for these peoples, the sense of 'I-ness' became much stronger than ever before.

It was this that enabled these peoples to create the first modern civilisations - their strongly developed sense of ego meant that they were more self-reflective and better at problem-solving, and therefore that they were very practical and inventive. But the 'ego explosion' also caused many problems. It meant that, for the first time, human beings had a sense of real separateness - separateness from each other and separateness from nature. We became individualistic and selfish, and developed a sense of disconnection from the natural world which has led to our present environmental problems. We even developed a sense of separateness to our own bodies too, which meant that we began to think of the 'flesh' as somehow 'sinful', and to think of instincts and bodily processess like sex and menstruation as 'unclean' and shameful. We lost the sense of inner harmony and the feeling of being 'at home' in the world which people had had before, and began to experience a sense of self-division and of being at odds with the world. 

Causes of War 

The question we really need to to answer though is: how did the stronger sense of ego which human beings developed during this time cause an eruption of war? 

There are several probable reasons for this. As I've just suggested, the ego explosion meant that people began to experience a sense of inner discontent. They experienced a painful sense of separation and isolation, of being trapped in their heads with the rest of the world 'out there'. And their strongly developed egos also meant that, like modern human beings, they experienced constant 'thought chatter' - the endless stream of daydreams, memories, images, worries etc. which runs through our minds. 

This also causes inner discontent because it disturbs our being, and in addition because 'thought chatter' is usually negatively based and focused around worries and problems, and so gives rise to anxiety, depression and other negative states. 

Because of this, in an effort to compensate for their inner discontent, human beings started to look for well-being from external things. They began to started thinking of happiness in terms of owning goods and gaining status and power, instinctively believing that these things would fill the 'lack' they felt inside them. And the 'war instinct' grew out of this. Invading other people's territories and attempting to conquer them became a way of gaining new material goods and new territory, of gaining new power, and of increasing the glory and status of their tribe or 'empire'. 

The ego explosion also meant that 'boredom' became part of the human condition. Human beings began to find it impossible to 'do nothing', partly because when there's nothing outside us to focus our attention on to we have to face the inner turmoil of our ego-isolation and 'thought chatter'; and also because, now that people were living 'in their heads' rather than actually in the world, the world became a much less colourful and fascinating place than earlier human beings experienced it as. And it's possible to say that the 'war instinct' was also partly rooted in a desire to escape restlessness and boredom. In other words - trite though it may sound - war became a kind of entertainment, which was necessary because human beings desperately needed activity, since they now found it impossible to just stay in their villages and live sedate lives. The French scientist and philosopher Pascal recognised this 350 years ago, in his famous Pensees, where he notes that,'the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room...The only good thing for men is to be diverted from thinking what they are...that is why gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular.'

The 'ego explosion' also made war possible because people became less able to empathise with others. A strong sense of ego means that you're always preoccupied with yourself, that it's difficult for you to identify with others and to feel compassion towards them. And this meant that human beings were capable of all kinds of cruelties and atrocities which would've been foreign to them before. They had no qualms about torturing and killing other people because they couldn't 'feel with' them and get a sense of the pain and suffering they were causing. 

Technology was undoubtedly a factor too. As I've said, the development of this stronger sense of ego gave people greater powers of invention and practicality, and it was these which gave rise to modern civilisation. And these same powers also gave rise to new weapons, new systems of transport, and more efficient organisation, all of which meant human beings were capable of violence and destruction on a massive scale. 

Beyond War

What this really means is that conflict between different human beings is the result of the conflict which goes on inside every human being; the consequence of the inner turmoil and discontent which we all experience as a result of the 'ego explosion'.
As long as this inner conflict is there, there will always be war in the world. The only sure way to go beyond war is to make peace with ourselves. 

And the good news is that there is a tried and tested method of doing this: through the practice of spirituality. The whole point of spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Vedanta and Tantra is to overcome exactly those problems which the 'ego explosion' has left us with. Through spiritual practice - mainly the practice of meditation - we learn to tame our chattering egos, so that our beings are no longer disturbed by 'thought chatter', and we gradually transcend our painful sense of separate 'I-ness' and develop a sense of unity with other human beings, other living beings and the universe itself. We also make contact with the source of our being, the pure consciousness inside us, and experience the serene contentment which is its nature. For these reasons, we develop a sense of inner well-being which means that we no longer have to look for happiness from materialism and power; we no longer experience boredom either, and we have a natural sense of empathy with other human beings which makes violence impossible. 

In view of this, it's perhaps significant that there are some signs that the human race as a whole is moving beyond war. There are still many wars and conflicts in the world, of course, but probably fewer than at any other time in history (at least in the last 5,000 years.) As the social scientist Duane Elgin notes, for instance, we seem to be moving into an 'age of of reconciliation', in which we are 'shifting out of the adolescent reactive mode into the adult interactive mode of negotiation.' This might well be another indication of the collective spiritual development which the human race seems to be undergoing, the collective 'awakening' which so many researchers and writers believe is taking place now. It may be that a new sense of inner peace is spreading through people in general, which might eventually lead to a new age of peace in the world.

(originally published in New Renaissance, Vol. 9, no.3, 2000)

At first sight the human race's future seems so bleak that a pessimist might be forgiven for believing that we might not even have very much of a future. After all, there are certainly very good grounds for pessimism if we look at the world's present environmental predicament.

A report published last year by a number of organisations - including the World Conservation Monitoring Centre at Cambridge University - shows that environmental destruction is accelerating at an alarming rate. According to the report, the world's freshwater resources are being dangerously depleted, with half of the available resources being used already, and the figure increasing by 6% a year. As well as this, since 1970 the consumption of wood and paper has increased by two-thirds, consumption of the world's fish resources has doubled so that now they are 'in serious decline', carbon dioxide emissions have doubled and are continuing to increase, and, perhaps most worryingly of all, the overall situation is getting worse now that many 'developing' countries are growing economically and beginning to deplete their own supplies of natural resources.

It's also clear that Global warming has already begun to cause serious problems to the world's climatic system. Figures recently released by the world's insurance industries show that 1998 was the by far the worst year on record for natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes and floods. In fact during this one year the world suffered more than twice as much damage than in all the decade of the 1980s, and scientists expect the situation to get worse, with the world entering a 'new era' of hurricanes. 

The Indo-Europeans

An observer from another planet would probably come to the conclusion that the human race has agreed to some sort of collective suicide pact, perhaps decided that life isn't worth living after all, and resolved to make themselves an extinct species within the next hundred years. 

Or perhaps they would look back at history and come to the conclusion that this self-extinction was more or less inevitable right from the beginning. Because we can, in fact, trace the existence of the particular human group which is mainly responsible for the problems back thousands of years - back to around 4000 B.C., for example, when a group of human beings who archaeologists later called the Indo-Europeans began to branch out from their homeland in the steppes of Southern Russia.

At this time most of Europe was inhabited by Neolithic peoples who, as the archaeological evidence shows, lived in a very similar way to the native inhabitants of the continents of America and Australasia. As Riane Eisler shows in her important book The Chalice and The Blade, these people were artistic, spiritual and felt a strong sense of connection to nature. Their societies were remarkably egalitarian and non-hierarchical, with women afforded the same status us men. They worshipped goddesses rather than male gods, and, perhaps most strikingly, there is an absence of fortifications in their settlements and of warrior images in the art they have left us which suggests that they weren't aggressive or war-like. 

The Indo-Europeans were different, however. The archaeological evidence makes it clear that they were a war-like people who worshipped 'the power of the blade' rather than nature, whose gods were all male and whose society was rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal. And when, at around 4000 B.C., the Indo-Europeans began to enter the territories occupied by the Neolithic peoples the outcome was probably inevitable : they 'conquered' the whole of Europe and parts of Asia, and the old European culture of the Neolithic peoples was replaced by a new one based on their values. 

Over time these Indo-Europeans subdivided into many different groups - they became the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Germanic peoples and many others. But no matter how culturally divergent they became they retained the basic Indo-European value system, and developed similarly patriarchal, hierarchical and war-like societies, worshipping male gods and developing a concept of nature as an enemy to be conquered and exploited. 

These original Indo-Europeans are the ancestors of modern Europeans, of course, and of modern North and South Americans and Australians too. It was their development of chariots and horses as a form of transport which enabled the original Indo-Europeans to conquer old Europe, and, thousands of years later, the ship-building and sea-faring prowess of the 'Indo-Europeans' of western Europe enabled them to cross the oceans to distant continents. And there, from the !6th century onwards, they destroyed the native American and Aborigine cultures with the same ruthlessness that their ancestors had destroyed the old European Neolithic culture, and replaced them with new societies firmly based upon the old Indo-European 'dominator' principles. 

The Old State of Being 

What this suggests is that there was something wrong with the Indo-European 'state of being' right from the beginning. Above all, what characterises the modern American or European (or the old Indo-European) mentality is a highly developed sense of ego.

 In contrast to native peoples like Aborigines or native Americans (and probably the Neolithic peoples) we experience ourselves as sharply defined 'selves' which live inside our brains and ou r bodies and exist in complete separation to other human beings and to nature. Because of this, we're literally more 'selfish' - that is, our own needs and desires are usually much more real and more important to us than the welfare of other species, the environment as a whole, or even other people. And it also means that we tend to live inside our heads instead of actually in the world. We're so busy thinking and worrying and planning that it's unusual for us to actually give our attention to our surroundings, which means that the natural world isn't as real to us as it is to other peoples who haven't got such strongly developed egos. 

Perhaps the original Indo-Europeans developed this state of being because of the hostile climatic conditions in which they originated - in the steppes of southern Russia - which meant that they had to develop a certain selfishness and a competitiveness to survive, which peoples who originated in more pleasant climates didn't need. And we can certainly see the roots of our present environmental problems in this state of being - the lack of connection to nature, and the lack of a sense of the 'alive-ness' of natural things which has resulted in us treating nature something 'other' to us which we're entitled to conquer, abuse and exploit. 

A New State of Being

Looking at the problem from this perspective also makes it clear what is required for us to overcome our present problems and ensure our species' survival. Since the fundamental problem is our state of being, we need to collectively develop a new state of being. 

We need to overcome our sense of ego-separation, develop and new sense of connection to the world and a new sense of spirituality - in fact, to develop a state of being similar to that of native peoples and of the old Neolithic peoples. 

This might seem to be another cause for pessimism. After all, how can we expect hundreds of millions of people to somehow transform themselves in this way, especially when it seems that they've only got a very limited amount of time to do it in? But this is, in fact, one of the biggest sources of optimism in our present predicament - because there's a lot of evidence which suggests that such a widespread transformation actually is taking place. 

We can see this most clearly in the amazing growth of the 'personal development' movement over the last forty or so years, the massive upsurge in interest in eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, spiritual practices like meditation and yoga, and in other 'alternative' spiritually based practices like Reiki healing, Rebirthing, Shamanism etc. Research conducted by Peter Russell (reported in his book The Awakening Earth) showed that this interest in self-development is the fastest growing trend in the modern world, with the number of people who are involved in it one way or another doubling every four years. 

It's also evident in a slightly more obscure way from the increasing restlessness which seems to be spreading through our societies. More and more people are, it seems, finding themselves unable to live the 'ordinary life' which is expected of them, in which they're supposed to live in exactly the same 'life-situation' for years on end, doing the same jobs and going through the same daily and weekly routines and restricting themselves to a narrow range of experience. There seem be an increasing number of 'misfits' or 'drop-outs', people who switch from one job to another instead of sticking to one career, who go travelling around the world, who find the routine of work to soul-destroying to put up with and resign themselves to life 'on the dole', or people who perhaps do live an ordinary life with jobs and mortgages but feel as if they're trapped and ache to break free. This suggests that there's an increasing alive-ness spreading amongst people, an increasing desire for experience and unfamiliarity, and a growing realisation that the purpose of life isn't just to 'get on' in the world and to enjoy yourself by treating yourself to material goods and sensual pleasures. 

There's also an increasing spirit of empathy spreading through our societies which we can also see as evidence that a collective change is taking place, since it suggests that people in general are becoming less selfish and separate. Studies of life in previous centuries - such as Colin Wilson's A Criminal History of Mankind - make it clear that our ancestors were generally much more cruel and indifferent to other people's sufferings than us. As Wilson writes, 'Our present concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Doctor Johnson would simply have condemned it as a dangerous sentimentality.' But since then, and especially over the last forty years or so, people seem to have developed a much more pronounced ability to identify with and to feel for others (including the members of other species). In recent decades this has manifested itself in, for example, better treatment for disabled people, a decline in racism, more equality and social acceptance for gays, an increase in vegetarianism etc. 

Morphic Resonance

It seems obvious that this change is taking place in response to the dangers we're facing. Perhaps it's being caused by a deep-seated survival impulse somewhere within the collective being of our species, or perhaps, in some mysterious way, nature herself may be engineering it. 

After all, it's not just a question of making ourselves an extinct species - if our ecological destruction continues it'll have terrible consequences for all life on earth, and probably set back the process of evolution by millions of years. So perhaps the sheer catastrophic weight of the crisis has triggered a response from nature, and she's implemented a sort of 'check' similar to the natural 'checks' which some animal species undergo when their populations have grown too big. 

A pessimist might say that even if all this is true it doesn't make much difference because there's nowhere near enough time left for a collective transformation like this to occur. After all, the change only seems to have affected a minority of people so far, and it's probable that if our ecological destruction continues for a few more decades it'll already be too late. 

But this is where we come in. We don't have to just leave it to nature to spread this new state of being throughout our species, because we can, in a very real sense, help to spread it ourselves. As the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has shown, the changes which individual members of a species undergo affect the species as a whole. When some members of the species develop a new trait its 'morphic resonance' builds up, making it easier for other members of the species to develop the same trait, until eventually, when the morphic resonance has built up sufficiently, the trait is taken on by all members of the species, and becomes a part of the 'species blueprint' which members of the species develop in accordance with from the moment of conception. So for us this means that by developing ourselves spiritually and moving towards a new state of being, we're prompting other human beings around the world to do the same. We're influencing them, building up the morphic resonance for this new state of being, and eventually, when a certain 'threshold number' of human beings have moved towards it, the state of being will permeate our species as a whole, and become as natural to us as our present one is. 

The responsibility for the human race's future doesn't, therefore, just lie in the hands of governments, global corporations or environmental groups; it lies with every one of us. We all have a choice to make. If you like you can forget about the future and just spend your life enjoying the hedonistic spoils of capitalism, earning and spending money and trying to become more and more successful so that you can earn and spend even more, in which case you'll be adding your signature to the human race's death warrant. On the other hand you can make spiritual development the main purpose of your life, in the knowledge by changing yourself you're helping the whole the human race to change - in which case you'll be helping to lead our species away from a catastrophic future, and towards a new harmonious one.

(Published in Paranormal Magazine, December 2006)

The basics of the near-death experience (or NDE) are probably familiar to most readers of this article already. Many people who clinically die for a short time - when their breathing and their hearts have stopped and their brains have shown no electric activity - find that their consciousness continues. They undergo an incredibly blissful and exhilarating experience, which is so powerful that they may not actually want to return to life and perhaps even be angry with the doctors who have resuscitated them. 

These experiences first came to wide public attention during the 1970s, with the research of psychologists such as Raymond Moody. However, examples of them have been recorded throughout human history, beginning with Plato's account of in The Republic of a soldier who was apparently killed in battle, and taken home to be buried. Fortunately for him, he revived on the funeral pyre, and stated that while unconscious he had left his body and travelled to strange country where he had seen other dead soldiers choosing their next life. 

Due to the advances of modern medicine (particularly in resuscitation techniques) reports of the experiences have become very widespread over recent decades. Different studies have found that between 12% and 43% of people who were clinically dead and then revived have had the experience. Typically, it begins with a feeling of separation from the body (in many cases an out-of-body experience in which you look down on yourself from above), followed by a journey through a dark passage towards a place of light. There is often a life-review in which all the events and experiences of your life flash before you. Often people meet deceased relatives or beings of light, who sometimes persuade them that It's not your time yet (as a friend of mine who died during a heart operation was told by his father), and persuade them to return to their bodies. 

However, one of the most significant aspects of NDEs, as I see it, is that they always incorporate powerful spiritual experiences. When the person leaves his or her body and travels through the tunnel towards the light, he or she almost always has an intense sense of well-being, a profound feeling of love, and a sense of the one-ness and harmony of the universe. One heart attack victim who watched from above while parademics tried to restart his heart and then passed through a tunnel towards a light, commented that, There is no comparable place in physical reality to experience such total awareness. The love, protection, joy, giving sharing and being that I experienced in the Light at that moment was absolutely overwhelming and pure in its essence. (Fontana 387) Another person reported that, It was just pure consciousness. And this enormously bright light seemed to cradle me. I just seemed to exist in it and be part of it and be nurtured by it and the feeling just became more and more ecstatic and glorious and perfect. Other descriptions of near death experiences contain phrases such as: a sense of exultation was accompanied by a feeling of being very close to the 'source' of light and love ; Time no longer mattered and space was filled with bliss - I was bathed in radiant light and immersed in the aura of the rainbow ; and finally I was one with pure light and love - I was one with God and at the same time one with everything.  

These are clearly experiences of the formless Void, the brilliant radiance of pure Spirit. They are practically indistinguishable from the powerful spiritual experiences described by great mystics like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart or Ramakrishna. Most people only rarely experience these states during their actual lives, if at all, although we might sometimes have less intense variants of them as a result of meditation, yoga, sex or relaxation. (And sometimes, of course, for no apparent reason.) But these intense spiritual states are always, it seems, a feature of the near death experience. 

But why should the near death experience also be a powerful spiritual experience? To answer this, we need to look at the basic causes of spiritual experiences. As I see it, there are two of these. The first is what you could call disrupting homeostasis. Throughout history people have tried to induce mystical experiences (or higher states of consciousness) by disrupting the normal homeostasis of the human organism. Homeostasis includes such factors as body temperature, blood sugar, salt concentration, and so on, all of which must remain at - or quickly return to - an optimum level. To a large extent our bodies maintain homeostasis automatically, by breathing, digesting food, sweating and shivering, for example. And we also help the process by performing physical functions like eating, drinking and sleeping. But when we don't satisfy these needs and put our bodies out of homeostasis , it's possible that we'll experience a higher state of consciousness. This is why many spiritual and shamanic traditions make use of practices like fasting, sleep deprivation, altered breathing (such as hyperventiliation), drug-taking, pain, dancing, and so on. Our normal state of consciousness seems to be linked to homeostasis, perhaps because, from the standpoint of survival, our normal consciousness is our optimum mode. So when we disrupt homeostasis, we also disrupt normal consciousness. This doesn't mean that we always have spiritual experiences, of course - we've all had many times in our lives where we've been hungry, in pain or deprived of sleep without experiencing anything apart from discomfort. But in the right conditions - usually in the setting of a ritual or in the context of a religious tradition - they certainly can occur.

The second main source of spiritual experiences is, I believe, connected to life-energy, or the energy of our being. Spiritual experiences can occur when there is a higher than usual concentration of life-energy inside us, and when this energy becomes much more stilled than normal. This is why meditation often generates spiritual experiences, for example. Normally, in everyday life, there is a continual outflow of life-energy. We expend it through the thought-chatter which hurtles through our minds whenever they aren't occupied. We expend it in mental effort, when we focus our attention on the tasks and chores which fill our lives, be it driving a car, doing a crossword, building a house or inputting information into a computer. We expend it in information-processing, the effort we make to process all of the sights and sounds around us at every moment, and the information which comes our way from the media, books, the internet or just from other people who we talk to. And finally, our life-energy fuels the functioning of our bodies. Our vital organs and other physiological mechanisms need life-energy to keep working. 

But when a person sits down to meditate, she stops (or at least reduces) all of these outflows . She sits in quietness with her eyes closed, and so doesn't have to process any information. She stops making any mental efforts, apart from maybe the effort of keeping her attention focused on a mantra. As she becomes relaxed her body becomes more still too, as her breathing slows down and her blood pressure falls. And most importantly, if she has a successful meditation, her thought-chatter begins to fade away too. Her mind becomes still rather than full of a chaos of thoughts, which stops what is probably the biggest single outflow of energy. 

The end effect of this is that, after a successful meditation, there is an intense inner concentration of life-energy. And this life-energy is also still, rather than disturbed by what Meister Eckhart called the storm of inward thought. Now the meditator's being is like the still surface of a lake rather than a stormy sea. And this intensification and stillness of life-energy usually results in a spiritual experience - a sense of inner well-being, a heightened awareness of the world, a sense of harmony, oneness and meaning. 

This helps to explain why activities listening to music, contemplating nature or works of art, sex, or certain sports (like long-distance running or swimming) can sometimes bring spiritual experiences. They all provide a strong focus for the attention - the music, the beauty of nature or art, the pleasure of sex and the game - which acts like a mantra in meditation, quietening the storm of inward thought and conserving life-energy. 

And this also helps to explain why spiritual experiences occur at the point of death. At the moment of death, it seems, our life-energy (or spirit, if you like) departs from the material body. The consciousness and the life-energy which constitute our being still exist, but are no longer tied to the body. There's an immediate freeing of life-energy due to the fact that the energy no longer has to fuel the body's physiological functioning. Most people who have near death experiences feel that they still have a body of some form, but a lighter and less crude one (this may be what esoteric traditions have called the energy body, or the astral body), which probably monopolises less life-energy. It's likely that at the point of death there will be a smaller outflow of life-energy from the ego too. After the experience of dying - perhaps involving periods of unconsciousness, or of pain and trauma - the ego-mind is likely to be much more subdued and still than normal. The process of dying is often a process of detachment as well. In ordinary life, our identity is bound up with a whole host of extraneous things: possessions, status, knowledge we've accumulated, hopes, beliefs etc. In the process of dying - particularly if it's a drawn out process - people often let go of these attachments, realising that they can't take them with them and that their true identity lies apart from them. These attachments can be seen as psychic structures which also use up life-energy and create disturbance inside our being, and so being released them from them would also create a higher intensity and stillness of life-energy. 

The good news is that this intense spiritual experience - of the formless Void which is the radiant and blissful essence of reality - may be waiting for all of us when we die. Many mystics have told us that there's no reason to be afraid of death, not just because life continues but because the process of dropping off the material body is a euphoric, liberating experience. D.H. Lawrence saw death as the beginning of a great adventure in which - as he writes in his poem Gladness of Death - the winds of the afterwards kiss us into the blossom of manhood. After the painful experience of death there is, he writes, an after-gladness, a strange joy. In the same way, Walt Whitman heard Whispers of heavenly death around him, and wrote that to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. Or as the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes our initial experience of death: 

Your respiration ceases, all phenomena will become empty and utterly naked like space. [At the same time] a naked awareness will arise, not extraneous [to yourself], but radiant, empty and without horizon or centre. This intrinsic awareness, manifest in a great mass of light, in which radiance and emptiness are indivisible, is the Buddha [nature] of unchanging light, beyond birth or death. 

This spiritual state may not last indefinitely - after a certain amount of time, it seems, we reach a more crude state of existence, which is in some ways similar to our life on earth, although more subtle and spiritual. However, it's clear that the horror and trepidation which many people feel when they think about death is misplaced.

(Written in 2002)

Richard Dawkins is the high priest of popular science, this country's unofficial scientist laureate. His theories have helped to form the generally accepted scientific 'rational' worldview of our culture, which most of our institutions, our media, and our respected intellectuals accept as 'reality'. The main tenets of this worldview can perhaps be summarised as follows: 

- Life came into being by accident, through the interactions of certain chemicals. Once it had come into existence, it evolved from simple to more complex forms through randomly occurring genetic mutations acted on by natural selection. 

- Living beings consist of 'selfish genes' whose mission is to replicate themselves. Human beings are merely vehicles for the propagation of our genetic material. The desire for genetic replication is the main motivation of everything we do. 

- All of our instincts, emotions and behavioural traits are related to certain genes. These characteristics exist in us because they had survival value for our prehistoric ancestors. As a result the genes they are related to were 'selected'. For example, it was genetically beneficial for men to be polygamous, since this meant that their genetic material could be replicated more frequently, and so men have a natural tendency to be unfaithful. Rape also has a genetic basis; we can see it as a desperate to attempt to replicate their genes by men who cannot attract willing sexual partners. At least this the view of the contemporary 'science' of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to explain this genetic and evolutionary basis of our behaviour. 

- Since living beings are nothing more than their physical or chemical components, there can be such thing as a 'soul' or 'lifeforce'. What we experience as 'consciousness' is produced by the working together of the billions of neurons in our brains. As a result there can't be any life after death. Our consciousness dies with our brains, and nothing survives our bodies.

- Paranormal, 'mystical' or 'spiritual' phenomena cannot be genuine because they break the fundamental laws of nature. For example, there is no known energy field which could link one mind to another and make telepathy possible, and no known force which could account for the ability to move objects by mental effort.

The Neo-Darwinist Dogma

If you read one of Dawkins' books, or read the Guardian or listen to Radio 4, you might assume that these are completely undisputed 'truths' with enormous evidence behind them, which all scientists accept. But if you dig a little deeper you find that this isn't the case at all. You find that these tenets are closer to beliefs or assumptions than actual truths, and that there are many scientists who dispute them. In fact, it's interesting that most of the prominent supporters of Dawkins' views are not biologists - Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, for example, while Steven Pinker is a psychologist. Amongst biologists themselves, there is a great deal more scepticism.

We also tend to forget that Neo-Darwinism is primarily an Anglo-American phenomenon. In general, continental scientists have been less impressed with it. One problem with Neo-Darwinism is that mutations only occur at a rate of about one per several million cells in every generation. Since only a tiny number create beneficial traits which give a survival advantage, some scientists have doubted that this frequency is enough to give rise to the amazing variety of life forms the world contains. And a further problem here, as the French anti-Darwinist scientist Andree Tetry pointed out, is that it's not just a question of mutations being beneficial, they also have to be cumulative. Each mutation has to 'adjust itself to the preceding mutation, and occur at precisely the right place and time.' Imagine the thousands of separate genetic mutations which would be needed to produce birds' wings, Tetry suggested. Each one would have to be exactly the right kind of mutation in terms of the previous one, to create the next step along the line of development to wings, and each time the odds against these occurring accidentally would increase massively. 

There is also the problem that favourable mutations would soon be lost by interbreeding with non-mutated members of a species. Darwin himself saw this as the biggest problem of his theory, and Neo-Darwinists have never convincingly solved it. It's easy to see how this 'crossing' might be avoided with animals - they might just physically move away from the species, for instance - but not with the vegetable kingdom. As the eminent French zoologist Pierre Paul Grasse pointed out, mutations only cause trivial changes. There are, he stated, invisible boundaries between species which mutations cannot cross, so that they can cause variation but never true evolution.

Other arguments against Neo-Darwinism will be familiar to readers of this magazine. For example, biologists such Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have argued that the driving force of evolution is not competition but co-operation. Living beings do not survive by fighting against one another, but by interaction and mutual dependence. Strictly speaking, 'the survival of the fittest' does not mean the survival of the strongest or the most selfish, but the survival of those who interact most effectively. While systems theorists have shown that natural systems and organisms have an innate tendency to move towards complexity, creating a structures which are more than the sum of parts. Apparent order and complexity are not created by genetic mutations, but by the innate 'emergent' properties of matter.

In addition, the developing science of epigenetics suggests that genes may be switched on and off by environmental factors, and that once genes are 'switched on', they may continue to be active for descendents. For example, it seems that if someone experiences malnutrition or stress, this can cause changes which are passed down through future generations. In a 2006 study in Sweden, the scientists Marcus Pembrey and Lars Olav Bygren found that if a 19th century person experienced famine in their life, it has an effect on the life expectancy of their 20th century grandchildren. Research at Washington State University has shown that if rats are exposed to toxic substances like fungicides or pesticides, it causes biological changes which last for at least four generations, and possibly more. Similarly, after the 9/11 disaster, the psychologist Rachel Yehuda studied the effects of stress on pregnant women in or near the World Trade Center. Her results suggested that the effects were passed on to the women's children. In other words, this suggests that the much maligned early French biologist Lamarck - who suggested that evolution proceeds through the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics' - may not have been completely wrong.

Anthropological Evidence against the Selfish Gene 

Dawkins' own most prominent contribution to the Neo-Darwinist paradigm, the concept of the selfish gene, leads to a host of pernicious assumptions about 'human nature.' If ultimately all that matters for us is the survival of our genes, then it's inevitable that human beings - and all other living beings - should be competitive, greedy, aggressive and war-like. It's inevitable that different human groups fight over territory and oil supplies, it's inevitable that societies consist of different classes and that the powerful oppress the weak, and it's inevitable that we all look after number one and keep all our millions of dollars in the bank instead of giving them to starving people on the other side of the world. As we saw earlier, some evolutionary psychologists see rape as an inevitable consequence of our selfish genes' desire for replication. Racism is also 'inevitable'. The evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer, for example, sees racism as 'a consequence of highly effective economic strategies', enabling us to 'keep members of other groups in a lower-status position, with distinctly worse benefits.' In other words, we keep people from other groups away from our resources and treat them badly so that we can decrease their chance of genetic survival and increase our own. The 'selfish gene' theory denies the most noble of human characteristics - our capacity for self-sacrifice, compassion and altruism - or else ingeniously explains them away as 'mistakes' or 'disguised self-interest' or 'recipocral altruism'. 

However, from an anthropological perspective, there are some serious objections to this view of human nature. It's completely wrong to assume that all human societies are - or have been - competitive and hierarchical. In fact anthropologists and archaeologists generally agree that the most ancient human societies were extremely egalitarian and democratic. Until about 10,000 years ago, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, in bands of up to 40, moving from site to site every few months when food supplies grew low. The contemporary hunter-gatherer societies which we know of usually do not have leader figures. They might have a nominal chief, but his power is very limited, and he can easily be deposed if the rest of the group aren't satisfied with his leadership. Decisions are usually arrived at by group discussion, and food is never hoarded individually but always shared amongst the group. There are no status or wealth differences. As the anthropologist Christopher Boehm summarises, 'This egalitarian approach seems to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism'. 

One possible argument here might be that these groups are effectively extended families, and so by being egalitarian they're effectively ensuring the survival of their common genetic material. As Dawkins explains the occasional altruistic behaviour of animals, 'altruism at the level of the individual organism can be a means by which the underlying genes maximise their self interest.' However, we would still expect there to be some expression of selfishness and competitiveness, at times when the interest of their selfish genes is better served by individualistic and non-cooperative behaviour. But such behaviour does not occur.  

Another argument might be that, although they may work co-operatively as individuals, as groups these peoples might be extremely competitive. All of their competitive instincts might go into fighting with other groups. After all, haven't all human groups always fought tooth and nail and done their best to exterminate each other? But this isn't true either. Hunter-gatherer groups are usually extremely peaceful, and when conflicts do occur they are often ritualised into less dangerous forms. For example, if Australian aborigine tribes had a potential conflict, one person from each tribe would be chosen, and, standing stationery around thirty metres apart, would throw spears at each other. When one of them was wounded the conflict would be over and the other tribe would be seen as the winner. One anthropologist, J.M.G. van der Dennen, has surveyed over 500 of the world's remaining native peoples, and found that the vast majority of them are 'highly unwar-like', with a small proportion who have 'mild, low-level, or ritualized warfare'. 

And this doesn't just apply to hunter-gatherers. There are many sedentary tribal peoples who are egalitarian and peaceful. There are also examples of ancient towns and even whole civilisations which existed without social inequality and war. This is true of the ancient Turkish city of Catal Huyuk, for example, which existed for 2000 years with no evidence of damage through warfare, or the ancient civilisation of Crete. According to the archaeologist Nicolas Platon, the ancient Cretans were 'an exceptionally peace-loving people' who showed no evidence of warfare either at home or abroad for over 1,500 years. Their towns had no military fortifications, their villas were built facing the sea (showing that there was no danger of attack by pirates or invaders) and there is no sign that the islands' different city-states fought against each other. The Cretans also had, in the words of Riane Eisler, 'a rather equitable distribution of wealth', the result of which was an apparent lack of poverty and a high standard of living for peasants. 

Neo-Darwinists and evolutionary psychologists don't attempt to deal with these issues. In general, they display an almost complete ignorance of anthropology and archaeology. They speak of an 'environment of evolutionary adaptation'(EEA), usually locating this on the African Savannah, but never attempt to investigate who these early humans were, or how they might have lived. And in fact, from their point of view this ignorance is advisable, since the evidence clearly contravenes their theories.

As mentioned above, Dawkins doesn't believe that altruism contradicts the 'genetic selfishness' of living beings. After all, it's usually directed towards people who share the same genes as us, members of our own families or communities, so that when we sacrifice ourselves for them this may mean actually perpetuating our own genes. At the same time the benevolence we give out is usually returned to us at some point. By being altruistic to others when they need it, we help to ensure that people help us in our hour of need - another indirect way of looking after ourselves. 

But this doesn't seem to go far enough. Many people behave altruistically to people who have no connection to them whatsoever, without any expectation or possibility of being helped back. What about a friend of mine who went to India for a holiday and was so affected by the poverty he saw that he decided to go back and spend a year working at Mother Teresa's hospital in Calcutta? His desire to help was so pure and unconditional that it's difficult to understand how - even on an unconscious or instinctive level - it might have been part of security policy to try to ensure that he was helped back if he ever fell into poverty himself, or even a way of increasing his status amongst his peers. And what about altruism towards members of different species? If I donate money to an animal charity, stop to pick up an injured bird on the road and go 10 miles out of my way to take it to the nearest vet, or pick up a spider from my bath, take it all the way downstairs and deposit it safely in my garden (which I often do myself) - am I really doing this because I expect members of these species to come to my aid in times of trouble? It's unlikely that I'm doing it for genetic reasons, unless there's a spider somewhere way back in my ancestry.

It's also worth remembering for a moment that genes are nothing more than chemicals. According to Neo-Darwinist ideology, these chemicals actually have control over me. I am completely subservient to them. Neo-Darwinism takes away all the autonomy, free will and intelligence which I thought I had and gives them to my genes.

Neo-Darwinism and the Higher Reaches of Human Nature

Some of the most absurd applications of Dawkins' Neo-Darwinism are its attempts to explain the 'higher reaches of human nature', such as human creativity, the appreciation of beauty, the urge for self-actualisation or for spiritual growth. 

According to Neo-Darwinism, everything we do is motivated by a desire for survival and genetic replication, and all our characteristics and habits were developed because they helped us to survive in the past. Steven Pinker has suggested, for example, that our sense of beauty is always directed towards natural phenomena which represented survival to our ancestors. This is why scenes of streams, trees, lush fields, fruit trees and flowers appear beautiful to us. And this does seem to make some sense - after all, we do generally find sterile and barren environments unattractive. As with evolutionary psychology in general, there's definitely something in it. The problem is that that 'something' is taken too far, and meant to account for the whole spectrum of human behaviour, ignoring myriad other factors. And there are, of course, all kinds of natural phenomena which we find beautiful despite the fact that they could have had no survival value for our ancestors whatsoever. One of the sights which human beings find most beautiful is a clear sky at night, with the velvet blackness and the stars and the moon. But the night environment has no survival value for us whatsoever - in fact, darkness was extremely dangerous to our ancestors. Desert environments could hardly be more inimical to human survival prospects, but many of us find them beautiful too. The recently deceased explorer William Thesinger, for example, wrote of the Sahara Desert: 'I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand.' 

In his book How the Mind Works Pinker also mulls over what he calls the 'puzzle' of human creativity. Why is it that so many people are driven to pursue artistic activities such as poetry, painting or composing music when these activities seem to have little survival value? The profound conclusion Pinker reaches is that creativity is linked to a desire for status. We write poems and novels and symphonies because we want to make a name for ourselves so that we can attract women and spread our genes as far and wide as possible. This might be true of a few rock musicians, but every creative person knows himself or herself that there's much more to it than that. If novelists and poets were really just after status then they would surely give up after their first year or so of rejection slips and become businessmen or drug dealers instead. And there are, of course, many artists who are completely unconcerned with recognition. A friend of mine has been writing poems profically for over 30 years and has never tried to get any of them published. 

Paranormal Phenomena and the Quantum World

In Unweaving the Rainbow Dawkins shows a surprising willingness to accept that human understanding of the world might be limited, and that science cannot give us the answer to everything. He discusses the idea that time began with the Big Bang, and writes that this is impossible for us to understand due to 'the limitations of our minds, which were only every designed to cope with slow, rather large objects on the African savannah'. He makes a similar point in his recent collection of essays, A Devil's Chaplain, when discussing Quantum physics. He writes that 'modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye, and than meets the all too limited human mind.' 

In the light of this, we might expect that Dawkins would have a similar open-minded attitude to paranormal phenomena. After all, isn't it possible that phenomena such as telepathy or pre-cognition - or even homeopathy or psychic healing - might work in ways which are beyond our understanding as well? But of course, completely hypocritically, Dawkins dismisses 'supernatural' phenomena with an almost hysterical vehemence. As he sees it, believe in the 'supernatural' phenomena is the result of a desire to regress to the comforting and colourful illusions of childhood. It's the result of a failure of nerve, a failure to develop a true, objective, rational vision of the world. This hypocrisy makes it clear that Dawkins' antipathy towards paranormal phenomena is not rational, but is a dogmatic reaction to phenomena which threaten the foundations of his worldview. 

Perhaps even stranger though, is the wilful blindness of mechanistic scientists towards certain areas of accepted modern science itself - in particular, towards quantum physics. 

Although he accepts the 'irrationality' of quantum physics, Dawkins doesn't accept the full consequences of this irrationality. He has said - as many sceptics do - that if paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and psychokenesis exist, this would break the present laws of physics, and involve completely new forces and fields whose existence physics has found absolutely no evidence for. But quantum physics itself contravenes the laws of physics - that is, the laws of Newtonian physics. Quantum phenomena as particle/wave duality and action across a distance make it clear that the laws of physics are not complete as they are, that there is much more to reality than mechanistic science believes, including new forces and fields. In fact paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and psychokenesis are completely compatible with the interconnected, immaterial world of quantum particles. Sceptics like Dawkins often attempt to separate off the sub-atomic world from the macrocosmic world, try to convince themselves that the strangeness of the sub-atomic world doesn't affect their ordered Newtonian world. But this is nonsense, of course. The sub-atomic world is this world, in the same way that the tiny black dots with different shades are the photo. All the particles in the universe have interacted with one another at some stage, right back to the Big Bang. As the science writer John Gribbin notes, 'The particles that make up my body once jostled in close proximity and interacted with the particles with the particles which now make up your body.' We are all part of a single system. The fundamental reality of this universe is interconnectedness. And in the light of this, paranormal phenomena aren't just possible, but inevitable. 

Anthropomorphic Arrogance 

The idea that there might be much more to reality than we can conceive of breaks ones of the assumptions at the heart of mechanistic science: the assumption that the world as it appears to us is the world as it is, that the human mind - or human consciousness - has access to absolute truth. 

It's this assumption which makes many scientists so sure that one day we will understand the universe completely, uncover all of its laws and explain all its phenomena. If we have access to absolute reality, then understanding the world is simply a question of investigating it in as much detail as we can. We just need to keep examining it, and eventually all our discoveries will add up into a 'theory of everything', and the great enterprise of science will be complete. 

This assumption is also the basis of scientists' certainty that there are really no such things as ghosts, gods and spirits, an afterlife and out of body experiences. These phenomena lie beyond our normal awareness of the world; they are not a part of our normal, tangible everyday reality. And so to accept them would mean that there is more to the world than everyday reality. But for any human being to believe that they have access to absolute truth is monstrous anthropomorphic arrogance. We are not aware of reality through an objective, camera-like vision; we are aware of reality through our own personal consciousness. In fact, any undergraduate philosophy student would recognise the absurdity of this assumption. As the great German philosopher Kant argued, our awareness of reality is filtered through the structures with which we perceive it. Our minds do not just observe reality, they co-create it. We cannot know reality as it is.

To assume that we're aware of absolute reality is to assume that our consciousness is absolute. But human beings are part of a whole spectrum of consciousness, which begins with amoebae, and moves through bacteria, insects, birds, higher animals and apes. All creatures in the evolutionary chain have a different level - or a different intensity - of consciousness. The more physically complex a living being is, and the later it evolved, the more awareness of reality is has - i.e. the more consciousness it has. An insect is more conscious of reality than an amoeba; a bird is more conscious of reality than an insect; a cow has more consciousness than bird; a monkey as more consciousness than a cow, and a human being - with the biggest and most complex brain - has more consciousness than a monkey. 

But evolution doesn't end with human beings, of course. At some point in the future other beings will come into existence, with more consciousness than us in the same way that we have more consciousness than apes. And with their more intense consciousness, they will perceive a different reality than us - a wider reality, including forces and fields and other phenomena which we can't conceive of, but which may explain some of the strange goings on in our world. 

The Neo-Darwinist Ideology 

The fact that, despite their shaky foundations, the tenets of mechanistic science are clung to so tightly and presented so aggressively as 'the truth' suggests that what we're really dealing with is not objective science so much as an ideology. 

The mechanistic view of the world has an enormous appeal because it appears to explain everything. To possess a complete and coherent picture of the world, which explains where we came from, who we are and what the world is, is a deep-rooted human need. On the one hand it gives us a sense of orientation and order, of knowing where we've come from and where we're going. And on the other hand it gives us a sense of power over the world. Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon said, and to feel that you completely understand nature and the world provides a satisfying sense of control, a feeling of superiority and dominion. Not knowing means living in uncertainty and confusion, and being subordinate to the mysterious forces of nature. 

This is part of the reason why religious sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses or the Church of Scientology are so appealing to many people. They offer a complete, watertight, self-sufficient view of the world which banishes any sense of existential confusion and doubt. As Erich Fromm pointed out, 'man's awareness of himself as being in a strange and overpowering world' creates an intense need for a 'cohesive frame of orientation' to explain the world. Until recent centuries religion provided this frame of orientation. The rise of science at the time of renaissance was so fiercely resisted partly because it blew apart the 'complete explanation of everything' which the Christian worldview provided, and therefore threatened people's sense of orientation and power over the world. 

Ironically, in this respect Dawkins' worldview is little different to the Christian worldview of 500 years ago, or the present day Bible Belt of U.S. fundamentalism - precisely the religious worldview he attacks so vigorously in The God Delusion. Both perform the same function, and satisfy the same need. As another academic who is highly sceptical of the claims of neo-Darwinism, Dorothy Nelkin of New York University, points out, 'Evolutionary psychology is a quasi-religious narrative, providing a simple and compelling answer to complex and enduring questions While represented as a scientific theory, [it] is rooted in a religious impulse to explain the meaning of life.' This makes is clear why the adherents of scientific materialism - the sceptics - react with such hostility to paranormal phenomena. They're reacting in exactly the same way as the popes and church leaders who tried Galileo and Giordano Bruno for heresy, trying to keep the 'frame of orientation' which gives meaning and purpose to their lives intact. The admission that telepathy or precognition might exist would send break it to pieces, and leave them bewildered and impotent in the face of the world. 

Dawkins and 'Bad Faith'

This might seem strange after spending the last few thousand words criticising him, but it wouldn't seem fair to end this essay without mentioning the few things I admire about Richard Dawkins. 

I admire his clear and fluent prose style and his 'no bullshit' approach to his subject matter. I admire his attempts to debunk religious beliefs and the vacuous intellectual posturings of post-modernist academics. And most of all, I admire his attempts to convince us that, in spite of the apparent bleakness of the mechanistic worldview, life is still full of meaning and worth living.

For him meaning comes from the very fact that we are alive at all, when the odds against any of us coming into being in the first place are so massive. As he writes stirringly, 'After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life.' His second source of meaning is the wonder of existence itself, the awe-inspiring complexity and intricacy of the world. Most of the time what he calls the 'anaesthetic of familiarity' dulls our minds to this, but if we could look at the world with 'first-time vision' we would be continually amazed by its richness and strangeness. Dawkins believes that the purpose of our lives should be to contemplate and to study this wonder, to spend our 'brief time in the sun' working towards 'understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it'. 

In these passages Dawkins has a tone of stoic existentialism. He's like Sartre encouraging us to value our freedom even though life is meaningless, or Nietszche encouraging us to 'praise in spite of'. But even here his attitude is dubious. He's not facing up to the full consequences of his own view of the world; in fact he's guilty of what Sartre called 'bad faith'. If we are nothing more than 'throwaway survival machines', if our lives have no other consequence than the replication of our genes, if life is just a 'brief spotlight' and then we're nothing for the rest of eternity, if the universe is empty and cold and purposeless, if there's no other causal force in the universe except blind chance - if all this was true, then no amount of complexity and intricacy would compensate us for it. To tell us to 'count our blessings' and look at how intricate everything is would be like telling a prisoner in solitary confinement to feel grateful because his cell is painted with bright colours. The most honest reaction to Dawkins' view of the world - and to the worldview of materialistic science in general - would be not to bother getting out of bed in the morning, to commit suicide, or to escape from the bleak reality by taking drugs or chasing after ego-gratification and sensory thrills. 

But fortunately we don't have to do any of these things, since this 'bleak reality' isn't the truth about the world anyway. 

Beyond Mechanistic Science

Well alright, the sceptics might say, if evolution didn't happen by random mutations and natural selection, if life didn't come into being accidentally, if consciousness isn't just a product of the brain and so on - how else are you going to explain these things? 

The most sensible way of looking at all of these problems is to accept that we don't have to know the answers to them, and that we may not even be capable of knowing the answers, because of the limitations of our consciousness. It may be that all we can do is to make pick up hints of an answer and make suggestions based on them. 

Since random mutations and natural selection don't seem capable of explaining evolution, we have to conclude - as Pierre-Paul Grasse did - that evolution is not accidental, but is propelled by some kind of force within living beings which makes them evolve along pre-determined lines. In other words, evolution might proceed according to some pre-determined pattern, a process of unfolding, like the development of a human being from conception through to birth and then adult maturity. This may very well be close to the elan vital envisaged by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. 

The key mistake of the mechanistic worldview is its assumption that 'life' and 'consciousness' are just products of the physical functioning of the body and brain. Partly as a result of neuroscientists' failure to explain consciousness in physical terms, many scientists and philosophers have suggested that consciousness may be something which is, in essence, outside the brain. As David Chalmers suggests, we should perhaps see consciousness as a fundamental force of the universe, like gravity. According to this view, consciousness is the ground of all reality, which pervades the whole universe and everything in it. It may be that, rather than actually producing consciousness, the human brain - or the brain of any living being - acts as a kind of receiver or transmitter of it. It translates the raw essence of universal consciousness into an individuated consciousness. 

According to this view, evolution is the process of organisms becoming more and more physically complex and in the process becoming capable of receiving and transmitting more consciousness. In these terms, the origin of life was presumably when inanimate matter became complex enough to act as a transmitter for consciousness - i.e. when the first single-celled organisms began to 'receive' consciousness and as a result became capable of reacting to and interacting with their environment. And evolution might be caused by the interaction of consciousness with physical matter - consciousness might act on physical matter in such a way as to impel it to increase in complexity. 

This could explain the puzzle of altruism too. If the essence of all living beings is the same universal consciousness then it's not surprising that we have the ability to empathise with each other's suffering and are prepared to sacrifice our own well-being for others'. Altruism is the consequence of our shared sense of being, the fact that in essence we are all one and the same and can therefore experience each other's suffering and joy as if they are our own. And all of this fits closely with what Quantum physics tells us, of course: that we are all part of a single system, that we are all interconnected.

But these are just speculations and suggestions, which will never be confirmed. Ultimately we have to accept that we can only know so much, and perhaps not very much at that. We have to remember that we are still in Plato's cave, looking at the shadows on the wall and mistaking them for reality. 

(Originally published in the Journal of the DH Lawrence Society, 2004-5)

One of the major themes that runs through all of D.H. Lawrence's work is that there is something 'wrong' with present day human beings. His attitude is as far removed from the optimistic humanism of his contemporary H.G. Wells as it is possible to be. Wells celebrated human invention and achievement, saw human history as one step forward after another, leading to the 'advanced' state of present day civilisation and further glories thereafter. But Lawrence's trajectory of history ran the other way. He believed that modern human beings had degenerated from an earlier, healthier state, and that industrial civilisation was heading irrevocably for disaster.

Because of these kind of views, Lawrence has a reputation for being a bad-tempered misanthrope, who was consumed with hatred of the human race. And it is true that some of his pronouncements do seem a little irrational and even hysterical - for example, when he writes, 'how easily we might spare a million or two of humans/ And never miss them' (1) or 'There are too many people on earth/ insipid. unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping' (2). Nevertheless, this picture of Lawrence is, I believe, flawed. Rather than being a cranky, subjective view generated by his own bitterness and bad-temperedness - or even his tuberculosis - Lawrence's negative opinion of present day human beings was, from his point of view, justifiable and even inevitable. His sense that there was 'something wrong' with human beings came from a deep intuitive understanding of the human race's early history and of the world's pre-civilised primal peoples. 

The Over-Developed Ego

Lawrence had two main complaints about modern human beings. One was what we could be referred to as our 'mind-body' duality, or our separation from our own bodies and instincts. We experience ourselves as an ego that lives inside our heads, an 'I' which continually chatters away to itself and busies itself with concepts and abstractions. Because we identify so strongly with this ego, we cut ourselves off from the deepest and most fundamental levels of our own being. As Lawrence expresses it in his poem 'Ego-Bound', we are like plants who are 'pot-bound' instead of rooted in the earth. Man is, he says, 'enclosed in his own limited mental consciousness' and as a result he is only half-alive, and 'can't feel any more/ or love, or rejoice or even grieve any more' (3). This 'I' sees the body as something 'other' to it, a kind of vehicle that it lives inside but which is not it. And because of this separation, we think of the body as a kind of enemy. We feel ashamed of its nakedness and its sexual desires. We see it as something 'lower' than us, a kind of base animal, and in the same way that we feel impelled to dominate animals - and the whole world in general - we feel impelled to dominate the body, and to control and repress its desires.

Lawrence's second main complaint concerns a different kind of separation: the separation between human beings and the cosmos. Rather than being part of the world, we are apart from it, detached observers who look at it as something 'other' to us - just as we do our bodies. The 'flow' of life between human beings and the cosmos has been broken. In Lawrence's words, we are 'separated off' from the cosmos. Man has fallen into 'awareness of himself, and hence into apartness' (4). And because of this separation the phenomenal world is an unreal and dreary place to us. We all live in what Lawrence called 'a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty and fearless face to face awareness of now naked life' (5). But in a sense we do not live in this world. Because we are trapped in what Lawrence calls 'the barbed-wire enclosure of know thyself '(6), all of this beauty and alive-ness is a kind of grey shadow reality to us. None of its incredible radiance and is-ness reaches us. As Lawrence puts it, 'Nothing, nothing comes from the open heaven, from earth, from the sun and moon, nothing, nothing; only the mechanical power of self-directed energy' (7).

We can see both of these complaints as expressions of the same fundamental problem. In both cases, the problem is human beings' over-developed sense of ego. Our sense of I-ness, or of individuality, has grown so strong that we have become alienated from our own bodies and from the cosmos. We have become isolated inside what Lawrence calls 'the glass bottles of our own ego' or 'the cages of our own personality'(8). 
Lawrence did not, however, believe that these problems were fundamental to all human beings. He believed that they were particular to Europeans, and more specifically still, to modern Europeans. This strong sense of ego was only a fairly recent development. The people of ancient times had not become 'separated out' from the cosmos. They lived in oneness with it, and were intensely sensitive to its beauty and alive-ness. As he writes in Apocalypse:

Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal Don't let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it we have lost the sun. We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge of the ancients (9). 

Because of their oneness with the cosmos, Lawrence suggests, these ancient peoples did not need gods. To them the whole phenomenal world was sacred, every tree, stone and river was pervaded with divine essence, and so there was no need to invent gods who lived outside the world. Gods only became necessary when we lost this connection to the cosmos. Or as Lawrence puts it: 

The very ancient world was entirely religious and godless. While men still lived in close physical unison, like flocks of birds on the wing, in a close physical oneness, an ancient tribal unison in which the individual was hardly separated out, then the tribe lived breast to breast with the cosmos The whole cosmos was alive and in contact with the flesh of man, there was no room for the god idea. It was not till the individual began to feel separated off...that the concept of a god arose, to intervene between man the cosmos God and gods enter when man has 'fallen' into a sense of separateness and loneliness (10). 

Lawrence saw the Etruscans as one of these peoples. In Sketches of Etruscan Places, he contrasts the Etruscans with their contemporaries in Italy, the Romans. Whereas the Romans were obsessed with war and power, and the phenomenal world was an incidental backdrop to their ego-struggles, the vibrant art work of the Etruscans suggests that they were awake to the is-ness and beauty of the natural world, and that they lived joyously and fully, without any sense of guilt or shame. To Lawrence, the Etruscans displayed, 'the last glimpses of a human cosmic consciousness different from our own... The fag end of the revelation of another form of cosmic consciousness' (11). In other words, they were one of the last European peoples who did not possess the over-developed sense of ego, and who were not, therefore, 'separated out' from the cosmos. With the coming of the Greeks, the Romans and other Indo-European peoples, this kind of consciousness faded away.

Outside Europe it lingered on, however. In some parts of the world it even managed to survive into the twentieth century. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious Lawrence explains this in terms of the ancient myth of the Flood. Before the Flood, all cultures shared a common 'esoteric science', based on their intense sensory awareness. But when the glaciers melted people were forced to flee to high ground, and their common culture fell apart. Some of them - such as the Greeks and Romans - forgot their ancient traditions, but others kept the old kind of consciousness alive, if only in a diluted form. As Lawrence puts it:

Some retained their marvellous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like the Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms (12).

Lawrence witnessed this at first hand in his encounters with Indian culture in New Mexico. He recognised that the Hopi Indians experienced the world through a completely different kind of consciousness to Europeans. And the essential difference, again, was that they did not experience a sense of separateness to the cosmos. The phenomenal world was as sacred and divine to them as it was to the Etruscans: 

There is [to the Indian], in our sense of the word, no God. But all is godly. There is no Great Mind directing the universe. Yet the mystery of creation, the wonder and fascination of creation, shimmers in evert leaf and stone, in every thorn and bird (13).

This, then, was basically Lawrence's view of history: earlier human beings lived in a state of connection to the cosmos and experienced the world as a fantastically vivid and beautiful place. They had a healthy acceptance of their own bodies and instincts, including a positive, guilt-free attitude to sex. But at a certain point human beings became 'separated off', and fell 'into a sense of separateness and loneliness'. Some human groups developed a stronger sense of self, or ego, and at that moment they became disconnected from the cosmos, and disconnected from their own bodies and instincts. 

The terminology Lawrence uses to describe this transition is, of course, borrowed from another ancient myth: the Biblical story of the Fall. In Apocalpyse Lawrence explicitly states that the 'fall into separateness' occurred when man 'ate of the Tree of Knowledge instead of the Tree of Life, and knew himself apart and separate' (14). And if we look at the Fall story, it is easy to see why he makes this connection. The author of Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve live in a state of harmony until the serpent tempts Eve to bite into an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. This brings death and disease into the world, and also seems to transform Adam and Eve's psyche. They are now cursed with self-consciousness. They are aware that they are naked, and cover themselves with fig leaves. They are also suddenly 'aware that there are things'. In other words, the Fall means developing a new kind of self-consciousness, which brings them a sense of separateness from their own bodies, and an ability to think abstractly. And Lawrence is claiming that the Fall actually happened, at least to European peoples. 

It is important to remember that Lawrence had little evidence for these views, partly because in his lifetime the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology were both at an early stage of development. As in so many other cases, Lawrence's views were largely intuitive. They were an example of the 'subjective science' which he believed ancient peoples practised, which operates through 'sure intuition' rather than through empirical investigation or intellectual reasoning (15). 

But how accurate was Lawrence's intuition? Did the world's ancient peoples really experience a different kind of consciousness to us, and do the world's 'primal' peoples still experience this - or is he falling victim to the desire to idealise the 'other'? 

Archaeological Evidence

Archaeology has now given us a clear picture of the 'very ancient' world which Lawrence describes. In Europe this means going back before the Romans and Greeks, or even the Celts or Germanic peoples - in fact, before any Indo-European peoples invaded Europe and conquered its peoples. One of the peoples from this pre-Indo-European period were the Minoans of ancient Crete. Thousands of years before the Greeks, beginning at around 6000 BC, the Cretans developed a civilisation with a high level of technology, and a high level of craft specialisation and engineering work. They had multi-storied palaces and villas, networks of roads from one side of the island to the other, and large, well-organised towns. But what is most striking is not the level of technology they reached, but the kind of culture which they created. Archaeologists have been struck by the atmosphere of lightness and joy of Minoan culture, and its apparent sense of the sacredness of life and the beauty of nature. According to the archaeologist Nicolas Platon, for instance, the art work of the ancient Cretans showed a 'delight in beauty, grace and movement', and an 'enjoyment of life and closeness to nature' (16). The walls and ceilings of houses were covered with paintings of plants, flowers and animals, and other popular art forms were frescoes of multi-coloured birds, beautiful golden minatures and gracefully molded statuettes. Whereas later cultures were obsessed with death and the afterlife, for them 'the fear of death was almost obliterated by the ubiquitous joy of living.' Another archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, wrote that Cretan art showed 'the most complete acceptance of the grace of life the world has ever known' (17). 

The Cretans also appear to have had a strikingly free and easy attitude towards sexual matters. Their culture showed what the archaeologist Jaquetta Hawkes, calls a 'fearless and natural emphasis on sexual life that ran through all religious expression' (18). Their art is full of sexual symbols, and Hawkes believes that sex ceremonies took place every Spring, to celebrate the earth's fertility. However, their open attitude to sex is most evident from their paintings, which show both men and women wearing sexually provocative clothes. Women are bare-breasted, and wear what we would today call short 'sexy' skirts. Men wore codpieces, and short garments which revealed their thighs. 

Nine years after Lawrence's death Henry Miller visited the epicentre of ancient Cretan culture, the palace of Knossos, and his impressions were strikingly similar to Lawrence's of the Etruscans. The art work and architecture of the palace of Knossus was, Miller believed, rendolent of a 'powerful and peaceful people':

The prevailing note is one of joy. One feels that man lived to live, that he was not plagued by thoughts of a life beyond that he was religious in the only way becoming to man, by extracting the utmost of life from every passing minute (19).

In the 1970s archaeologists began to realise that, rather than being an isolated culture, ancient Crete was part of a broad network of similar cultures, which were spread over a massive area of southern and eastern Europe and flourished between 8000 and 3000 BC. The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas called this 'Old European civilisation', in contravention of the traditional idea that civilisation began with the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians during the 4th millennium BC. 

Old European civilisation in general appears to have had the same basic characteristics as Cretan culture. Most notably of all, the Old Europeans do not appear to have been war-like. No military weapons have been found at Old European sites, and unlike later civilisations - whose artwork was dominated by weapons and war - their artwork contains no depictions of warfare or violence. Instead, like the Cretans, their artwork was dominated by natural images. These were practically everywhere - images of the sun, water, serpents and butterflies, covering the outside and inside of houses, and the walls of shrines and public buildings (20). But the major art form of the Old Europeans seems to have been small statuettes - or figurines - of naked women. Literally tens of thousands of these have been found, showing women with enlarged breasts and hips, sometimes in sexually inviting poses. Some archaeologists believe that these figurines had a religious function, others that they may simply have been an early form of pornography (21), but in any case they are clearly evidence of a free and easy attitude to sex and nakedness. We also know, as other evidence for this, that the Old Europeans placed vagina-shaped shells around the bodies of the dead - presumably to symbolise a return to the womb of the earth - and made a practice of painting vagina-shaped cavities inside caves with red ochre, presumably to symbolise menstrual blood (22). 

In other words, this archaeological evidence suggests that Lawrence was right. The reverence for nature that these peoples evidently possessed suggests that they had a sense of connectedness to the cosmos which we have now lost; and their positive attitude to sex and the body suggests that they had a sense of integration between their minds and bodies which we have also lost. And both of these together suggest that these peoples did not possess the modern over-developed sense of ego. They apparently had not 'fallen into separateness'. 

The high level of technology and social organisation of these cultures - which made Gimbutas feel entitled to use the term 'civilisation' - suggests another sense in which Lawrence's intuitions were correct. Lawrence scorned the Wellsian view of human history as a slow progression from tribes of ignorant and primitive savages to the civilisations of Egypt and Sumer and the glories of Greece and Rome. He believed that there were other, earlier kinds of civilisation whose traces had not yet become visible. As he writes in Sketches of Etruscan Places, 'The idea that our history emerged out of caves and savage lake-dwellings is puerile. Our history emerged out of the closing of a previous great phase of human history, a phase as great as our own' (23). And this is exactly what Gimbutas' discovery of Old European civilisation tells us. 

Anthropological Evidence

How close was Lawrence's view of the world's primal peoples to what we now know of them? Here we are speaking of the peoples were once called 'primitives' or 'savages' - pre-literate and pre-civilised peoples such as the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, certain African peoples, the peoples of Oceania, and the tribal peoples of Siberia and India. Nowadays many of these people's cultures have either been destroyed completely or distorted by European influence, so they cannot really be called 'primal' any more. However, we are fortunate that, in many cases, anthropologists managed to study these cultures while they were still in a relatively 'pure' state. Many of the most important anthropological studies were made during the two or three decades immediately following Lawrence's death. In fact the British anthropologist Branislav Malinovski published his first study of the Trobriander islanders of Papua New Guinea while Lawrence was still alive, in 1927, although Lawrence appears not to have been aware of it (24). Other important studies were Elwin's study of the Muria people of India (first published in 1942)(25), E.E. Evans Pritchard's study of the Nuer people of southern Africa (26) and Colin Turnbull's study of the Pgymies of central Africa (27), both of which were undertaken in the 1950s.

Primal peoples in general appear to experience a deep sense of connection to nature. They appear to perceive natural phenomena as animate, with their own kind of consciousness or inner life. There are no 'inanimate' things to them - every tree, every plant, every rock and every river is alive. And what makes these things alive is the presence of Spirit inside them. Almost all - if not actually all - primal peoples believe that the whole universe and everything in it is pervaded with a spirit-force, or a kind of divine energy. In my readings of anthropological texts, I have yet to find a primal culture which does not have a term for this. In American, the Hopi - who Lawrence encountered in New Mexico - called it Maasauu, the Lakota Indians called it Wakan-Tanka, and the Pawnee Indians called it Tirawa. (28) In Africa, the Nuer call it Kwoth (29) and the Mbuti call it Pepo (30); the Ainu of Japan called it Ramut (31), while in parts of New Guinea it was called imunu (translated by early anthropologist J.H. Holmes as 'universal soul' (32)). All natural phenomena are seen as a manifestation of this spirit-force, and as a result all natural phenomena are seen as sacred. According to the African theologian Harvey Sindima, for example, to traditional African peoples, 'All life - that of people, plants and animals, and the earth - originates and therefore shares an intimate relationship with divine life; all life is divine life' (33). 

Lawrence's intution that these peoples do not have concepts of God also appears to be largely correct. He was not completely right, since some primal peoples do have a concept of a creator God. But these creator Gods are very remote and detached figures who step aside once they have completed their creation and then have little or no significance. In general, there are no gods which control the events of the world and which they feel they have to pray to or worship. As Eliade writes: 

Like many celestial Supreme Beings of 'primitive' peoples, the High Gods of a great number of African ethnic groups are regarded as creators, all powerful and benevolent and so forth; but they play a rather insignificant part in the religious life. Being either too distant or too good to need a real cult, they are involved only in cases of great crisis (34)

To primal peoples the divine is in the world, the spirit-force which pervades all things. As Evans-Pritchard wrote of the Nuer: 'The anthropomorphic features of the Nuer concept of God are very weak and, as will be seen, they do not act towards him as if he were a man God is spirit, which, like the wind and air, is invisible and ubiquitous' (35).

These peoples also have a completely open and shameless attitude to their own bodies and instincts. Most hunter-gatherer peoples live their lives either mostly or completely naked, and their sexual frankness is startling even by present day European standards. Sex is seen as a healthy and natural source of pleasure and is never an uncomfortable or clandestine subject. Adults talk about it freely and never try to shield their children from knowledge of it. As the anthropologist Robert Lawlor notes of the Aborigines, 'The sex act itself is never hidden from children (although adult couples tend to prefer privacy). Children sleep in the same camp as their parents, and sex is an open topic of conversation' (36). 

Starting at a very young age - sometimes as young as 5 - Aborigine children play erotic games with each other, including mock lovemaking. They start having sex at what we would think of as a very young age too, sometimes even at the age of nine. In fact this seems to be true of all primal peoples. As Malinowski wrote of the Trobriander Islanders, for example:

The children initiate each other into the mysteries of sexual life in a directly practical manner at a very early age. A premature amorous existence begins among them long before they are really able to carry out the act of sex. They indulge in plays and pastimes in which they satisfy their curiosity concerning the appearance and function of the organs of regeneration, and incidentally receive, it would seem, a certain amount of positive pleasure (37). 

And once their sex lives actually do begin, the children of primal cultures have a degree of sexual freedom which most of us would find shocking. Sometimes children have their own communal dormitories, away from the adults', where they regularly have sex with different partners. The most famous of these is the Ghotul of the Muria. This was a special 'children's house' which adults were usually barred from entering, and where, according to some reports, children would be fined for having sex with the same person for more than three nights running (38). Eventually, however, by the time of late adolescence, children do begin to 'pair bond'. They form serious stable relationships, which lead to marriage. But even while married primal peoples have a great deal of sexual freedom. Many of them practise what we would today call 'wife-swapping', and sometimes when a man marries he assumes the right to have sex with any of his wife's sisters, and the same for the wife with her husband's brothers (39).

And all of this, of course, fits very well with Lawrence's views. Like our ancient ancestors, the world's primal peoples do not seem to experience a sense of ego-separateness, and as a result feel a powerful sense of connection to the cosmos, and do not appear to suffer from a neurotic division between their minds and bodies. And the similarity with the world's ancient peoples is not coincidental, of course - Lawrence also seems to be right in the sense that these primal peoples and ancient peoples like the Old Europeans seem to be essentially the same people, with the same form of consciousness. In some way primal peoples seem to be survivors from the world's ancient past. 

Lawrence's State of Being 

In one of his letters Lawrence complains of being described by his friend - and enemy - John Middleton Murry as 'sort of animal with a sixth sense' (40). But Murry's description is apt. Lawrence's powers of intuition were so powerful - and so accurate - that they sometimes do border on the supernatural. It is impossible to read the Birds, Beasts and Flowers poems, for example, without being struck by what Keith Sagar calls Lawrence's 'almost occult penetration into the being of other creatures' (41). We can also see his 'sixth sense' at work in his famous 'Letter From Germany', written in 1924, in which - nine years before Hitler came to power - he detects a dark spectre of hostility and aggression forming, and eerily predicts the rise of Nazi Germany (42). And after looking at the archaeological evidence, it seems that his 'sixth sense' is also working with amazing accuracy here, in terms of his views of human history and other cultures. 

One of the most important points here is that Lawrence did not, of course, experience the modern 'disease' of ego-separation himself. He experienced the same profound sense of connection to the cosmos and the same integration between mind and body as the Old Europeans or the Aborigines. Because of this he was an outsider, who would always be estranged from his own culture and his own time. Lawrence knew this, of course, and interestingly, he was also aware that he really 'belonged' to the 'pre-Fall' cultures of the world. Towards the end of his life, in the essay New Mexico, he writes that in all of his years of travelling, the pre-European Indian culture of New Mexico was the place in which he felt most at peace and most at home: 

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I ever had. It certainly changed me forever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico which liberated me from the present era of civilisation and the great era of material and mechanical development (43). 

The fact that Lawrence did not experience ego-separation is perhaps one of the major reasons for his greatness as a writer. The fact that he was not himself enclosed inside 'the glass bottle' of the ego gave him amazing powers of empathy and understanding, the ability to 'enter into' the beings of his characters and describe their inner lives so richly and vividly. Whereas his contemparies (such as Wells) only seem to describe the 'surface personality' of their characters - the ego that deliberates, feels emotions and interacts with others and experiences everyday life - Lawrence goes deeper, to the non-personal, instinctive levels of their being. As he famously wrote of an early draft of The Rainbow to Edward Garnett, 'You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego - of the character I only care about what the woman is - what she IS - inhumanly, physiologically, materially' (44). And perhaps the second great ability which his lack of ego-separation gave him was the amazing vividness of his writings, the powerful is-ness which they convey. His vision of the phenomenal world was so intense and acute - and his literary ability to communicate this so great - that to read one of his works is to actually experience the 'marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty and fearless face to face awareness of now naked life' (45). 

In view of this estrangement from his own culture, it is perhaps not surprising that Lawrence's view of his fellow human beings was so hostile. He was not merely a bad-tempered misanthrope who was bitter because his books and paintings were banned and critics did not understand his work. On the one hand, he had a justifiable sense of the 'wrongness' of present day human beings in the context of ancient peoples and the world's remaining primal peoples. He knew that the state of ego-separation which present day human beings lived in was really abnormal. On the other hand, the psychic difference between him and his contemporaries meant that he felt alien to them, and experienced the enmity which goes with otherness. 

And we should not forget that all of this went the other way round too, of course. Lawrence rejected his own culture - but his own culture also rejected him. To large extent, the misunderstanding and resistance he met with in his life can been seen as the inevitable result of this psychic gulf between him and his contemporaries. He was determined to celebrate the human body and treat sex as a sacred act, but as far as his contemporaries were concerned, with their neurotic separation from the 'base animal' of their bodies, this was depraved and disgusting. 

Lawrence believed that the ultimate consequence of ego-isolation was the death of the human race. As he wrote in Nemesis: 

If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed 
the sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
will be bright red with blood (46).

But he was sometimes optimistic too. Despite his many doom-laden pronouncements, Lawrence intuited that a transformation could take place, that human beings could develop a new - and at the same time an old - way of relating to the world, and the life-denying materialism and puritanism of his age might be swept away by a new spirit of joy and harmony. As he wrote at the end of the The Rainbow: 

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast of their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven (47). 

We can only hope that his powers of intuition were accurate in this instance too. 

Endnotes

• D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, London: Penguin, 1993, p.402
• Ibid, p.606
• Ibid, p.474
• D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, London: Granada, 1981, p.88.
• D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, op.cit., p.667
• Ibid.
• Ibid, p.675
• Ibid, p.482
• D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, op.cit., p.21 
• Ibid, pp.87-88
• D.H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, London: Penguin, 1992, p. 176
• D.H. Lawrence, Fanstasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, London: Penguin, 1971, p.13
• D.H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, London: Penguin, p.65
• D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, op.cit., p.88
• D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, op.cit., p.12
• In R. Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, London: Thorsons, 1987, p. 32
• Ibid, p.32
• 18. Ibid, p.33
• H. Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, London: Penguin, 1950, p.124 
• M. Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1982. 
• T. Taylor, A Pre-History of Sex, London: Fourth Estate, 1996. 
• R. Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, London: Century, 1998. 
• D.H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, op.cit., p.176
• B. Malinowski, B., The Sexual Life of Savages, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1932.
• V. Elwin, V. The Kingdom of the Young, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. 
• C. Turnbull, The Forest People, London: Pimlico, 1991. 
• J. DeMeo, Saharasia, Oregon: OBRL, 1998.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, op.cit.
• C. Turnbull, The Forest People, op.cit. 
• N. Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind, London: Fontana, 1971. 
• L. Levy-Bruhl, The Soul of the Primitive. London: Allen and Unwin, 1965.
• In Magesa, African Religion, New York: Orbis Books, 1997, p. 73. 
• M. Eliade, From Primitives to Zen, London: Collins, 1967, p.6.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, op.cit., p.7. 
• R. Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1991, p.173.
• B. Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages, op.cit., p.47.
• V. Elwin, The Kingdom of the Young, op.cit. V. The Muria 
• A.A. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow: the Seriono of Eastern Bolivia, Washington D.C: US Government Printing Office, 1950. 
• D.H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters, London: Heinemann, 1962, p.1124. 
• K. Sagar, 'Introduction', D.H. Lawrence, London: The Penguin Poetry Library, 1986, p.15, 
• D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays, London: Penguin, 1950. 
• Ibid, p.181
• D.H. Lawrence, The Collected Letters, op.cit., p.282
• D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, op.cit., p.667
• Ibid, p. 514
• D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, London: Penguin, 1975, p.495.

The view is often expressed - particularly by sociobiologists and their modern counterparts evolutionary psychologists - that human beings are naturally driven to compete against one another and as a result human societies are naturally stratified and hierarchical, with different classes and castes. This is surely innate to us, since our 'selfish' genes mean that we are only concerned with our own our survival and reproduction.

Our chances of survival are increased if we can gain access to greater supplies of food and other resources, and so we are driven to compete against one another to gain access to these. The more power we have, the more control we have over resources. And sex is a factor here too, according to evolutionary psychology. Women are naturally attracted to powerful men - since they can protect and provide for them better - and so men are naturally driven to compete for power in order to try to attract females. Because of these reasons, egalitarianism has no survival value, and philosophies such as socialism are, in the words of E.O. Wilson (1995), 'based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature.' 

However, advocates of these ideas have to explain the complete absence of inequality and social stratification in the most simple - and the earliest - human societies. In general, bands of hunter-gatherers - and also many sedentary tribes - do not have authoritarian leaders, reach all their decisions by consensus, share their food, have no different classes or castes, and have strong ethical principles which negate any expression of greed or selfishness. Hunter-gatherer bands seem to exist in a natural state of communism - a fact which Marx himself recognised, and referred to as 'primitive communism'. According to Lenski's statistics in Human Societies (1978) - based on the data in Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas - only 2% of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies have a class system, while private ownership of land is completely absent in 89% of them (and only 'rare' in the other 11%). Similarly, Lenski notes that slavery is 'extremely rare' amongst hunter-gatherers (in contrast to 'advanced horticultural' societies, 83% of which possess it) and that they tend to have a strikingly democratic system of making decisions. Many societies have a nominal chief, but their power is usually very limited, and they can easily be deposed if the rest of the group are not satisfied with their leadership. Political decisions are not taken by the chief alone, but are usually 'arrived at through informal discussions among the more respected and influential members, typically the heads of families.' As Briggs (1970) wrote of the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada, for instance:

The Utku, like other Eskimo bands, have no formal leaders whose authority transcends that of the separate householders. Moreover, cherishing independence of thought and action as a natural prerogative, people tend to look askance at anyone who seems to aspire to tell them what to do (p. 42).

While as David Boehm (1999) summarises, 'This egalitarian approach seems to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism.' 

One possible explanation for this egalitarianism was put forward by Cashdan (1980). She suggested that hunter-gatherers are inevitably egalitarian because their mobile lifestyle precludes the accumulation of possessions, so that no single person can own more goods or more wealth than another, which prevents inequalities from arising. Gluckman (1965), on the other hand, suggested that the important factor is the hunter-gatherers' lack of role specialisation. Since nomadic foragers tend be 'jacks of all trades' no individual can assume a more important role than another. 

There are obvious objections to these theories. One is that the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers extends far beyond the possession of property, or economic roles. There is no reason why equality in terms of possessions and economic roles should necessarily translate into a lack of formal leadership, or group decision-making processes. But the greatest objection to these theories is that egalitarianism is not confined to mobile hunter-gatherers. There are many sedentary horticultural peoples who are just as egalitarian as foragers. The Wape of New Guinea, for example, have weak leaders, use consensus for group decisions, and any possessions or gifts which an individual receives are quickly redistributed (Mitchell 1978). The Ila of Zambia also have a group decision-making process, and chiefs are considered facilitators rather than powerful leaders. Chiefs must also never make a show of wealth, and be willing to share any wealth they gain (Tuden 1966). As Boehm (1999) summarises: 

Many other nonliterates [besides hunter-gatherers], people who live in permanent, settled groups that accumulate food surpluses through agriculture, are quite similar politically [to hunter-gatherers] These tribesmen lack strong leadership and domination among adult males, they make their group decisions by consensus and they too exhibit and egalitarian ideology (p. 38). 

There is also some archaeological evidence that egalitarian societies existed long after human societies became agriculturally based. Archaeologically, one of the clearest signs of inequality are differences in the sizes of graves and in the possessions which are placed in them. And there is no evidence of any of these differences until around 4000 BCE, 4,000 years after the so-called 'agricultural revolution' began. In particular, until this point there are no 'chieftain graves' which are many times bigger than normal, filled with wealth and often in a central position. As James DeMeo (1998) writes of the agricultural communities of Northern Africa during the sixth millennium BCE, for example, '[they were] cooperative, productive and peaceful in character, without social stratification or strong man rule.' Or as Eisler (1987) summarises: 

The prevailing view is still that male dominance, along with private property and slavery, were all by-products of the agrarian revolution despite the evidence that, on the contrary, equality between the sexes - and among all people - was the general norm in the Neolithic (p. 12). 

Even some of the earliest civilisations seem to have been strikingly free from social stratification and inequality. Ancient Crete was characterised by what Eisler (1987) describes as an 'equitable sharing of wealth', the result of which was an apparent lack of poverty, with a high standard of living even for peasants. There were no differences in graves, and no depictions of powerful leader figures in their artwork. This also seems to have been the case at other ancient cities such as Catal Huyuk and the Jomon settlement of Aomori city in Japan, where craft specialisation and a high level of social organisation existed, but where no there was an apparently even distribution of wealth and a lack of class differences (Rudgley 1999.) . 

The onset of social inequality does not seem to be connected to the shift to a sedentary lifestyle or to the beginnings of civilisation. Archaeological evidence suggests that inequality became increasingly common from 4000 BCE onwards, and that it began with certain human groups in Central Asia and the Middle East. The Indo-Europeans began to migrate away from their homeland in the Steppes of southern Russia at around this time, and their different graves - including large chieftain graves with massive amount of wealth and much smaller graves with no possessions, presumably belonging to ordinary people - clearly suggest a hierarchical social system (Gimbutas 1974). The Indo-Europeans also give us what appear to the world's first ever instances of slavery. At some early Indo-European sites, the female population mainly consisted of women who were not Indo-European, suggesting that as they invaded new territories the Indo-Europeans killed the men and children but spared some girls and women, who became their concubines or slaves (Eisler 1995). 

In contrast to the civilisation of Crete and the city of Catal Huyuk, the civilisations of Sumer and Egypt - which developed during the 4th millennium BCE - were extremely hierarchical and unequal. House plans show that the size of Sumerian houses varied greatly. Some houses were large well-laid out 'mansions', while others were tiny one-room hovels which were squeezed into gaps between existing buildings (Oates 1986). According to Oates:

Perhaps the most striking feature of Mesopotamian [the larger area which Sumer was a part of] social structure at all periods is the apparent lack of other than economic stratification. Society fell basically into 2 groups, those who owned the means of production, especially property in land, and those dependent on them (p. 57).

Studies of human remains from ancient Egypt show that after the civilisation began the protein intake of ordinary farmers decreased, suggesting a centralisation of wealth (DeMeo 1998). A small elite of nobles (who were exempt from taxes) owned massive areas of land, while the rest of the population lived as serfs. Serfs could be called upon to perform 'corvee' (forced labour) for the state at any time, which seems to be how the pyramids were built. And the pyramids themselves, of course, are a grotesque illustration of social stratification, the most extreme example the world has ever known of inequality of grave sizes and burial goods. As DeMeo (1998) puts it, 'Enormous and magnificent structures were built at tremendous cost to house the corpses of dead kings, while the bodies of the commoners and slaves who built them were interred in communal pits.' 

All of this seems very puzzling, if we take competitiveness as a 'given' fact of human nature - and consequently, inequality and social stratification as inevitable facets of human societies. If this is the case, why does inequality seem to be such a late development, and why are there so many native peoples who are free from it? 

David Boehm (1999) makes a valiant attempt to explain the egalitarianism of many native peoples without stepping beyond the Neo-Darwinist (or evolutionary psychological) paradigm. He describes his basic theory as follows, writing in the past tense:

The premise was that humans are innately disposed to form social dominance hierarchies but that prehistoric hunter-gatherers, acting as moral communities, were largely able to neutralize such tendencies, just as present day foragers apply techniques of social control in suppressing both dominant leadership and undue competitiveness (p. 64). 

Boehm describes some of these techniques. Many native peoples customarily 'put down' and ridicule individuals who are boastful, for example. The !Kung of Africa swop arrows before going hunting, and when an animal is killed, the credit does not go to the person who fired the arrow, but to the person who the arrow belongs to. And in occasional instances when an 'alpha male' tries to take control of the group, native peoples often practice what Boehm calls 'egalitarian sanctioning'. They gang up against the domineering person, ostracise him, desert him, or even - in extreme circumstances, when they feel that their own lives may be in danger due to his tyrannical behaviour - assassinate him. In this way, Boehm says, primal societies are 'reverse-dominance' societies, in which, in his words, 'the rank and file avoid being subordinated by vigilantly keeping alpha-type group members under their collective thumbs'. 

One problem with this theory is that, as Boehm admits, what he calls 'egalitarian sanctioning' occurs only very rarely - he says he 'had to examine scores of forager ethnographies to find a few dozen usable reports of egalitarian sanctioning.' But surely if it was a question of suppressing an innate need for power and status in human beings then this would happen much more often, constantly even. In fact, if this need really was innate then it would not be a question of small number of alpha males breaking the egalitarian code; everybody would break it. It would be impossible to 'neutralize' competitiveness and sustain egalitarianism because everybody would be competitive. After all, in later non-egalitarian societies, it is not just a question of a few alpha males ruling over everybody else, but of a general desire for power and status, common to almost everybody. 

In addition, if hunter-gatherer peoples managed to neutralise their innate tendency to dominate for the good of society as a whole, why were later peoples so spectacularly bad at suppressing their domineering impulses? The difference is perhaps that it is only possible to control potential dominators in primal societies because there are so few of them, since the need for status and power is not innate to them (1).

The Over-Developed Ego

The egalitarianism of native peoples and the inequality of later societies is perhaps best explained in psychological terms - or to be more precise, in terms of a fundamental psychic difference between them and us.

1. In fairness to Boehm, his main aim is not to explain why native peoples are not as socially stratified and unequal as later civilised societies, but to explain why they lack the dominance hierarchies of primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees. In this more limited sense, his theory is more satisfactory. However, the mistake he - and many others - makes is to equate the hierarchical systems of some primates with the inequality and oppression of modern human societies, and to suggest that both are inevitable results of the same 'selfish genes'. The inequality of modern human societies is an altogether different phenomenon to the inequality of primate groups, in the same way that human warfare is a vastly different phenomenon to aggression within the animal kingdom. The competitiveness and aggression which appears to be natural and instinctive to animals is fairly mild, and massively amplified within human beings. The power of dominant primate individuals, for example, does not go beyond gaining better access to food and better making opportunities. They have very little power over the behaviour of others, and certainly do not oppress or exploit them as human dominators do. As Boehm himself states, 'There are few contexts in which he [a dominant male chimpanzee] actually controls the group Every chimpanzee decides autonomously where to forage, and whether or not to join in a hunt or go on patrol.' (26). It is not a question of 'despotism' being natural to all living beings - like warfare, despotism is a specifically human phenomenon, and one which belongs to some human groups, but by no means all.

Werner's (1957) study of the 'perceptual and cognitive functioning' of European-Americans and native peoples found that European peoples have a more pronounced sense of individuality. He notes that native peoples are 'de-differentiated with respect to the distinctions between self and object and between objects'. They experience a strong sense of connection between themselves and other people, and between themselves and the world around them. They can also sense a connection between objects which we perceive as separate and distinct. According to Werner, European/American peoples inhabit a world of separateness - separateness between ourselves and the world, ourselves and other individuals, and between the different objects and phenomena around us. 

This difference was the source of great problems to the colonists of the Americas and Australia. Their egalitarianism made it very difficult for native peoples to adapt to the European way of life, with its emphasis on private property and individual gain. The Native Americans found it difficult to cultivate their own pieces of land or to trade or run stores for profit, because it conflicted with what Ronald Wright (1995) describes as the 'ethic of reciprocity [which was] fundamental to most Amerindian societies.'

Some European colonists were actually aware of this difference themselves, and realised that they would only be able to truly 'civilise' the natives by developing their sense of 'self-ness'. Senator Henry Dawes - who attempted to turn Amerindians into small scale landowners - went to heart of the matter when he wrote of the Cherokees in 1887, 'They have got as far as they can go [i.e. they are not going to progress any further], because they hold their land in common There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation' (in Wright, 1995). The English missionaries in Australia tried various measures to develop the aborigines' sense of individuality. As Bain Atwood (1989) writes, 'the missionaries sought to make each [aborigine] an integrated centre of consciousness, distinct from the natural world and from other aborigines.' To this end, they made them live in separate houses and tried to stop going into each other's. They baptised them so that they would think of themselves in terms of a permanent name, instead of the fluid aboriginal names which could change and include the names of other tribe members. This was not successful, however. The aborigines never developed a sense of personal ownership over their houses or the possessions inside them. They wandered in and out of each other's houses, and continually swapped possessions.

The European-American strong sense of individuality develops slowly from birth to adulthood, as a part of our general psychic development. During the first year or so of our lives, we do not experience any degree of separation; we have no sense of anything 'outside' us. As Ken Wilber (1980) notes, for a newly born child, 'there is no real space...in the sense that there is no gap, distance or separation between the self and the environment.' However, following this our sense of 'I-ness' intensifies, and we begin to feel a basic sense of aloneness and isolation. We try to subdue this by making use of 'transitional objects' - teddy bears or dolls, for example. We fuse our identity with these, thereby alleviating our sense of aloneness. However, it is probably significant that, as Richard Heinberg (1995) notes, 'This process does not occur in the same way in the case of primal child-rearing The need for transitional objects seems to be minimised.' We can presume this is because the children of primal cultures have less need for transitional objects, since they do not develop as strong a sense of separateness as they enter adulthood. 

The fundamental difference between European-Americans and primal peoples may be, therefore, that we have a stronger and sharper sense of ego - or individuality - than them. 

The Ego Explosion

This stronger sense of individuality seems to have developed at a particular historical point. The researches of the geographer and archaeologist James DeMeo suggest that this was around 4000 BCE. His Saharasia (1998) uncovers evidence of a massive environmental disaster which began at around 4000 BCE: the desertification of the large region of the earth which he terms 'Saharasia', which until that time had been fertile and widely populated with humans and animals. Parts of Saharasia were the homelands of groups such as the Indo-Europeans and the Semites, and this catastrophe had a massive impact upon them. On the one hand, it forced them leave their homelands (which explains the mass migrations of the Indo-Europeans and Semites over the following centuries), and on the other, the new living conditions it created transformed their psyche. DeMeo's research shows that this was the historical point where war became rife, when male domination over women began, and when - most importantly as regards this article - societies became stratified, with different classes and powerful leader figures. 

DeMeo himself interprets this transformation in terms of Wilhelm Reich's concept of 'armoring'. He suggests that the hunger and discomfort which dominated these groups' lives made them 'armor' themselves against the world, and against their own instincts and natural pleasure-seeking impulses. Adults began to treat their children harshly, depriving them affection, which created further 'armoring', which was then passed down from generation to generation. However, if the essential difference between European-Americans (and other 'literate' peoples) and native peoples is our stronger sense of individuality, then this could well be the point when this difference was created. In other words, perhaps the Saharasian environmental catastrophe generated a more powerful sense of ego within human beings. 

Perhaps there were two main ways in which this happened. First, the sheer hardship of these human groups' lives when their environment began to change - when their crops began to fail, when the animals they hunted began to die, when their water supplies began to fail and so on - must have encouraged a spirit of selfishness. In order to survive, individuals had to start thinking in terms of their own needs rather than those of the whole community, and to put the former before the latter. Secondly, the new difficulties the groups faced as their environment changed must have brought a need for a new kind of intelligence, a practical and inventive problem-solving capacity. In order to survive, individuals were forced to deliberate, anticipate the future, find quick solutions, and to develop new practical and organisational powers. In other words, the Saharasian peoples were forced to think more, to develop powers of self-reflection, to begin to reason and 'talk' to themselves inside their heads. And they could only do this by developing a stronger sense of 'I'. Self-reflection is the 'I' within our psyche talking to itself. 

There are also some suggestions from myths that earlier human beings were less individuated than their descendants, and that our strong sense of ego developed at a particular - fairly recent - historical point. The Saharasian environmental catastrophe may be the origin of the myths of the Fall. The story of ejection from a fruitful garden symbolises the enforced migration from a once-fertile homeland, and myths which speak of a degeneration from a more pristine state (such as the Greek myth of a 'Golden Age', or the Chinese myth of 'men of perfect Virtue') refer to the increasing violence and corruption of human society when male domination, war and social inequality had become normal. But interestingly, the myths also seem to suggest that the reason for the Fall - or for the slow degeneration - was an intensification of self-consciousness. The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil suggests this, as also does the notion that they were 'given understanding' and also that they 'realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves.' The Chinese myth of the Age of Perfect Virtue suggests that human beings lost their harmony with the Tao as a result of developing a new kind of individuality and self-sufficiency. Individuals began to live by their own will rather than the will of nature. As a result they were much more aware of themselves and their own behaviour. Chuang Tzu tells us that the 'true man of ancient times did not grow proud in plenty, and did not plan his affairs He could commit an error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make a show' (in Heinberg 1989). In other words, these ancient men acted without analysing their behaviour, presumably because they were less self-aware, and as a result they were from feelings of guilt and pride. Similarly, the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata states that the 'holy men of old' were 'self-subdued and free from envy'. 

By the beginning of the current era, the Saharasian peoples had migrated throughout Europe and Asia, and the old egalitarian 'matrist' cultures had almost completely disappeared. From around 1500 C.E. their new ship-building and seafaring prowess enabled the Saharasian groups to spread further afield, and they took their 'patrism' to the Americas, Australia and other parts of the world.

The Development of Inequality 

The most important point, however, is that the beginnings of social inequality were concurrent with the development of this stronger sense of ego. The same groups who developed the first class systems and hierarchical societies were the same groups who were affected by the Saharasian environmental catastrophe. And since, in addition, the native peoples who are apparently not as individuated as us are also egalitarian, there is a very strong case for suggesting that the 'sharpened' sense of ego is the root cause of social inequality. 

I have elsewhere suggested (Taylor 2002) that the 'sharpened' sense of ego was the cause of the sudden eruption of war which takes place at around 4000 BCE, and my argument here follows similar reasoning. The new sense ego meant that human beings' experience of life was transformed. They underwent what Campbell (1964) calls The Great Reversal, when 'for many in the Orient as well as in the West, [there occurred] a yearning for release from what was felt to be an insufferable state of sin, exile, or delusion.' Life became suffering, in Buddhist terminology. Human beings began to experience a new kind of psychic discontent and disharmony, which was partly related to the painful sense of separation and isolation they now experienced. The sense of connection to the natural world which native peoples experience was lost, and replaced by a sense of being trapped within their own selves, with the rest of reality 'out there'. And with their new power of self-reflection, human beings became prey to 'thought chatter', the endless stream of associative mental material which runs through our minds. This thought chatter is usually negatively based, and so gives rise to anxiety, depression and other uncomfortable mental states. At the same time, this new sense of separation gave rise to a sense of incompleteness, or 'cut-offness'. As a result these human beings developed a need for external sources of happiness, as a compensation for their inner discontent and as a way of trying to complete themselves. And fundamentally this meant a desire for material goods and for status. From 4000 BCE onwards human beings began to crave for property and power as an escape from their inner disharmony. And since there is only a limited amount of property and power, there began to be competition to possess these, and they became unevenly distributed. Capitalism took over from communism, and societies became stratified and unequal. 

At the same time the stronger sense of ego created a fundamental lack of empathy between human beings. They became more 'walled off' to one another, and as a result it became much more difficult for them to empathise with others and to 'feel with' them. The individual's own ego-generated needs and desires began to take precedence over the well-being of others. Other human beings become mere objects, which the individual feels he is entitled to actually use to help satisfy his desires. As a result the brutal oppression and exploitation which is always a feature of stratified societies became possible. The nobles and landowners of feudal societies were so 'walled off' within their own psyche - and consequently had such limited 'fellow-feeling' - that they did not consider their serfs or peasants to be human beings. Legal documents from medieval England refer to peasants' children as his 'brood' or 'litter', while in estate records they were frequently listed in the same category as livestock (Lenski 1978).

The egalitarianism of native peoples can be explained in reverse terms. Because their sense of ego is less strong and sharp, they do not suffer from the 'pyschic disharmony' which afflicts us. They do not experience a sense of separation from the cosmos or a sense of inner incompleteness, and they do not experience our constant, nagging 'thought-chatter'. As a result, they lack the powerful inner compulsion to acquire personal wealth and power which creates social competitiveness and inequality. And because they are less 'walled off' to another, they are more capable of empathy and compassion, and much less ready to oppress and exploit one another. This fits closely with the notion of native peoples as 'gentle hunters' who see hunting as an unfortunate necessity, take no pleasure from killing, treat the animals with great respect and apologise to their spirits (see Turnbull ). In fact the great capacity for empathy which native peoples show could easily be taken as further evidence for their less developed sense of ego-separateness. Their sense of empathy with the natural world makes them extremely reluctant to damage natural phenomena and gives them a strong sense of environmental responsibility. The ability to empathise with others is so central to Australian Aboriginal culture, for example, that mothers take care to 'teach' it to their children. Often, when a child grabs some food or another object and holds it to its mouth, the mother - or another female relative - pretends to be in need of it, in order to encourage a spirit of sharing (Lawlor 1991). Similarly, whenever a weak or ill person or animals comes by, the mother makes a point of expressing sympathy for it, and offering it food. As Lawlor notes, by these means 'the child experiences a world in which compassion and pity are dramatically directed towards the temporarily less fortunate. The constant maternal dramatization of compassion in the early years orients a child's emotions toward empathy, support, warmth and generosity.'

On the surface all of this might seem to offer as pessimistic a view of human nature as sociobiological or evolutionary psychological approaches. Selfishness and social inequality are clearly not 'in our genes' or our brains; but they are still inevitable, it might be argued, since they are in our psyche, and have existed since the 'Ego Explosion' took place around 6,000 years ago. In this sense, one might say, Marxism is as misguided as evolutionary psychology. A perfectly egalitarian human society with no private property or status differences is not feasible, since the drive for personal wealth and power is as natural to 'Saharasian' individuals as the drive for sex or food. These drives were not created by the 'capitalist' social system; they were generated by an intensification of ego-consciousness, and then themselves gave rise to capitalism. 

However, there is an important difference in that the human psyche is malleable in a way which our genes are not. Spiritual philosophies such as Buddhism, Vedanta, Tantra and Taoism arose as a reaction against the psychic disharmony which the Ego Explosion brought. They teach methods of transforming the human psyche, of overcoming the separate sense of self, transcending the anxiety of ego-isolation and the constant disturbance of thought-chatter, attaining a sense of inner peace and wholeness and regaining a sense of oneness with the cosmos. In a sense they teach us how to reverse the effects of the Ego Explosion, although with the important caveat that we retain the high level of rationality and hypothetico-deductive thinking which was the positive side of the intensification of ego-consciousness. Once the separate sense of ego is transcended, the need to dominate and oppress other human beings is also transcended. 

References

• Atwood, B. 1989. The Making of the Aborigines. Sydney: Allen ansd Unwin. 
• Boehm, C. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Briggs, J.L. 1970. Never in Anger. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 
• Campbell, J. 1964. Occidental Mythology. London: Arkana.
• Cashdan, Elizabeth A. 1980. 'Egalitarianism Among Hunter and Gatherers.' American Anthropologist, 82: 116-120.
• DeMeo, J. 1998. Saharasia. The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the deserts of the Old World. Oregon: OBRL. 
• Eisler, R. 1987. The Chalice and the Blade. London: Thorsons.
• Eilser, R. 1995. Sacred Pleasure. Shaftesbury: Element. 
• Gimbutas M. 1974. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. London: Thames and Hudson.
• Gluckman, M. 1965. The Ideas in Barotse Jurisprudence. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
• Heinberg, R. 1989. Memories and Visions of Paradise. Wellingborough: the Aquarian Press.
• Heinberg, R. 1995. The Primitivist Critique of Civilisation. Paper present at the 24th Annual meeting of the International Soceity for the Comparative Study of Civilisations, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, June 15th, 1995. 
• Lawlor, R. 1991. Voices of the First Day. Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions. 
• Lenski, J. & L. 1978. Human Societies. An Introduction to Macrosociology. New York: McGraw-Hill. 
• Mitchell, W.E. 1978. On Keeping Equal: Polity and Reciprocity among the New guinea Wape. Anthropological Quarterly, 51: 5-15. 
• Oates, J. 1986. Babylon. London: Thames and Hudson. 
• Rudgley, R. 1999. The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age. 
• Taylor, S. 2002. 'Where Did it All Go Wrong? James DeMeo's Saharasia Thesis and The Origins of War'. The Journal of Consciousness Studies. Vol. 9 no. 8. 
• Tuden, A. 1966. Leadership and the Decision-making Process. In V.W. Turner, M.J. Swartz, and A. Tuden, eds., Political Anthropology, pp. 275-283. Chicago: Aldine. 
• Turnbull, C. 1950. The Forest People. London: Pimlico.
• Werner, H. Comparative 
• Wilber, K. 1980. The Atman Project. Wheaton: Quest Books.
• Wilson, E.O. 1995. On Human Nature. London: Penguin 
• Wright, R (1992). Stolen Continents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

(First published in New Renaissance, Vol 10, no.1, 2001)

We all experience 'higher states of consciousness' from time to time, when an inner peace seems to fill us and the world around us seems magically transformed. Everything seems much more real and more beautiful, we feel like we're actually part of our surroundings, and there seems to be a meaning in things which we aren't normally aware of. The world seems a benevolent place, with a harmony in it, and we may even become aware of a kind of force or presence which seems to pervade all things.

We also have a sense that we're seeing the world in a wider and truer way that normal, as if a veil has been pushed aside and we're catching a glimpse of how things really are. 
Studies have shown that, while these 'higher states of consciousness' can occur for no apparent reason, they are often 'triggered' by certain things: they often occur when we're amongst natural surroundings, for example, or when we do meditation and yoga, or after periods of emotional turmoil and depression. They also sometimes occur after or during sex, when we do certain sports (such as long-distance running), and people who suffer from epilepsy often experience them in the moments before seizures. 

Mainstream science and psychology have never really known how to deal with these experiences. Since Freud interpreted them as a regression to the ego-less state of early childhood, psychologists have tended to treat them as undesirable pathological states. They've been seen as a form of schizophrenia, in which the normal 'healthy' ego stops functioning and loses the ability to differentiate between itself and the world 'out there'.
Recently neuroscientists have put forward explanations of them too. Noting that they often occur in times of crisis, one theory suggests that they're caused by an 'emergency response mechanism' in the brain. This is the part of the brain which is 'switched on' whenever we're in dangerous situations, which makes us aware of the significance of the danger so that we can respond to it in the right way. However, sometimes this mechanism can be activated accidentally - in times of high emotional or physical stress, for example, so that our brain reacts as if we're in an emergency situation and everything we see seems to be powerfully real and full of significance. 

Another theory is that these 'spiritual' feelings might simply be the result of natural selection. Religion makes human societies more stable and cohesive, and so gives them a better chance of surviving. So perhaps 'spirituality' was simply a illusory sensation (created by certain brain chemicals) which was 'selected' by nature because it gave rise to religious beliefs and so helped to create stable and cohesive societies.

What all these theories have in common is the assumption that there's something aberrational about higher states of consciousness, or mystical experiences. They're pleasant but illusory feelings which are caused by a malfunctioning of the brain or the psyche. It's taken for granted that our ordinary state of being is the ideal state for us to be in, and one which tells us the absolute truth about the world we live in. Anything that deviates from the state, and which shows a different 'reality' to us must, therefore, be unhealthy and illusory. 

But in actual fact it makes a lot more sense if we take the exact opposite stance to this - if we say that it's our ordinary state of consciousness which shows a false reality to us, and it's only in higher states of consciousness that we glimpse 'reality'. In other words, it's our ordinary consciousness which has something 'wrong' with it, and only higher states of consciousness should be considered normal and healthy. 

Native Peoples and Children

The strange thing is that there are some peoples in the world who seem to naturally live in what we could call a higher state of consciousness, or at least something close to it. Peoples like the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines seem to perceive the world around them in a much more real way than modern Europeans or Americans.

Whereas we normally perceive natural things as 'objects' with no life inside them, to them all things are alive. They seem to be able to sense a spiritual essence in things, a kind of force which pervades all of reality and unites all superficially separate things into a one-ness. (This is what Indian philosophy calls Brahman, and which Native Americans sometimes call the 'Life Master' or the 'Great Spirit.') These peoples also don't seem to experience the sharp duality between the individual and a world 'out there' which is our normal state. They seem to naturally experience a degree of the sense of connectedness and belonging to the world which is a facet of what we call higher states of consciousness. 

It's also strange that we seem to experience a degree of this kind of vision of the world as children. The idea that children live in a higher state of consciousness than us may seem absurd, but it's certainly true that, as children, we experience the world in the same intensely real way which native peoples do. As children we find the world an incredibly fascinating place, we stare in awe and wonder at 'humdrum' things which adults no longer bother giving their attention to, and we feel a powerful natural delight in being alive. Because our ego's haven't yet become strongly developed, we also have a natural sense of connectedness to the world - instead of being 'in here' with the world 'out there', we are, in a sense, 'out there' with the world. This has been confirmed by the studies of the American psychologist H. Werner, who - in Comparative Psychology of Mental Development - notes that the perceptions of both native peoples and children are 'more vivid and sensuous, and de-differentiated with respect to the distinctions between self and object and between objects.' 

What this suggests is that, rather than being a kind of aberration, there is something natural and normal about higher states of consciousness - perhaps even that they are our original state. It's almost as if something 'went wrong' in our development, which caused us to lose it.

The Ego and the 'Familiarity Mechanism' 

As I see it, there were actually two things which 'went wrong'. The first was the development of a strong sense of ego. The archaeologist and geographer James DeMeo has shown recently that the ancestors of modern human beings such as the Indo-Europeans and the Semites originated in an area which he calls 'Saharasia' - the enormous belt of arid land which stretches from North Africa, through the middle East, and into central Asia. 6,000 years ago and before, however, the area wasn't arid at all, but was a fertile grassland, full of human and animal life. But at around 4000 BCE, beginning in the Near East and Central Asia, it started to dry up. Rainfall decreased, rivers and lakes evaporated, vegetation disappeared and famine and drought took hold. This created massive social devastation, and also seems to have caused a kind of 'psychic transformation' amongst the peoples who inhabited the area. Whereas before they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now they became extremely war-like and oppressive. According to DeMeo's research, this is the historical point where war, male domination, caste or class systems and a negative attitude to sex and the human body become common. 

Our ancestors seemed to have developed their strong and sharp sense of individuality in response to this environmental disaster. The hardship which filled their lives as their environment began to change - as their crops began to fail, as the animals they hunted began to die, as their water supplies began to fail and so on - must have encouraged a spirit of selfishness. In order to survive, people had to start thinking in terms of their own needs rather than those of the whole community, and to put the former before the latter. In addition, the new difficulties they faced must have brought a need for a new kind of intelligence, a practical and inventive problem-solving capacity. They were forced to think more, to develop new powers of self-reflection, to begin to reason and 'talk' to themselves inside their heads. And they could only do this by developing a stronger sense of 'I'. After all, self-reflection is the 'I' inside our heads talking away to itself. If you want to be inventive or to deliberate or plan ahead, you have to have an 'I' to think with. And these two factors may well have been responsible for our strong sense of ego. 

The second thing which I believe 'went wrong' is connected to this. There seems to be a mechanism in our minds which 'edits out' the real-ness of things once we've been exposed to them for a while. For instance, when we go into a room with a terrible smell in it we feel nauseous and are amazed that the other people can stand it - but after a few minutes we seem to 'switch off' to the intensity of the smell and it no longer affects us as much. The same thing happens on a larger scale when we go to a foreign country for the first time, or when we move house into a new area - everything around us seems to be much more real and to clamour for our attention. We can really sense the new atmosphere and the exciting new sights and sounds. But this intensity of perception only lasts for a short time: after a few weeks (or perhaps a few months at the most) we get used to the new environment, it becomes familiar and even dreary to us - as, again, something inside us seems to 'switch off' to its reality.

This 'familiarity mechanism' - as we could call it - affects our perceptions of everything. We spend almost all our time surrounded by things which we've seen or experienced thousands of times before and whose reality we have, therefore, been de-sensitized to. In other words, we look at everything in the world through a veil of familiarity. In fact this is the main difference between us and children : children haven't developed this 'familiarity mechanism' yet, the reality of the phenomenal world hasn't been 'edited out' to them, which is why they perceive the world in such a real way, and why it's such a fascinating place to them. 

Our ancestors probably also developed this mechanism in response to the 'Saharasian' environmental disaster. It may partly have been a kind of 'concentration aid'. It 'turned off' their attention to their surroundings so that they could focus their attention more on their survival problems, helped them to 'narrow down' the field of their attention to particular things, so that they could become more practical and techincally skilled. 
Once this mechanism developed it must have aided the development of the ego too. As the reality of the 'outside' world was switched off to our senses, our attention became focused inside ourselves, so that we developed a more pronounced inner life and a greater sense of duality between our selves and the world. 

Ordinary Consciousness 

These are the two main factors which have gone into the development of our normal consciousness. The 'familiarity mechanism' means that the world is a fairly dreary place to us - and also an inanimate place, so that we see stones, rivers and even the earth itself as inert chemical machines, and so that we aren't aware of the spiritual essence which flows through all things and makes them one. And our strong sense of ego means that we experience a strong sense of disconnection to the world, and live inside ourselves instead of actually in the world. 

But it's hopefully clear by now that the assumption that this normal consciousness is perfectly healthy and gives us a 'true' vision of the world is completely wrong. This consciousness is the result of a 'fall away' from the more intense and fuller consciousness of native peoples and children, the end result of a process of limiting and filtering our awareness of reality, so that what we're left with is a vision of the world which, far from being 'correct', is actually only a kind of false shadow reality. 

In other words, our normal consciousness is really a kind of 'sleep', which we're so used to that we don't even realise we're in it. And the importance of higher states of consciousness is that when we have them we 'wake up'. When we meditate, when we're alone in nature or when we go long-distance running (or any occasion when we experience higher states of consciousness) we often manage to free ourselves from these limiting mechanisms. I haven't got space here to explain how this happens in detail (I try to do this in my yet-to-be-published book, Waking Up From Sleep), but it's mainly because, in these moments, the channels through which we normally give away our vitality (or life-energy) close down. We normally give our vitality away by being active, by thinking, and through the work we have to do to process the sensory material which around us. But when we meditate, for example, we're completely inactive, our senses are closed to the external world and our minds are (hopefully) no longer filled with thought-chatter; as a result we retain our viality. And this means that, since the essential purpose of the 'famliarity mechanism' is to save attentional energy, there's no need for it to function, in the same way that you no longer need to save money when there's a lot of it in your bank account. So for once our perceptions become free of the famliarity mechanism, and able to perceive the incredibly beautiful, animate and harmonious world which is normally hidden from us. 

What this means is that we shouldn't treat higher states of consciousness as illusions - instead we should see them as temporary glimpses of reality. And it's also important to remember that these glimpses don't have to remain just temporary. After all, this is what spiritual practice is all about: turning the 'peak experience' into the 'plateau experience', turning these temporary 'waking up experiences' into a permanent state of wakefulness. Spiritual development is (from this point of view at least) a process of gradually 'undoing' the development of the ego and of the familiarity mechanism, which eventually leads to a permanent higher state of consciousness. Every time we sit down to meditate, every time we do yoga, or when we manage to detach ourselves a little more from external sources of happiness or to make our lives less active or less hedonistic, we take a step closer to reality. 

(a later version of this essay was published in the Journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society, 2001-2)

When D.H. Lawrence died at the age of 44 in 1930 he was most widely known as the author of scandalous novels like Women in Love and The Rainbow, which treated sexual relations with an openness which his age wasn't ready for.

Originally he'd become famous as a nature writer with marvellously vivid powers of description, and also as a 'working class writer' who portrayed the life of the Midlands mining village where he grew up. At that time, early in his career, Lawrence showed all the signs of going on to be a best-selling writer and a member of the literary establishment, but then a visionary and prophetic tone began to enter his writings which his previous readers found hard to stomach. His books began to be filled with savage denunciations of modern life, a sense of horror at the growing materialism and industrialisation he saw around him, and even a sense that the human race was doomed to make itself an extinct species. People had become alienated from the natural world and from their true selves, he said, they'd begun to exist as just egos instead of real beings, and only lived inside their heads instead of actually in the world. He saw the repression of sex as another sign of modern man's separation from the natural order of things, and in the end he decided not to care about being published and just to write about sex as openly as he wanted. This was in his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which wasn't published until 33 years after his death. 

It's probably this novel which is mainly responsible for the popular image of Lawrence as a writer who deals with sexual themes and celebrates the life of the instincts against the suppressive forces of so-called civilised society. To other people he's still mainly important as a nature writer or a working class writer, while at various times he's also been labelled (and misinterpreted) by literary critics as a fascist and a misogynist. It's been very rare, however, that the most important aspect of Lawrence as a person and as a writer has been paid attention to : namely, the fact that he lived his life in what we could call a 'mystical' state of consciousness, and that, even though he rejected his Christian upbringing and had no interest in any other forms of religion, he was a mystic in exactly the same way that religious figures like Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa were.

The Mystical View of the World

The mystic experiences life in a completely different way to ordinary people. We normally experience ourselves as egos enclosed inside our minds and bodies. We're 'in here' and the world and all the things in it - including other people - are 'out there'.

In a way we exist in a state of solitary confinement - we receive information about the world through the 'windows' of our five senses, and we can communicate our thoughts and feelings to other people by using language, but we're always essentially alone inside ourselves. The world we live in also seems like a fairly dreary place to most of us ; all of the natural and man-made things which it consists of are so familiar to us that we scarcely bother giving our attention to them. In fact in a sense the world is even a dead place to us, because it seems to be made up of things which are inanimate, which we perceive as just 'objects' with no being of their own. And it's also clear to us that all these things exist in separation to each other, just as they exist in separation to us. 

But the mystic lives in a different world to this. He or she lives in a state of unity with the world rather than a state of separation. Their sense of being isn't confined to their own mind-body complex like a genie in a bottle - they realise that at the ground of their being they're one with everything, that the substance of their being is the substance of the being of the whole world. All the things around them seem incredibly beautiful and alive to them too ; everything seems to shine with its own inner radiance and to have a being of its own. And to the mystic these things don't seem to be separate and discrete objects. There is a different level on which their superficial separateness melts away and they are seen as different forms of the same thing, pervaded by an underlying oneness. This is what, in the Hindu Upanishads, is called Brahman - the pure consciousness or 'divine energy' which pervades the whole of the universe and is the essence of all things. 

In this mystical world the normal human ideas about time and mortality don't apply either. Instead of linear time with a future and a past there's only an 'Eternal Now', and since the ground of our beings is divine energy which is timeless and spaceless, the mystic also realises that we are, in essence, immortal. 

Most of us have brief flashes of this kind of consciousness every so often - perhaps when we meditate, when we're out walking in the country, or when we're listening to music. But people who've actually lived in a mystical state of consciousness are few and far between. In fact to find examples of them we have to turn to the great spiritual figures of human history - the Buddha, Jesus Christ, St. John of the Cross, Jakob Boehme, and comparatively recent Indian saints like Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharishi. And, strange though it may sound, one of the most fully developed mystics of recent times was D.H. Lawrence. 

Lawrence's Mystical Vision

To compare D.H. Lawrence with people like Jesus and the Buddha probably seems ridiculously far-fetched, so it's probably best to proceed slowly and carefully, by looking at different aspects of the mystic's vision of the world in turn and showing how he expressed these in his writings.

Lawrence wrote an enormous number of books in his short life-time, including poetry, plays, travel books, literary criticism, and philosophy. His mystical vision of the world is, however, most visible in his poetry, which is where I've taken most of the quotes below from.

There is no separation between us and the world and all the things in it. We are the world. 

Lawrence's lack of ego-isolation meant that he could enter into the beings of other people and even other creatures, and experience life as they experienced it. We can see this in his collection of poems Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, where he shows, in the words of the critic Keith Sagar, 'an almost occult penetration into the being of other creatures.' It's also evident in his poem 'We Die Together', where he describes the living death which millions of people in industrial England are experiencing, and feels that he's literally dying with them, that even though he lives in the Italian countryside he is 'A mill hand in Leeds, and the death of the Black Country is upon me.' And this lack of ego-isolation meant that he felt no sense of separation between himself and the natural world. In his poem 'Mana of the Sea', for example, he writes: 'And is my body ocean, ocean, whose power runs to the shores along my arms...I am the Sea! I am the Sea!'

All things are alive.

Lawrence knew that it's not just human beings, animals and even just plants which are alive, but also the things which we normally consider to be inanimate, like rivers, clouds, and even the moon. We can see this in Lady Chatterley's Lover, when Lawrence describes how Lady Chatterley's view of the world changes when she's walking home after making love to her gamekeeper: 'The universe ceased to be the vast clockwork of circling planets and pivotal suns which she had known. The starts opened like eyes, with a consciousness in them, and the sky was filled with a soft, yearning stress of consolation. It was not mere atmosphere. It had its own feeling, its own anima. Everything had its own anima.' 

Everything is divine energy. Brahman - or 'God' - pervades all things. 

Lawrence sensed the presence of this everywhere around him, and follows the tradition of the Christian mystics in giving it the name 'God.' In his poem 'There Are No Gods' he writes: 'Whose is the presence/That makes the air so still and lovely to me?/...I tell you, it is no woman, it is no man, for I am alone./ And I fall asleep with the gods.' While in another poem, 'Name the Gods!', he writes, 'All the time I see the gods :/ the man who is mowing the tall white corn, suddenly, as it curves, as it yields, the white wheat,/ and sinks down with a swift rustle, and a strange falling flatness, / ah! the gods, the swaying body of God!/ ah! the fallen stillness of god. '

This divine energy is the essence of our beings as well. 

'In the very darkest continent of the body there is God. And from Him issue the first dark rays of our feeling, wordless, and utterly previous to words.' 

The purpose of life is attain the bliss and fulfilment of mystical union with the world. 

In one of his most moving poems, 'Pax', written while he was dying of tuberculosis, Lawrence writes : 'All that matters is to be one with the living God/ Like a cat asleep on a chair/ at peace, in peace / feeling the presence of the living God..'

There is no such thing as death.

To Lawrence death was something to rejoice in rather than to be afraid of, because in a deep intuitive part of his being he sensed that death doesn't mean extinction, but is rather the beginning of what he called 'a great adventure', where we attain the fulfilment which may have avoided us during this life. In death, he writes in his poem 'Gladness of Death', 'the winds of the afterwards kiss us into the blossom of manhood,' and 'after the painful, painful experience of dying there comes an after-gladness, a strange joy.' 

Lawrence as Spiritual Teacher

Perhaps the main difference between D.H. Lawrence and more traditional mystics like Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa (and Jesus and Buddha) is that he didn't think of himself as a religious teacher, and didn't make a conscious effort to try to show others the path to enlightenment. But if we look closely at his work, we can see that he's also left us with some 'teachings', and that these are essentially the same as those of most mystics throughout history. 

As the Hindu and Buddhist traditions see it, the main obstacle that stands between us and enlightenment is our over-developed sense of ego, which separates us from the divine inside and outside us. The ultimate aim of their philosophies is to subdue the ego and break down this sense of separation so that we can attain a state of oneness with the world. And D.H. Lawrence echoes this : as he sees it, our problems stem from what he calls 'The knowledge of the self-apart-from-God'. If we can overcome this sense of separation a new world lies in wait for us - as he writes in 'Terra Incognita', 'When man has escaped from the barbed wire entanglement of his own ideas...there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life.' To this end, Lawrence tells us to switch the centre of our being from our egos to our senses and our feelings. He tells us to 'wholly attend' to the present moment and to our surroundings, and live by our instincts instead of by our thoughts. 

In some Tantric sects of Buddhism and Hinduism sex is seen as a sacred act which symbolises mystical union with the universe, and enables us to directly experience the bliss which is the nature of absolute reality. And this was essentially D.H. Lawrence's attitude to sex as well. Sex was so important to him because it can bring about a temporary dissolution of the ego and bring us into union not just with the person we're having sex with but with the whole world itself. It can bring what he calls 'the strange, soothing flood of peace, the sense that all is well,' and plunge us into the incredibly alive and beautiful world which Lady Chatterley became aware of when she was walking home from her gamekeeper's house. 

Our over-developed egos aren't just an obstacle to spiritual growth as far as Lawrence is concerned, though, they're also dangerous, and he warns us over and over again that unless we re-develop a sense of connection both to the world around us and to our true selves our future is bound to be catastrophic. 'If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness, and freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed,' he writes prophetically, 'the sky blue walls of our unventilated heaven will be bright red with blood.' Our present day ecological problems have proved Lawrence right here, since the root cause of the problems is surely our sense of separation from the natural world and our inability to perceive the 'alive-ness' of natural things, which have meant that we see nature as something alien to us which we have no respect for and are entitled to abuse. 

It's possible to see the whole of Lawrence's work as an urgent call for us to 'wake up' so that we can prevent this catastrophe, and also so that we can begin to live fully as individuals. And perhaps most prophetically of all, despite all his pessimism, Lawrence had a strong sense that this awakening would eventually occur. We can see this in perhaps the most inspiring passage in all of his work, the last two pages of his novel The Rainbow, where he describes the industrial horror which is spreading over his home county of Derbyshire, and the 'living dead' colliers with 'the eyes of those who are buried alive.' But then a rainbow forms itself over the hills, and this becomes a symbol of the new world which is coming into existence, and of the new human beings who will live in it. 

'And the rainbow stood on the earth. She [the novel's heroine, Ursula] knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.' 

The massive popularity of the present day self-development - or New Age - movement seems to suggest that this new germination of the Earth is taking place now. And when it comes to full fruition, perhaps in another few decades or so, D.H. Lawrence will surely become known as one of its prophets. 

(Originally published in New Renaissance, Vol 8, no.4)

What is it that makes one form of life more advanced than another? From one point of view, we can say that some beings are literally more alive than others. This 'aliveness', that the French philosopher Henri Bergson called the 'elan vital,' has manifested itself more powerfully within them.

We can see the whole evolutionary process which has taken life forward from amoebi to human beings as a process of 'vitalisation', by which living things become progressively more animated. As living beings become more 'vitalised' the intensity of their consciousness increases; so another parallel way of looking at evolution is to see it as a process by which living beings become more and more conscious.

Thus, we can say that because the 'elan vital' is relatively weak inside them, plants only have a small degree of consciousness, which manifests itself in the way they react to changes in their environment; while animals like sheep and cows are more conscious than, say, insects, because they have a much fuller awareness of their surroundings. And we human beings, as the latest products of the evolutionary process, are more 'vital' and also more conscious than any other animal: we're the only animals who have self-awareness, for example, the only animals who are conscious of death to any degree, and also the only animals who are conscious of the past.

The 'elan vital', or 'life force', is inside us all. It's the vital energy which we give out as we go about our daily lives, which we expend when we think, when we work, when we use our senses to perceive what's happening around us, and which we also need to mantain the healthy functioning of our bodies. It's this energy which is recharged inside us
when we sleep, which drains out of us when we've been doing too many things and our senses have been overloaded with external stimuli, and which also passes out of us when we die. The Chinese word for this 'life energy' is Chi, and acupuncture and the exercises of Chi Gung and T'ai Chi are based on it, while in Sanskrit the word for it is Prana, and it's the principle underlying the exercises of hatha yoga. Strangely, even though everybody
accepts its existence on an everyday level (for example, when we say that we feel 'run down', that our 'energy levels are low' or that we need to 'recharge our batteries'), the concept of a 'life energy' is alien to our materialistic Western culture, and our scientists and doctors refuse to believe that there's any such thing. But we too have a word for 'life
energy', even if it's not used much nowadays: vitality.

It's very important to look at the 'elan vital' in both these areas, in connection with evolution and in connection with ourselves, because there's a very close relationship between the evolutionary process as a whole and the personal evolution which can take place in our own lives. In exactly the same way that evolution as a whole can be seen as a process by which living beings become more and more 'vitalised', we can also see personal spiritual development as a process of making ourselves more and more 'vitalised' as individuals.

Conserving Vitality

In ordinary life there's always an outward flow of vitality. Our senses are always busy taking in sights and noises, doing our jobs or performing other tasks and chores, and our minds are always busy processing information or chattering away to themselves.

These three things - sensory activity, thought processes, and mental or physical activity - are like three channels through which our vitality is continually drained away. But when this outward flow is halted for some reason, and as a result we're able to build up a higher than usual concentration of vitality inside us, something strange happens; in fact it's in these moments that we're liable to experience higher states of consciousness.

This can happen when we meditate. It's possible to see meditation as a technique specifically designed to halt the usual outward flow of vitality so we can feel more 'vital' or spiritual within ourselves. We stop 'doing' and sit still, we close our senses off to external stimuli by closing our eyes, and we try to stop our minds chattering away by focusing our attention on a mantra or on our breathing. Through doing this we close the channels through which our vitality leaks away and create a high concentration of vitality inside us. As a result, when we open our eyes again we may feel we're looking at a different world then we saw before. Everything around us looks more real and more beautiful, there may seem to be a harmony or a unity amongst the whole of our surroundings, and we may feel a strong sense of connection with our surroundings.

Something like this can also happen when we're alone in the countryside. There's silence and stillness around us, and the beauty of the countryside can have an effect similar to a mantra: because it's so beautiful we concentrate on it, which means that the chattering of our minds slows down and may even fade away. As a result we may experience the higher states of consciousness which poets like Wordsworth and Shelley experienced when they were alone in nature: a sense of the amazing aliveness and beauty of everything we see, and also perhaps an awareness of what Hindu philosophy calls Brahma, the pure consciousness which is the essence of all things, including ourselves. Then we feel an overpowering sense of oneness with nature and a profound sense of joy.

For the same reason as this, it's quite common for people to experience a higher state of consciousness at the moment of waking up, even though this might only last a few seconds. Our vital energies are completely recharged after sleep, our minds haven't started chattering away yet, and as a result we may feel a powerful sense that 'all is well', or feel, as Alan Watts wrote, that, "Every morning, when I first awaken, I have a feeling of total clarity as to the sense of life, a feeling of myself and the universe as a matter of the utmost simplcity. 'I' and 'That which is' are one and the same."

Detachment

Another, more subtle, way in which we give away our vitality is by 'attaching' ourselves to external things. Most people depend on external things for their sense of well-being: their possessions and comforts, their hopes and ambitions for the future, other people, their status in society, security, and so on.

By depending on these things we give part of our selves away to them. We become aware of this when something we depended on is taken away from us - when we give up an addiction like smoking, for example, or when a person we've depended on leaves us. At first we experience a terrible sense of loss and emptiness, but after a while, if we stop ourselves giving in to the addiction again, we feel ourselves become stronger and more whole, as if the part of ourselves which we gave away to the thing (or the person) we were dependent on has been given back to us. It's as if the 'powers of our soul' have become stronger, because we've made ourselves a little more 'detached' and self-sufficient.

The biologist Alister Hardy conducted a survey of spiritual experiences for his book The Spiritual Nature of Man, and found that the most common 'trigger' for them was depression or despair. This is probably a result of 'detachment' too. Often we are depressed because things we depended on for our well-being have been taken from us - maybe our hopes and plans have been destroyed, or our success or wealth, or our status has been taken away from us. But this also means that we're forced to detach ourselves from these things - which can lead to spiritual experiences.

Ordinary Consciousness

There is a simple reason why building up a higher concentration of inner vitality - either by blocking the channels through which it normally drains out of us, or by detaching ourselves from external things - can lead to spiritual experiences.

In the 1960's, American psychiatrist Arthur J. Deikman investigated the changes in consciousness which meditation brings and decided this happens because meditators often experience a 'de-automization' of perception. Under our ordinary consciousness the things we see around us don't look particularly beautiful or interesting, and the world seems to consist of 'things' which are just inanimate and exist in separation from each other and from us.

We take it for granted that this view of the world is true, that we're seeing things exactly as they are; but it may be that the only reason we have this view of the world is because, as Deikman noted, our normal perception is automatic. This automatic perception was probably developed by our ancestors in response to the demands of survival, as a way of saving energy and attention so they could concentrate completely on the practical business of keeping themselves alive. It means that normally we don't put any energy into our perceptions - it's almost as if a kind of 'autopilot' is doing it on our behalf. But what happens when we meditate or when we're in a state of 'detachment' is that there's what we could call 'surplus energy' inside us, which means that our perceptions don't have to be automatic anymore. The 'surplus energy' which we've gathered goes into the act of perception - and as a result the dreary inanimate world we lived in before is suddenly full of amazing is-ness and beauty and harmony. And we can look at the way mystics usually went about this in terms of vitality as well. One of the great writers on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, wrote, 'No genius can afford to dissipate his energies, the mystic genius most of all,' and in order to prevent this the mystics made sure that they were far away from the energy draining activity and external stimuli of everyday life, living in monasteries or as hermits. There they spent hours at a time in meditation, and used penitential and ascetic practices to tame their sensual desires, so they could conserve their vitality. They also tried to live without possessions, which are dangerous because, in the words of German mystic Meister Eckhart, they cause 'a chronic discharge of energy.' What the mystics were trying to do was to permanently close down the channels through which our vitality usually leaks away, so that they could build up a greater intensity of 'elan vital' inside themselves, and as a result experience a permanent state of what they called 'deification', or union with the divine.

Our Spiritual Development

If we think of our spiritual development as a question of building up a greater intensity of the 'elan vital' inside ourselves, it's not so difficult to see how we can develop spiritually.

 Perhaps most importantly, we need to meditate regularly. As well as helping us 'wake up' temporarily, the more we meditate the quieter the chattering of our minds will become, and in the end we might manage to stop it altogether, which 'closes' one of the main channels through which vitality leaks away. Practices like Chi Gung and Yoga, which can generate new vitality inside us, can help us too. And we can also try to live 'vitality conserving' lifestyles: make sure our lives aren't too full of actvity and that we're not exposed to too much external stimuli. If we know that the 'powers of our soul' are drained from us by our attachments, and also by our sensual desires, we should try to control this as well - try not to live too hedonistically, and learn to look for contentment inside ourselves instead of from external things like money, possessions, status, hopes for the future, etc. Meditation can help us here too, because the longer we practise it the more we get used to living inside ourselves, and the more we get into contact with the natural contentment at the source of our beings.

The important thing about spiritual development, or self-evolution, is that it aims at the same thing as the process of evolution itself. For five billion years evolution has been making living beings more and more 'vital', and as a result living beings have developed a more intense consciousness of reality. And this is exactly what we do in our self-evolution - we take evolution into our own hands, and try to make ourselves more 'vital' and more conscious. We can see the mystics as more advanced in evolutionary terms than ordinary people, because they were more 'vital' and more conscious than others, in the same way that ordinary people are more 'vital' and more conscious than animals. And by developing spiritually we're attempting to transform ourselves into a 'higher' form of life as well.

But it's not really 'we' who are doing this at all, it's the force of evolution itself which is doing it, working through us, and trying to push life forward to a higher level of development. Those who try to develop themselves spiritually are sometimes criticised for being selfish, for just concerning themselves with their own well-being instead of other people's. But this isn't true; they aren't doing it for their own sake, but on behalf of evolution itself, and by extension, on behalf of the whole of life itself.

Ever since modern science began after the Renaissance, there's been a general belief that it's possible to explain absolutely everything about life and the world (and the universe) in scientific terms. Even today many scientists believe that its powers are unlimited. Science is a process of uncovering the mechanisms by which nature works, and eventually, when we've done enough experimentation and investigation, every mystery will be understood. The darkness of ignorance will have been completely illuminated by the light of reason, and we will possess 'The Truth'.

Some observers even believe that we're quite close to reaching this point now. If scientific progress continues at the same rate as the last few decades, so this argument goes, it can only be a matter of a few more decades (or even less) before all the mysteries in the universe are solved. After all, haven't most of the biggest mysteries already been solved? As long ago as 1971 the biologist Bentley Glass wrote, 'We are like the explorers of a great continent, who have penetrated to its margins in most points of the compass and have mapped the major mountain chains and rivers. There are still innumerable details to fill in, but the endless horizons no longer exist.' We already know how the universe began (with a Big Bang), how life evolved (through genetic mutations and natural selection), and how living beings inherit their parents' characteristics (through DNA), and we're surely quite close to answering the remaining 'big questions' as well. Neuroscience will soon be able to tell us exactly what causes consciousness, biologists will soon be able to tells us how life originated, and physicists will finally tell us what the fundamental reality of the universe is.

Unsubstantiated Theories

But whether science actually has progressed as far as some scientists like to think is very debatable. There is a powerful scientific orthodoxy which promotes ideas as truths before they are substantiated properly, and even while there's still doubt about them. Take the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution for example, which most 'thinking' people accept as an established truth.

 Recent experiments with bacteria suggest that genetic mutations are not purely random, as the theory suggests. When starving bacteria are in the presence of sugar they can't eat, for example, they 'mutate' at levels far higher than chance in order to generate the enzymes they need to digest it. The concept of 'punctuated equilibrium' also casts doubt on neo-Darwinism too. Fossil evidence shows that evolution works through stops and starts, with periods of stasis for millions of years and then sudden bursts of change - which can be as short as 1,000 years - which give rise to new species. This doesn't make sense if mutations are random, since if they were they would occur fairly evenly, and there would be no reason why some periods would see more change than others. (It's interesting to note that the arch neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins vehemently refutes the significance of punctuated equilibrium, which he says is merely 'an interesting wrinkle on the neo-Darwinist theory' - no doubt because he realises that it throws his own theories into question.)

The Big Bang is by no means a proven theory either. Even the theory's biggest advocates admit that there are still problems with it and 'large gaps' which have to be filled in. For example, cosmologists haven't been able to determine how stars and galaxies formed after the big bang, and have also admitted that the visible matter at the centre of galaxies isn't massive enough to keep them from flying apart, which has led them to suggest the existence of invisible 'dark matter'. Big Bang theory also tells us that the universe is at least 16 billion years old, which contrasts with estimates deduced from other evidence, which suggest an age of between 7.5. and 11.5 billion years. 

It's also very debatable whether science is close to solving the other 'big questions'. Almost 50 years ago a young graduate student called Stanley Miller managed to synthesise amino acids - the basic building blocks of life - from a chemical simulation of the earth's atmosphere. After this many scientists believed that the problem of the 'origin of life' would soon be solved. But five decades of research of have brought no further advances to Miller's experiment. The 'self-replicating molecule' which biologists have been feverishly searching for has been strangely elusive. In fact some scientists - like Francis Crick - find the odds against life come into being on this planet by accident so overwhelming that they've developed the concept of 'Panspermia', which suggests that the earth was 'fertilised' from interstellar space. However, as other scientists have pointed out, the odds against this are perhaps even greater than the odds against life starting on this planet. 

This also applies to the 'big question' of developmental biology : how does a single fertilised cell develop into a complex multi-cellular lifeform? As Rupert Sheldrake writes in The Rebirth of Nature, after their success in 'breaking the genetic code' in the 1960s, some of the world's leading molecular biologists turned their attention to this problem, believing that it would only take them a decade or two to come up with a basic answer. They expected to find that development was somehow 'encoded' into DNA, but soon realised that this wasn't the case, and that other unknown 'formative' influences must be at work. But again, after decades of research, biologists have been unable to pinpoint what these are. 

In a similar way, at the moment many neuroscientists are confident that the 'problem of consciousness' will soon be solved. They believe that new technologies which allow us to examine how the brain works will enable us to see how its billions of neurons work together to produce consciousness. But again, it's slowly becoming apparent that the reality is much stranger and more complex than this simple mechanistic view suggests. Originally neuroscientists thought that consciousness would be located in a specific area of the brain, but have now concluded that in some way it seems to emanate from the brain as a whole. It also seems that to a degree consciousness is independent of the physical structure of the brain. If consciousness was only an epiphenomenon produced by the brain, then we'd assume that damage to the brain would always impair consciousness (especially if consciousness is spread around the brain rather than located in a specific area ; if the latter was true we could always say perhaps the area which produces consciousness escaped damage). It's true that this often does happen, but there are also cases of people who've had very severe structural damage to the brain but lived as completely normal adults with a normally functioning consciousness. The psychologist Julian Jaynes, for example, cites the case of a 35 year old man who died of an abdominal malignancy, and whose autopsy revealed that he'd been born with parts of his brain missing and other parts abnormally small. But in spite of this, Jaynes says, 'the patient had always displayed an 'easygoing' personality and had even led his class in school!' 

Because of problems like these some more open-minded scientists are beginning to doubt whether it's possible to explain consciousness in terms of 'neuronal networks' or 'connectivist pathways' at all. In an essay called 'The Puzzle of Conscious Experience' (which caused a sensation when it was published in Scientific American in 1995), the scientist David Chalmers suggests heretically that consciousness is not produced by the brain but 'should be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to anything more basic.'

The Need for Understanding 

It's worth considering for a moment where this need for complete understanding of the universe comes from. After all, why should it really be necessary for us to understand everything about the life and the universe? Will our lives really be different - better or happier - in any way just because we happen to know the answers to all questions?

Since the Enlightenment, the Quest for Knowledge has always been as something noble which should be supported in every possible way. Even in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Goethe's Faust, which were written to illustrate the dangers of man's thirst for knowledge and control over nature, there's the assumption that the enterprise is noble in itself, and it's just that it can be dangerous when taken to extremes. It's our 'reason' which makes us superior to other animals, and through exercising it we can dispel the darkness of ignorance and superstition which our 'primitive' ancestors lived in. Scientists often say that this Quest for Truth is what makes us truly human and that life would be meaningless without it. 

But, if we look a little deeper, the 'nobility' of the scientific enterprise begins to look very questionable. Three or four centuries ago, exploring and colonising the world was thought of as noble enterprise too. Europe's ruling classes were consumed by a desire to explore unknown territories, to bring home treasure from them and to spread their 'advanced' civilisation and religion to their heathen populations. This enterprise was more or less completed a century or so ago, when European governments 'ruled' most of the world's population, and explorers had covered almost every inch of the earth's surface.

Of course, now we know that there wasn't anything 'noble' about this at all. What this enterprise really was, of course, was a desire for dominance over the world itself and its peoples. It was rooted in the over-developed egos of European males, and the thirst for power and for material gain which the over-developed ego generates.

And it's possible to look at science in the same way. In a sense the scientific enterprise 'took over' from the colonial enterprise, and became a new channel for the European male's desire for dominance. After all, science itself is really a form of colonisation, as the above quote from Bentley Glass implies - a colonisation of nature, which human beings can then use for their own devices. Atomic physics 'colonised' the structure of atoms, for instance, so that we could use them to create nuclear bombs and energy, and now the 'genome project' is attempting to colonise (or map out) our genetic structure, so that we can control and manipulate it.

This isn't to say that there isn't anything healthy about science - nobody can deny that medical advances have made life easier, and that modern technology has made the world a smaller and more interconnected place. And there are certainly some scientists who are motivated by a genuine sense of curiosity and wonder, and a desire to bring benefits to mankind. But it's certainly no accident that most scientists are European males. Like the 'colonial' enterprise, the scientific enterprise is largely rooted in an unhealthy desire for dominion over nature, an egotistical impulse for power and control. 

In fact this is implicit in the way that science works. It sees nature as something which is always 'out there', foreign and apart from the consciousness which is observing it. And when something is 'other' to us it's always an enemy which we feel the need to subdue and conquer. 

The Limitations of Consciousness

But what's most debatable of all, in my opinion, is whether this 'complete explanation for everything' is at all feasible, and whether, in fact, it's possible for science to answer any of the 'big questions' we've looked at. 

The problem, as I see it, is that most scientists aren't aware of the limitations of human consciousness. There's an underlying assumption that the ordinary human consciousness with which we perceive reality is absolute and objective, and that the world as we see it is the world as it is. Our consciousness is like a perfect spotlight which illuminates the world clearly and truthfully, and which illuminates everything. And this is, of course, why it's possible for us to understand and explain everything - because we are aware of all reality there is to be aware of, and there is nothing potentially outside the 'range' of our consciousness spotlight. 

This is why scientists are usually hostile towards paranormal phenomena. Phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance and pre-cognition can't be genuine because they have no place in the mechanistic Newtonian world which our ordinary consciousness tell us is 'reality'. The same goes for 'spiritual' or mystical experiences. The different reality which people perceive in these moments obviously isn't objectively real - it can't be, because we 'know' that the reality we perceive with our normal consciousness is the Truth. Mystical experiences are therefore really only a delusory effect which the brain produces in certain situations. One current theory of mystical experience, for example, suggests that it's caused when the 'emergency response' mechanism in our brains (which makes us see things as significant when they threaten our well-being) is accidentally triggered by emotional or physical disturbance, which is why we have the sense that everything around us is full of significance. 

But the assumption that our ordinary consciousness tells us the absolute truth is completely unwarranted. One way of looking at evolution is to see it as a process by which living beings become progressively more conscious of reality. From amoebae to invertebrates to insects to birds to animals to apes and to human beings, the 'consciousness spotlight' has become more and more powerful. Whereas amoebae only have a tiny flicker of consciousness which enables them to react to changes in their environment (if you can react to changes in your environment then, it might be argued, you must have an awareness of that environment), human beings have a powerful 'consciousness spotlight' which gives us a very intense and precise awareness of the world around us, a degree of 'conceptual awareness', so that we're aware of the future, the past and death, and also a degree of self-awareness, so that we're not just conscious but also actually aware of ourselves being conscious. It's true that there are some 'higher' animals - like dolphins or chimpanzees - who seem to be aware of death and of themselves to a degree, but this awareness doesn't seem to be as intense as human beings' is. 

But just because we're more conscious than any other animal, it doesn't mean that we're completely conscious. This is the same as suggesting that human beings as we exist now are the culmination of the whole evolutionary process, that now evolution is complete and has ended, which is obviously ridiculous. In fact, assuming evolution continues, it's inevitable that at some point in the future living beings will come into existence who are more complex and more conscious than us in the same way that we're more complex and conscious than sheep or cows. These beings will be more intensely aware of their surroundings than we are, perhaps be more aware of themselves than we are, and they will certainly be aware of phenomena which we're ignorant of because they lie beyond the limits of our awareness. 

And if our consciousness is limited, there's no reason why we should expect to understand and explain everything. In the same way that a sheep or a cow can't be aware of the future or the past or of themselves, or of the presence of the moon and stars above them, there must be some realities which are beyond the limits of our consciousness. Perhaps we might see some of the effects of these phenomena (in the same way that the inhabitants of Flatland can see the effects of a three-dimensional reality) and we might puzzle over them and try to understand them, but we'll never be able to explain them properly, because we're not aware of the phenomena themselves. 

And as I see it, this is the position of modern science. Scientists will never be able to solve the 'big questions' because the answers to them - if there are any - lie beyond the limits of our normal consciousness. Trying to understand how the universe started, how life began, how an embryo develops or how consciousness is produced can only lead (as they are doing) to cul-de-sacs and confusion, because these questions can't be explained in terms of the restricted view of the world which our normal consciousness gives us. They obviously involve factors or phenomena which our limited consciousness doesn't allow us to be aware of. 

In fact we can almost grasp this when we ask ourselves some of the 'Big Questions'. Questions like 'Does the universe have an end? If it does, what comes after it?' or 'What was before the Big Bang?' These questions defy common sense, like the koans of Zen Buddhism. In fact there is one field of science, Quantum Physics, which seems to consist solely of koan-like riddles which can't be answered. How can a photon of light be a particle and a wave at the same time? How do electrons seem to 'know' what other electrons are doing? Why are experiments always affected by the expectations of the person who is doing the experiment? It's obvious that the answers to these 'koans' - if there are any - must be beyond the normal range of our 'consciousness spotlight'. 

Expanding the Range of Consciousness

But this doesn't necessarily mean that, as Goethe's Faust concluded, 'we can know nothing', and that the 'Quest for Truth' is a futile exercise. In fact the idea that our knowledge is limited by our consciousness suggests a different way of increasing our knowledge : by extending the range of our consciousness. And this is, of course, exactly the approach which Eastern philosophy has always taken.

Whereas Western science and philosophy has always assumed that truth is here, and can be found if we look and think hard enough, Eastern philosophy has always known that truth is beyond our normal consciousness, and can only be found by following spiritual practices which refine and intensify our consciousness. After all, the whole point of the Zen koans is that they can be solved, but not by using reason. The purpose of them is confuse and 'paralyse' the intellect, and so help to engender a fuller or higher state of consciousness - at which the solution to the koan suddenly becomes clear. 

Western scientists and philosophers are like someone who lives in a room and is sure that there is nothing outside it - in fact the idea that there might be something outside it doesn't even occur to them. They think they can find 'truth' by examining the room, by finding out what it's made of and how everything in it works, and cataloguing all the details they find. The only problem is that they keep coming upon strange things which don't seem to be explainable in terms of the room itself - there might be a strange air movement, for example, or light whose source they can't find. 

The eastern philosopher, on the other hand, realises that the room is not all there is, that there is a wider and truer reality outside it. He or she realises that truth can't be found in the room at all, and that there's no point looking for it there. It can only be found outside it - and so he spends his time trying to find a way out of the room, or trying to dismantle its walls, so that he can gain access to the wider reality beyond them. 

This is what we could call 'mystical science' - a quest for truth which is based on expanding consciousness. And if we really want to answer to 'big questions' this is the approach that we should take too. We need a different kind of science - one which isn't based on the supposed objective vision of an observer, but which focuses on expanding the vision of the observer, so that he or she can see more. Instead of new technologies which allow us to examine the shadow reality of samsara more and more deeply, we need spiritual 'technologies' which intensify our consciousness and so give us access to more 'truth'. 

And these 'technologies' have already been developed, of course - the transformational paths of Buddhism, for instance, of Tantra or Vedanta Yoga, of Sufism, or the Integral Transformative Practice recently developed by Michael Murphy, Ken Wilber and others. And there have also, of course, been many 'mystical scientists' throughout history, like Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharishi. Their intensified consciousness meant that they were aware of realities which are hidden to us - including many of the answers to the 'big questions'. The Ananda Sutram, for example, by one of the greatest Indian mystic-philosophers of recent times, P.R. Sarkar (also known as Anandamurti), provides a complete explanation of 'life, the universe and everything' from the standpoint of expanded consciousness. 

The only problem with this explanations is that, seen from the standpoint of our limited ordinary consciousness, they seem meaningless and even ridiculous. They're bound to, since we're like sheep trying to comprehend a new theory of 'the future and the past and death' which a sheep philosopher-mystic has put forward. The only way we can understand is to use spiritual technologies to expand our consciousness and become mystical scientists ourselves. 

A Critique of the View that Primal Peoples were/are less Socially and Spiritually Developed than Modern Humans...
(Originally published in The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 22, 2004.)

Abstract

Many theorists - including Wilber, Habermas and Gebser -believe that there are strong parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny, and that the development of the human species has followed the same basic pattern as the development of the individual from birth to adulthood. I discuss this view in relation to archaeological and anthropological knowledge of the world's 'primal peoples'. I look at the spiritual, moral and social development of primal peoples and find that, in almost every instance, they are more advanced that these theorists suggest, possessing characteristics which only occur - ontogenetically - at the higher 'fulcrums' of development. In particular, I argue that Wilber's model of phylogenetic development is false, and that his spectrum model cannot be applied to species development. I suggest the basis of a new (non-ontogenetic) model of phylogeny.

The question of whether the world's 'primal peoples' - both those who existed during earlier epochs and those who existed until recent times - are genuinely 'spiritual' or not is a hotly contested issue, which has important consequences for transpersonal psychology. The two sides of the argument will be familiar to every reader of Ken Wilber's works. On the one hand there is what Wilber calls the 'Retro-romantic' view, which holds that primal peoples were more 'spiritual' than modern human beings. They possessed a strong sense of connection to the cosmos and an awareness of esoteric forces and phenomena, both of which we have lost. With the development of our powerful intellect and strong sense of ego - and especially with the development of modern industrial civilisation - we 'fell' away from their higher state of being. 

But according to Wilber (e.g. 1995), this is to fall victim to the pre/trans fallacy. Applying his spectrum of consciousness model to phylogenetic development, Wilber argues that primal peoples were a pre-personal level of consciousness. The hunter-gatherers of the Paeolithic Era belonged to what he calls the typhonic stage of evolution, which is characterised by 'magical thinking', including voodoo practices, taboos, and an animistic worldview. The farmers of the Neolithic era, beginning around 12,000 BCE, belonged to the mythic stage, where individuals begin to realise that magic no longer works and instead projected the existence of elaborate systems of gods, demons and other forces. At around 2500 BCE the 'solar ego stage' began, with the 'low egoic' phase lasting until 500 BCE and the current 'high ego' phase beginning at around 500 BCE. Only at this stage did human beings become capable of rationality and hypthetico-deductive reasoning; and only at this stage did human beings become capable of experiencing the higher transpersonal levels, including nirvikalpa samadhi itself. Every age has an 'average' level of consciousness, and some gifted individuals are able to 'jump' from that level to the higher realms, but because their average level was relatively low, earlier human beings could not leap the full height of the spectrum. Even during the mythic stage individuals could only 'peak' at the psychic realms, which they attained with the help of shamanic rituals and trances (Wilber, 1981,1995). (Recently, however, Wilber (2000) has modified this view, and now suggests that 'a truly developed shaman in a magical culture, having evolved various postconventional capacities, would be able to authentically experience the transpersonal realms (mostly the psychic, but also, on occasion, subtle and perhaps causal)') (my italics). 
In other words, according to Wilber, primal peoples are actually less spiritual than us, both in the sense that their average level of consciousness was lower than ours - and therefore further away from the transpersonal spiritual realms - and in the sense that their exceptionally developed individuals could not 'leap' as high as us (or at least far fewer of them were capable of doing so). One of the problems here, Wilber warns us, is that the lower levels of consciousness have superficial similarities with the highest levels. At fulcrum-2, for example, (during the typhonic stage), the individual experiences a state of pre-personal fusion with the world, which is superficially similar to the trans-personal state of oneness which highly developed mystics experience. This pre/trans fallacy is so prevalent, Wilber argues, that we have developed a completely romanticised view of our earlier human cultures. We believe that there was once a golden age (or at least a more golden age) when human beings lived at one with each other and with nature, when there was no war, oppression, selfishness or environmental destruction. But Wilber takes exactly the reverse view: rather than seeing human history as being shaped by a Fall away from earlier more pristine condition, he sees human history as a series of 'leaps', propelled by the atman telos of evolution (Wilber 1980). He contends that, like young children, earlier human beings were at the pre-operational stage of cognitive development and a pre-conventional level of morality, and therefore narcissistic and egocentric. According to his model, individual and social attributes such as compassion, democracy, sexual equality etc., only become possible at fulcrum-5, when formal operational cognition develops. As a consequence, in order to fit his ontogenetic model to phylogeny, he has to contend that earlier human beings lacked these 'higher' attributes.

My intention here is to dispute Wilber's analysis. I believe there is a great deal of evidence suggesting that primal peoples did possess many of the higher characteristics which Wilber believes can only arise at the egoic and post- egoic levels. However, above and beyond this, I believe that the primary mistake Wilber makes is not his view of primal peoples itself, but the application of ontogeny to phylogeny which forces him to take this view. In my opinion, this application is itself a fallacy, similar to the pre/trans fallacy, in the sense that a number of superficial similarities prompt one to take the giant leap to complete identification. Primal peoples seem to possess a simple, undivided consciousness and a strong sense of connection to the natural world; they also seem to have less developed powers of rationality and intellect, and a less developed sense of individuality and separateness. But to leap from these similarities to the conclusion that their level of consciousness is exactly that of ontogenetic fulcrum-2 or 3, and that they share exactly the same state of pre-egoic fusion which children experience, is completely unwarranted. Wilber himself recognises that the application of ontogeny to phylogeny is sometimes unfounded, noting that there are 'many places that strict onto/phylo parallels break down' (Wilber, 2000), but in my view the matter is much more problematic that he believes.

Before I begin with this, however, I ought to define exactly what (or who) I mean by 'primal peoples'. In the sense I am using the term, it refers both to hunter-gatherer tribal and early agrarian peoples who lived during earlier epochs but whose cultures have now disappeared (e.g. the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe and the pre-Semitic inhabitants of the Middle East), and also to tribal peoples whose cultures survived until recent centuries (e.g. Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, traditional Africans). Some writers have warned against inferring from contemporary to prehistoric tribal groups (e.g. Roszak, 1992), and I believe this is justified in the sense that every tribal culture in existence now has been affected and altered by colonial European influence. But I also believe it is valid to see peoples like the Native Americans and the Aborigines, at the times when Europeans first had contact with them (and for a period afterwards), as a kind of window through which we can look back at the history of the whole human race. These were cultures which had been unchanged for thousands of years. As the anthropologist Robert Lawlor (1991) writes, for instance: 
Traditional archaeological evidence holds that Aboriginal culture has existed in Australia for 60,000 years, but more recent evidence indicates that the period is more like 120,000 or 150,000 years. The Aborigines' rituals, beliefs and cosmology may represent the deepest collective memory of our race. 
Lawlor 1991, p. 9 

In any case, what anthropologists tell us of these peoples corresponds very closely to Wilber's (and Habermas') depiction of early human beings at the typhonic stage (e.g. their tribal system, hunger-gatherer lifestyle, animistic and magical worldviews). It is therefore, I believe, completely valid to use anthropologists' reports of these relatively contemporary primal peoples to argue against Wilber.

However, I must first say that in some respects I agree with Wilber. Primal peoples clearly are pre-rational - or at least, they clearly do not possess rational-logical powers to the same extent that we do. It's probably justifiable to say that, in terms of Piaget's model, their cognitive development does not reach the formal operational stage - or at least, that their rationality and hypthetico-deductive ability is less developed than ours. This is a controversial issue in itself, and many 'retro-romantics' will take me to task for this, but I believe that the prevalence of magical beliefs and practices, irrational taboos and superstitions amongst primal peoples is clear evidence of this. These show an inability to come to grips with causal mechanisms and logical systems, and an inability to analyse. The relative lack of technological and development amongst primal peoples is also, I believe, evidence of this. Apart from a few exceptions, early human beings, and primal peoples like the Aborigines and Native Americans, had only rudimentary engineering and building skills, rudimentary medical science, and no written language. Juergen Kremer (1998) has listed a number of achievements which he believes show that primal peoples' intellectual powers were as well developed as modern humans', including the Aztec and Mayan calendars, the astronomical knowledge associated with Stonehenge, and the pyramids of Egypt. Wilber (1998) argues against this by stating that 'any individual can be above or below a society's centre of gravity, and any remarkable accomplishments are open to virtually any society', and this is, I believe, completely valid. To assume that a whole community is intellectually developed because some individuals were capable of designing intricate structures or possessed astronomical knowledge is as misguided as assuming that the whole population of India is enlightened because a small number of mystics and saints have emerged from the country (although this is a mistake which is sometimes made too, of course). 
But apart from this, Wilber's analysis of early human beings and primal peoples is, I believe, full of fallacies and misinterpretations, which he is forced to make in order to hitch his ontogenetic spectrum of consciousness to phylogeny. 

Primal Religion

According to Wilber, at the psychic level (fulcrum-7) we experience nature as divine. We sense the presence of brahman in everything - or, as it has elsewhere been called, dharmakaya (Mahayana Buddhism), God (Christian Mysticism), consciousness-force (Sri Aurobindo), or the One (Plotinus).

As we've noted, Wilber contends that primal peoples cannot have access to the psychic levels, except as exceptional individuals. A thorough an open-minded examination of primal cultures, however, leaves absolutely no doubt that primal peoples in general (not just through a few exceptional individuals) were aware of the presence of 'consciousness-force' everywhere around them. They do not simply see nature as Spirit but as an expression of it. Spirit is in nature, rather than exclusively identified with it. 

In many primal cultures the concept of 'God' has two meanings. On the one hand it can refer to a creator God, a personal being, who created the world but then stepped aside and now has very little significance. This God is usually a very remote and detached figure, who seems to have been invented simply as a way of explaining how the world came into being. According to Eliade:

Like many celestial Supreme Beings of 'primitive' peoples, the High Gods of a great number of African ethnic groups are regarded as creators, all powerful and benevolent and so forth; but they play a rather insignificant part in the religious life. Being either too distant or too good to need a real cult, they are involved only in cases of great crisis. 
Eliade, 1967, p. 6

However, 'God' can also refer to an animating force which pervades all things. 
Native Americans have called this the Life Master and the Great Spirit (Wakan to the Sioux, Dachakamaq to the Incas, for example), the Nuer of Africa call it Kowth, and the Ufaina of the Amazon call it fufaka, and so on. Every primal culture without exception has a term for this force. The word the Plains Indians used for 'Great Spirit', Wakataka, literally means 'the force which moves all things.' While here a member of the Pawnee tribe describes their 'supreme God':

We do not think of Tirawa as a person. We think of Tirawa as [a power which is] in everything and moves upon the darkness, the night, and causes her to bring forth the dawn. It is the breath of the new-born dawn. 
Eliade, 1967, p. 65

In my view this force is clearly one and the same as brahman or consciousness-force. The important point, again, is that Spirit is in nature, rather than actually being nature. The passage above invites comparison with any of the passages from the Upanishads which describe the presence of brahman within the manifest world. For example:

Shining, yet hidden, Spirit lives in the cavern. Everything that sways, breathes, opens, closes, lives in Spirit
Spirit is everywhere, upon the right, upon the left, above, below, behind, in front. What is the world but Spirit? 
Happold, 1963 p. 146

Wilber might contend that I am falling victim to the pre/trans fallacy here, and say that primal peoples' apparent sense of the divine is the result of their pre-personal fusion with the world. But this does not hold true. Primal peoples do not, strictly speaking, experience a state of fusion with this force. Although (as we will see in a moment) they recognise that Spirit is the essence of their own being as well, they experience a sense of differentiation between themselves and consciousness-force. They speak of it as something external, something which is 'out there' in the world, which they perceive with a degree of subject-object duality. In other words, this is not the same state of pre-egoic fusion with the world which young children experience, but the state of differentiated experience of the divine of fulcrum-7. 

In terms of Wilber's model we are already dealing with impossibilities, of course. I am suggesting that primal peoples existed at two different levels of consciousness simultaneously. Their lack of rationality and their magical thinking locates them at fulcrum-2 (or the early stages of fulcrum-3), but at the same time their awareness of the divine locates them at fulcrum-7. I feel much more comfortable with the application of Wilber's model to ontogeny, and I agree that ontogenetically this is not possible: as individuals we clearly have to pass through the pre-personal levels of childhood and the egoic levels of maturity before we can stabilise ourselves at the transpersonal levels. But this does not appear to be the case phylogenetically - which clearly shows, to me, that Wilber's spectrum model can not be applied to species development. 

The third main aspect of primal religion, after the creator God and consciousness-force, is the presence of spirits. There are, generally, two kinds of spirits: those which are the spirits of dead human beings, and those which have always existed as spirits. These are everywhere; every object and every phenomenon is either inhabited by or connected to a particular spirit. As E.Bolaji Idowu (in Magesa, 1997) writes of traditional African religion, 'there is no area of the earth, no object or creature, which has not a spirit of its own or which cannot be inhabited by a spirit.' These spirits are not autonomous beings with personalities, like gods - as Idowu writes, 'they are more often than not thought of as powers which are almost abstract, as shades or vapours.' And although to some extent they are conceived as individual forces, they are also seen as an expression of the 'great spirit'. As Evans-Pritchard (in Magesa, 1997) notes of the Nuer, 'God is not a particular air-spirit but the spirit is a figure of God The spirits are not each other but they are God in different figures.' (Note here that the term 'God' here does not refer to the creator God but to God as spirit-force.) 

Wilber maintains that this animism is the result of pre-personal fusion, the lack of a clear distinction between subject and object. But I believe that animism is both pre-personal and transpersonal, in the sense that it's the result of a combination of elements associated with both these levels. At the most basic level, primal peoples see all things as alive because they are aware of the Spirit in all things: Spirit makes the world alive. However, as we've noted, their lack of rationality means that they cannot understand the causal mechanisms by which the natural world operates. But they had to find some way of explaining these to themselves, and they did this by translating their sense of the general aliveness of things into a belief that phenomena were individually alive with individual spirits, rather than generally alive with a common Spirit. These individual spirits had powers of agency and influence, and could therefore be responsible for events and processes. When a wind suddenly arose, for example, this could be explained as the action of a wind-spirit; when somebody became ill this could be explained as the influence of 'evil' spirits. This was, you might say, a distortion of the original sense of Spirit, which would certainly not occur in post-rational spiritual evolution. We should remember, however, that, as Evans-Pritchard indicates, belief in spirits does not occlude primal peoples' awareness of Spirit itself, since ultimately individual spirits are an expression of the Great Spirit. 

Other Spiritual Characteristics

Another characteristic of higher spiritual states is the sense that Spirit is not only out there, pervading the world, but also inside us, as the very essence of our beings

 Brahman exists inside us as atman; or, in the words of Meister Eckhart (1996), 'The inward man is not at all in time or place but is purely and simply in eternity. It is there that God arises, there He is heard, there He is'. When awareness of this divine Self arises, the individual becomes something of a 'divine schizophrenic', consisting of two selves: the superficial ego-self and the true, spiritual self, or the 'outward' and the 'inward' man, as Eckhart called them.

According to Wilber, of course, this identification with inner divinity only becomes possible at fulcrum-7. We have to first 'dis-identify' ourselves with the world, then with the body and then with the ego. But again, although this is clear enough from an ontogenetic perspective, primal peoples do not seem to fit to this framework. This is admittedly not quite so clear from my research, but there seems to be a general recognition that the individual human spirit is in essence divine too, as a part of the great ocean of Spirit which pervades the whole world. In fact, since all natural things are seen as divine in essence, it would be very surprising if this was not the case. As the anthropologist H. Sindima (in Magesa, 1997) writes of traditional African peoples, for example, 'All life - that of people, plants and animals, and the earth - originates and therefore shares an intimate relationship of bondedness with divine life; all life is divine life'. 

Similarly, the Ufaina of the Amazon believe that when a human being is born a small amount of fufaka (or Spirit) enters her body. She, and the group to which she belongs, 'borrow' it from the total 'stock' of Spirit. While she lives, therefore, Spirit is always the essence of her being, and at death it is released and returns to its source (Hildebrand, 1988). 

Some primal peoples show clear awareness of the 'two selves' concept as well. We might take the example of the Australian Aborigines. As we've seen, and in common with the other peoples we have looked at so far, their animism, magical thinking and hunter-gatherer lifestyle locate them squarely at Wilber's typhonic stage, corresponding to fulcrum-2 or early fulcrum-3. At this stage, according to Wilber, their self-sense should only be associated with their body; there should be no sense of ego and certainly no sense of Spirit. But the aborigines appear to possess both of these simultaneously. Many aboriginal tribes believe that human beings contain two souls, one of which is the 'true soul' and the other of which they call the 'trickster'. As the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner wrote of the Murngin tribe: 

One is looked upon as fundamental and real, and is felt to be the true soul The other is considered a trickster, of little value, and only in a vague way associated with the 'true man'. The 'shadow soul' causes evil and badness within the personality. The true soul supplies the eternal element to the cultural life of an individual Murngin. It lifts man from the simple profane animal level and allows him to participate fully in the sacred eternal values of the civilisation.
In Eliade, 1967, p.187 

Another anthropologist who has intensively studied aboriginal culture, Robert Lawlor (1991), describes the 'trickster' as the 'source of the individualised ego [which] can be characterised as the ego soul. This spirit force is bound to locality; to relationships with wives, husbands and kin relatives; and to material things such as tools and items of apparel'. This sounds frighteningly similar to the ego as we understand it - especially when we learn that, as Lawlor also notes, the trickster resents death because it takes it away from these material and emotional attachments. It wants to be immortal, in eternity with its pleasures and possessions. But in the same way that, according to the perennial philosophy (and Wilber), we can only truly find eternity by dis-identifying with the ego-self and orienting ourselves around inner Spirit, the aborigines recognise that every soul 'must true immortality in identifying itself with the enduring energy emanating from the celestial realms of the Dreamtime ancestors' (Lawlor, 1991). In other words, since the Aboriginal concept of 'Dreaming' corresponds roughly (with distortions possibly due to magical thinking) to consciousness-force, we must identify ourselves purely with Spirit. 

Narcissism and Egocentricity 

Piaget showed that, before they reach the operational stages, children are severely narcissistic and egocentric. They are unable to see the world from other people's points of view. Piaget demonstrated this with his famous 'Swiss mountain scene' experiment. He built a model of three papier-mache mountains, each of which were different colours and sizes and shapes.

Children walked around and explored the model, and then were seated on one side of the model, while a doll was placed at a different location. The children were then shown ten pictures of the mountains and told to choose the one which shows the scene as the doll sees it. Children at the age of four always chose the picture which matched their own view of the model, showing that they were unable to understand perspectives beyond their own. Six year olds showed some awareness of perspective: they always chose a different picture to their own view, but usually the wrong one. Only seven and eight year olds chose the right picture (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956). 

Because of this, young children are incapable of empathy and compassion, since these depend on looking at the world from the perspective of others, and 'feeling with' them. I experienced this with my three -year-old Nephew the other day, when I said to him, 'I don't feel very well Ben - I think I'm ill.' Instead of expressing sympathy or asking me what I thought I was coming down with (and therefore feeling empathy), he simply said, 'I'm not.' This is why, despite their innocence, young children are capable of appalling acts of cruelty - e.g. tearing the legs off spiders, boiling frogs, putting cats in the washing machine.

If primal peoples have only reached Wilber's fulcrum-2, corresponding to Paiget's pre-operational stage, we would expect them to be similarly narcissistic and egocentric. But the reality could hardly be more different. 

In fact, primal peoples are characterised by a pronounced lack of these. They generally display a strong sense of empathy and compassion for other living beings, and nature in general. Whereas children at the pre-operational stage have so little ability to 'feel with' animals that they can be sadistically cruel to them, primal peoples often apologise to the spirits of animals before they set off hunting. Hunting is usually seen as an unfortunate necessity, and they take no pleasure from killing. In The Forest People Colin Turnbull (1993) describes how, to the Mbuti of Africa - who he lived with for three years - hunting is the 'original sin', which occurred when a mythical ancestor killed an antelope and then ate it to conceal his act. Since then, all animals - including human beings - have been condemned to die. Partly because of this philosophy, they are, in Turnbull's words, 'gentle hunters' who never show 'any expression of joy, nor even of pleasure', when they make a catch. They never kill more than they need for one day, since 'To kill more than is absolutely necessary would be to heighten the consequences of that original sin and confirm even more firmly their own mortality'. 

Their strong sense of empathy means that primal peoples are reluctant to damage or destroy any natural phenomena. In The Dance of Life, Edward T. Hall (1984) describes how an agricultural agent was sent to work with the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. At first, through the summer and winter, he got along well with them, but when Spring came around their attitude to him suddenly became hostile. The Indians refused to say what the problem was, just that 'he just doesn't know certain things.' Eventually, however, it emerged that the agent had tried to make them start 'early spring plowing', which offended their empathetic sense that in spring the earth is pregnant with new life and must be treated gently. In Spring, Hall notes, the Indians remove steel shoes from their horses, refuse to wear European shoes or to use wagons, for fear that they might damage the earth. 

Even now there is continual conflict between native Americans and European-American companies who want to 'develop' lands which the Indians believe are sacred. Often the Indians refuse to let mining take place on their reservations, even though this would bring them massive financial benefits. In the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, for example, it is estimated that there are around 50 billion tons of coal, but despite large scale poverty and unemployment on the reservation, the Indians' empathetic sense of the alive-ness of nature means that they will not allow mining to take place. To them this would be tantamount to murder (Bryan, 1996). 

(This is incidentally a reason why I dispute Wilber's view that primal peoples were potentially - apart from their lack of technology - as environmentally destructive as we are. Their awareness of Spirit pervading the whole of nature, their sense of the alive-ness of natural phenomena and of their sense of connection to nature, meant that they had - and have - an extreme reluctance to damage or even interfere with nature. I am not disputing that in some cases they may have damaged their environment due to a lack of forethought, but it is clear, I believe, that their strong sense of empathy with nature means that they are much more reluctant - and therefore much less capable - of damaging nature than us. Our lack of connection to and empathy with nature is, I believe, one of the root causes of the ecological crisis. Wilber maintains (in 1995, for example) that ecological awareness can only arise with formal operational cognition, when we become capable of grasping mutual interrelationships. But surely there is another kind of ecological awareness which is non-rational, and which stems from the sense of empathetic connection with the natural world - in other words, from direct perceptual awareness, rather than from rationality). 

The quality of compassion is so central to Aboriginal culture that mothers take care to 'teach' it to their children. Often, when a child grabs some food or another object and holds it to its mouth, the mother - or another female relative - pretends to be in need of it, to encourage a spirit of sharing. Similarly, whenever a weak or ill person or animals comes by, the mother makes a point of expressing sympathy for it, and offering it food. As Lawlor (1991) notes, by these means 'The child experiences a world in which compassion and pity are dramatically directed towards the temporarily less fortunate. The constant maternal dramatization of compassion in the early years orients a child's emotions toward empathy, support, warmth and generosity.' 

Narcissism and egocentrism give rise to a whole host of negative human traits. They mean that the individual is dominated by his or her own needs and desires, and refuses to let the needs of other individuals or of the community as a whole come before them. After all, since he cannot 'put themselves in other people's shoes', the individual cannot understand the needs and desires of others. This leads to behaviour which we associate with greed and selfishness. A child below the age of 7, for example, might eat a whole bag of candy themselves instead of offering them to his brother, or throw away a toy she is bored with even though her brother still plays with it. At the pre-operational levels - at least according to Wilber and Piaget - this selfishness is inevitable. Children are extremely reluctant to share. 

But we do not, of course, find anything resembling this amongst primal peoples. In fact, again, we find the complete opposite: a powerful spirit of reciprocity and sharing, and ethical systems which negate any expression of greed. One of the fundamental cultural differences which made Native Americans unable to adapt to the European way of life was that, whereas Europeans became successful and respected as a result of accumulating wealth for themselves, the Indians gained kudos by distributing wealth. Even the Incas, who shared many negative European traits - such as militarism, patriarchy and social stratification - possessed a welfare system, the like of which the U.S. and Europe have only seen during the last few decades. Every town had a large number of warehouses, full of provisions and supplies which - except in times in war - would be distributed amongst the poor, the disabled, widows and the old (Wright, 1992). 

The same is true of traditional African culture, where to hoard any wealth for oneself, and so to deprive the other members of the community, is regarded as a heinous sin. To traditional Africans, hospitality is a moral imperative; greed breaks the communitarian principles which sustain the universe. As Magesa writes:

What constitutes misuse of the universe? This question can be answered in one word: greed Greed constitutes the most grievous wrong. Indeed, if there is one word that describes the demands of the ethics of African Religion, sociability (in the sense of hospitality, open-hearted sharing) is that word. 
Magesa, 1997 p. 62

This is clearly why most primal societies have a lack of private property and social stratification, which itself indicates a lack of egocentrism. Marx described this as 'primitive communism' and it was the source of another massive cultural clash between the Europeans and Native Americans. The Native Americans could not comprehend the concept of private ownership of land, or the massive inequalities which ran through European society. As Sitting Bull complained, 'The White Man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it The love of possession is a disease with them. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule' (Wright, 1992). While the Europeans, for their part, saw the 'communism' of the natives as a defect which had prevented them from becoming 'civilised'. As Senator Henry Daweson said of the Cherokee Nation in 1887: 

There is not a pauper in that nation, and the nation does not owe a dollar Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they hold their land in common There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. 
In Wright, 1992 p. 67

There is also a general lack of concern for gaining individual status and power amongst primal peoples, and a lack of competitive behaviour. The root of competitive behaviour is a desire to possess wealth, status or power at the expense of others, to hoard a large part of the total supply of these for oneself instead of them leaving them to the community - in a word, egocentrism. And we can see evidence of the difference between European and primal peoples' attitudes here simply by looking at games. There were always giant problems when European colonists tried to introduce their competitive sports to the natives. In New Guinea boys were trained to play soccer in mission schools, but instead of trying to win by as many goals as possible, they would always carry on playing until both teams had level score (Lawlor, 1991). The aborigines could not get to grips with soccer either - not only did the idea of winning against other members of their community seem incomprehensible to them, they could not bring themselves to play the game with the usual kind of aggression and confrontation, since these were absent from every other arena of their lives. The only occasion when they did show aggression and confrontation was for the punishment of those who broke taboos, which confused them even more (Lawlor, 1991). 

Primal peoples are, then, clearly not narcissistic or egocentric to anything like the degree that children at fulcrums 2 or 3 are. Again, this suggests that Wilber's ontogenetic model cannot be applied to phylogeny. In fact, like their awareness of Spirit, their pronounced ability to take the role of the other primal peoples way above the developmental level which Wilber allocates to them. According to Wilber's model, there is a widening circle of identity - and of empathy - which develops as we move through to higher fulcrums. At fuclrum-4 we cease to be completely egocentric, and become sociocentric, identifying with our tribal or social group (in Kohlberg's terms, we move from pre-conventional to conventional morality). At fulcrum-5, our circle of identity and empathy expands to the whole human race; we become worldcentric. At fulcrum-7, the circle widens to include all living beings; and at fulcrum-8, it expands to all reality, all manifestations of Spirit (Wilber, 1995). Based on the above evidence, it seems entirely justifiable to place primal peoples at fulcrum-7, perhaps even higher.

Once again, this makes absolutely no sense in terms of Wilber's model. In terms of Kohlberg's hierarchy of moral development, primal peoples should - according to Wilber - only have a pre-conventional morality, with their sole moral motivation the completely egocentric goal of avoiding punishment and gaining rewards. But they clearly have a much higher level of morality than this. As Magesa indicates above, the main motivation of their morality is not personal or even communal, but universal: to preserve the harmony of the universe. This clearly suggests that, at least in some respects, they possess a post-conventional morality.

Another conundrum which the above analysis gives rise to is the apparent fact that we Europeans are more egocentric and narcissistic than primal peoples. This is evident from a number of factors: our much more pronounced desire for status and power and material goods (i.e. greed), the extreme competitiveness of our culture, the emphasis of the individual over the community, social stratification, and - perhaps most emphatically - our lack of empathy with the natural world, our inability to 'feel with' nature. According to Wilber's analysis - and those of Gebser and Habermas, to which most of the criticisms I am making here also apply - as evolution progresses there should be a decline in egocentrism. And again, in ontogenetic development this is indisputably the case. But equally indisputably, in terms of the development of our species this is not the case. 

Enlightened Social Characteristics 

This obviously contrasts with Wilber's view of phylogeny as a gradual advancement of the human species, progressing from one fulcrum to the next, and leading to higher levels of cultural and social development. And there is another persuasive argument against his progressivist view of phylogeny, which is the apparent prevalence of 'higher' social and cultural characteristics amongst primal peoples. 

According to Wilber, enlightened social characteristics such as non-militarism, democracy and equality can only occur when societies as a whole move to the formal-operational levels. This is happening at the present time, and has been since the beginning of the 'high ego' or egoic-rational phase at around 500 BCE. This phase reached its fruition in sixteenth century, with the rise of the modern state, and gradually began to manifest itself in the 'Enlightenment' principles of equality and democracy. It led to the end of slavery, the end of autocratic monarchies, women's rights, workers' rights, a decline in militarism etc (Wilber, 1995). 

Again, since primal peoples are allegedly at a pre-operational stage of cognition, and have only reached fulcrum-2 (or early 3), we would expect to find a complete absence of these characteristics, or at the very least to find that they were as war-like, as socially stratified and as patriarchal as more recent societies have been. Wilber maintains that this is the case - or at least that, if it isn't, this is only because of accidental and unimportant economic factors. He agrees that patriarchy was absent from hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies, but argues that this was a simple consequence of the fact that women had a much more prominent role economically - in fact during both phases they produced around 80% of food. Patriarchy began, he argues, with the transition from horticultural to agrarian society - in other words, when the plough began to be used, which meant that women began to be excluded from economic life (since working with heavy ploughs would have made them miscarry) (Wilber, 1995). At the same time, he flatly denies that war and inequality were less prevalent amongst these societies, quoting Lenski's data - e.g. that 58 percent of hunter-gatherer societies and over 50% of agrarian engaged in frequent or intermittent warfare, that 61 percent of agrarian societies had private property rights and 14 percent had slavery, and so on. 

But again, the archaeological and anthropological evidence contradicts this. I have already suggested that primal societies were natural democratic, with a lack of private property and social stratification. In fact there is a very good case for suggesting that, at least to some extent, the modern concepts of democracy and equality were derived from primal peoples: specifically, from the Native Americans. The authors of the American constitution borrowed their concept of a union of different states from the centuries-old 'Six Nations' confederacy of the Iroquois Indians - in fact the idea was actually recommended to the Europeans by a leader of the Six Nations at a treaty signing in 1744, at which Benjamin Franklin was present (Wright, 1992). Similarly, the constitution's concept of a non-hierarchical society - which was, after all, completely alien to Europe at that time - was to a large extent inspired by the authors' observations of Native American societies. In the words of Alvin M. Josephy Jr.:

Colonial records show that many of the Indian peoples of the Atlantic seaboard taught the European settlers much with regard to freedom, the dignity of the individual, democracy, representative government, and the right to participate in the settling of one's affairs. 
Josephy, 1975, p.39

The Native Americans were also to some degree responsible for the French Revolution - at least to the extent that they inspired Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who idealised them as 'noble savages'. (And Rousseau's ideas influenced the American constitution as well, of course.) And it's ironic that, as well as being the originators of modern capitalist democracy, the Iroquois had a hand in the creation of communist states. In 1851 Lewis Henry Morgan published League of the Iroquois, reporting his anthropological observations of Iroquois society. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the book, and were also inspired by what they saw as an example of a Utopian socialist society. As Engels wrote to Marx, 'This gentle constitution is wonderful! There can be no poor and needy...All are free and equal - including the women' (Wright, 1992). 

Similarly, Wilber's assertion that primal peoples were as war-like as later human groups does not fit the historical evidence. The idea that 'war is old as humanity' is now disputed by the majority of archaeologists and anthropologists, whose findings are mostly opposed to Lenski's. In The Origin of War (1995), for example, J.M.G. van der Dennen surveys over 500 primal peoples, the vast majority of whom he finds to be 'highly unwar-like', with a small proportion who have 'allegedly mild, low-level, and/or ritualized warfare'. Similarly, R. Brian Ferguson (2000) has stated that 'the global pattern of actual evidence indicates that war as a regular pattern is a relatively recent development in human history, emerging as our ancestors left the simple, mobile hunter-gatherer phase.' 
This is also clear from an anthropological perspective. The different tribes of the Australian aborigines, for example, very rarely fought against each other, and even when they did it was common to 'ritualise' the conflict into a fight between two individuals. A representative of each tribe would be chosen, and the two men would stand motionless, about 15-20 metres apart, and throw spears at each other. When one of them was wounded the 'war' would be over (Wildman, 1996). One potential source of conflict amongst aborigines is when hunters from one tribe approach the campsite of another tribe. But here there is another traditional ritual which defuses the situation. The hunters wait at a distance from the campsite, making sure they can be seen. Then the unmarried members of the hunting group and those who have been apart from their wives for a long time lie down on their backs. At sunset a group of women from the tribe walk over from the campsite, lie down on top of the hunters, and make love to them (Lawlor, 1991).

The Native Americans became much more war-like as a result of their conflicts with European colonists, and certain peoples (like the Aztecs and the Incas) were always aggressive, but in general war was a much less prominent part of life for them than for Europeans. As Josephy has written:
Certain groups like the Hopis were among the most peaceful peoples on earth, and many Indians abhorred warfare and the misery and violent death that it brought...
[Warfare] usually consisted of sporadic raids There were few sieges, protracted battles or wars of conquest. Quite often an attacking side, believing that nothing was worth the loss of its own people, would break off fighting as soon as it had suffered casualties. 
Josephy, 1975, p. 37-38
In other words, when we look back at history we do not see a gradual ascent to present day Western democracy, equality and (relative) non-militarism; we see an earlier time when these qualities were already present, and then a 'Fall' away from this state, into war, patriarchy and social stratification (as well as greater egocentrism and narcissism). And later still - during recent centuries - we see a gradual re-emergence of these 'higher' social characteristics. 

Summary 

To summarise my argument, then, Wilber's application of ontogeny to phylogeny is misguided for the following reasons:

1. Primal peoples exhibit higher spiritual characteristics, including a) an awareness of Spirit pervading the manifest world b) an awareness of the inner Spirit or atman and c) an awareness of the 'two selves', the ego and the divine self. This paradoxically locates them at fulcrum-7, while their lack of hypthetico-deductive reasoning and magical thinking locates them - according to Wilber's model - at fulcrum-2 or 3. 

2. Primal peoples show no sign of the narcissism and egocentrism which children at pre-operational levels exhibit. Their 'universal' empathy locates them at fulcrum-7 or higher, and suggests that they possess a post-conventional morality. 

3. Primal cultures exhibit enlightened social characteristics, such as democracy and peacefulness which, according to Wilber, should only emerge at fulcrum-5, or during the high egoic period.

There is, however, another point I would like to add briefly, which in my view further undermines the application of ontogeny to phylogeny. Following Gebser and Habermas, Wilber suggests that, like young children, early hunger-gatherers existed in a state of fusion with the world. There is no sense of separateness to the world, and no clear sense of subject-object duality. As Wilber (1996) writes, 'Mind and world are not clearly differentiated, so their characteristics tend to get fused and confused.' The problem with this view, however, is that surely, if these early humans could not clearly distinguish between subject and object (or between an image and real object), they would have found it impossible to survive. After all, they did not live in the protective circle of parental care which young children live in, and which alone makes survival possible for them. As Wilber hints, pre-personal fusion equates with confusion, which would have severely undermined our ancestors' survival abilities (just as it does with young children). The practical business of survival - especially within the dangerous world which early human beings inhabited - requires a sense of differentiation. 


In my view, as I've already hinted above (e.g. in my discussion of the aboriginal notion of the 'two-selves'), the reality is probably that early human beings did have a degree of separate-self development, but only a small degree. The difference between them and later peoples is that the latter developed a much sharper and more defined sense of ego. The egos of primal peoples are not so developed that they result in a sense of disassociation from the physical body or from nature, or that individual desires take precedence over communal or universal welfare (or that they possess hypthetico-deductive reasoning powers). However, later human beings - including us moderns - possess what Barfield (in Wilber, 1981) describes as 'the individual, sharpened, spatially determined consciousness of today,' and so do experience a painful sense of separation from the world, other human beings and even from our own bodies (and are capable of hypthetico-deductive reasoning). In other words - again in opposition to the application of ontogeny to phylogeny - primal peoples are not at a pre-personal level, but at a less developed personal level. 

What we really need, in order to fully substantiate my argument here, are two things: first, a new view of spirituality, explaining what spiritual states actually are and how they are attained, which could account for the fact that primal peoples are 'spiritual' and pre-rational at the same time; and second, a new model of phylogeny, to replace the ontogeny-based models of Wilber, Habermas and Gebser. I do not have space here to investigate these properly, and intend to deal with them in future papers. But I would like to suggest briefly that the basis of a new model of phylogeny should be what the myths of many different cultures describe as a 'Fall'. As many of the myths indicate, the 'Fall' was precisely the development I referred to in the last section: the development of a much stronger and sharper sense of ego in certain human groups. I would like to put forward a basic three stage model of phylogeny, the bare skeleton of which is as follows:

1. The 'pre-Fall' period (from the beginnings of the human race to 4000 BCE, and later in many places). This covers both the hunter-gatherer and the Neolithic agricultural phases of human history. During these human groups were peaceful, democratic, free from social stratification and private property, highly attuned to the natural world, and non-patriarchal. The negative aspects of this phase were the lack of technological development and the irrationality of superstitions and taboos. 

2. The 'fallen' period (from around 4000 BCE onwards). The 'Fall' appears to have begun with certain human groups inhabiting the middle east and Central Asia at this time, whose psyche was apparently transformed by an environmental catastrophe (see DeMeo, 1998 for a discussion of this). Forced to leave their homelands, these peoples - including the Indo-Europeans and the Semites - migrated throughout the Middle East, Europe and Asia and in this way their 'fallen' culture eventually spread to large areas of the globe. The characteristics of this stage include: patriarchy, intense warfare, social stratification, a hostile attitude to the human body and nature, theism (both polytheism and monotheism), capitalism, private property etc. The Fall also resulted in the increased narcissism and egocentrism which I mentioned above, and a sharp decline in ecological awareness. Positive aspects of this phase include increased technological development and rationality, enabling a transcendence of magical thinking. 

3. The 'trans-Fall' period (16th century onwards?). This is the phase which we are moving through at present, corresponding to what Wilber calls the 'high egoic' phase. This period features a re-emergence of pre-Fall characteristics on national and global levels, including democracy, equality, non-militarism, a healthy acceptance of instincts, a sense of connection to the natural world, increased sense of empathy with other beings etc. Significantly, however, human beings at this phase retain the positive aspects of the Fall, and are capable of rationality and spirituality at the same time. 
Such a model as this dispenses with the need for species development to follow the same pattern as individual development and fits more closely with the archaeological and anthropological evidence than Wilber's, admitting the possibility that, in some respects, primal peoples were more 'advanced' than modern human beings. By attempting to hitch his ontogenetic model to phylogeny Wilber does primal peoples an enormous injustice, denying them 'higher' characteristics which they clearly possess. 

References 

• Bryan, W. L. (1996). Montana's Indians: Yesterday and Today. Helena, MT: American & World Geographic Publishing. 
• DeMeo, J. (1998). Saharasia. Oregon: OBRL.
• Meister Eckhart, (1996). From Whom God Hid Nothing. David O'Neal (Ed.). Boston: Shambhala. 
• Eliade, M. (1967). From Primitives to Zen. London: Collins. 
• Ferguson, R.B. (2000). The Causes and Origins of Primitive Warfare. In Anthropological Quarterly 73.3: 159-164. 
• Hall, E.T. (1984). The Dance of Life. New York: Anchor Press. 
• Happold, F.C. (1986). Mysticism. London: Penguin. 
• Hildebrand, M. von (1988). 'An Amazonian Tribe's View of Cosmology'. In P. Bunyard and E. Goldsmith (Eds.) Gaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, Camelford, Cornwall. 
• Josephy Jr., A.M. (1975). The Indian Heritage of America. London: Pelican. 
• Kremer, J.W. (1998). 'The Shadow of Evolutionary Thinking'. In D. Rothberg and S. Kelly (Eds.). Ken Wilber in Dialogue. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books. Pp 237-258.
• Lawlor, R. (1991). Voices of the First Day. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions. 
• Magesa, L. (1997). African Religion. New York: Orbis. 
• Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1956). The Psychology of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 
• Roszak, T. (1992). The Voice of the Earth. New York: Touchstone. 
• Turnbull, C. (1993). The Forest People. London: Pimlico. 
• Vennen, M.G. van der (1995). The Origin of War. Groningen: Origin Press 
• Wilber, K. (1981). Up From Eden. Wheaton: Quest Books.
• Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala.
• Wilber, K. (1996). A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala. 
• Wilber, K. (1998). 'A More Integral Approach'. In D. Rothberg and S. Kelly (Eds.). Ken Wilber in Dialogue. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books. Pp 306-377.
• Wilber, K. (2000), Integral Psychology. Boston: Shambhala. 
• Wildman, P. (1996). 'Dreamtime Myth: History as Future'. New Renaissance, 7(1), 16-19.
• Wright, R (1992). Stolen Continents. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

One possible solution to the problem of relating consciousness purely to neurological processes - the intractability of what has been called the hard problem - is to suggest that consciousness may not necessarily come from the brain but through it.

The philosopher David Chalmers (1995) has suggested that experience is a fundamental property of the world, while Robert Forman (1995) hass suggested that consciousness is a universal force which is canalised by the human brain into our individual consciousness. The function of the complex neurological circuitry of the brain is not to produce consciousness, but to receive and transmit it. The brain as antenna-receiver for mind hypothesis suggested by Watson, Schwartz and Russek (2004) suggests a similar view. 

One piece of evidence for this view is the ubiquity of concepts of an all-pervading universal force amongst almost all - if not actually all - of the world's tribal or indigenous peoples. I have been collecting examples of these from my readings of anthropological and religious texts for years, and have lost count of the number I have. To give just a few examples, in America, the Hopi Indians called it maasauu, the Pawnee called it tirawa, and the Lakota called it wakan-tanka (literally, the force which moves all things ). The Ainu of Japan called it ramut (translated by the anthropologist Monro [in Smart, 1971] as spirit-energy ), while in parts of New Guinea it was called imunu (translated by early anthropologist J.H. Holmes [in Levy-Bruhl, 1965] as universal soul ). In Africa the Nuer call it kwoth and the Mbuti call it pepo. Holmes description of imunu is a good general summary of all of these concepts: 

[Imunu] was associated with everything, nothing arrived apart from it...Nothing animate or inanimate could exist apart from it. It was the soul of things...It was intangible, but like air, wind, it could manifest its presence. It permeated everything that made up life to the people of the Purari Delta...[It was] that which enables everything to exist as we know it, and distinct from other things which, too, exist by it (in Levy-Bruhl, 1965, p.17.) 

In each case, these concepts refer to an impersonal force which is pervades all space and all objects and beings. This suggests that these peoples had a direct awareness of consciousness as a fundamental universal force. There is also often a recognition that - as with the canalisation hypothesis - the universal spirit-force forms the essence of our own being. For example, the Ufaina Indians of the Amazon believe that when a person is born, a small amount of fufuka (their term for universal spirit) enters her. She, and her tribal group, borrow it from the total stock of Spirit. While she lives, therefore, this spirit-force is always the essence of her being, and at death it is released and returns to its source. (Hildebrand, 1988).

These concepts are also widespread in Eurasian cultures. However, while this universal soul or spirit-energy seems to have been a part of everyday life for indigenous peoples, for European and Asian cultures the concept is generally confined to spiritual and mystical traditions. In the Indian Vedanta tradition, for example, it is known as brahman; in Mahayana Buddism it has been called dharmakaya, while in Chinese Taoism it is the Tao. In ancient Greece, the Stoics referred to it as pneuma. In the mystical traditions associated with Judaism, Christianity and Islam the term God was often used with this meaning. While the popular version of the religions saw God as an anthropomorphic being who oversees the world, the mystical traditions saw God as a force or energy which filled all reality, or as a being who was personal and limitlessly immanent at the same time, whose radiance filled all reality. And again, there was often a recognition that spirit-force forms the essence of our own being. Brahman manifests itself in us as atman, or as the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1996) put it, God s form is stamped inside us; his seed is planted in us. 

Some scholars have rejected the notion of the kind of trans-cultural perennial philosophy which these concepts represent, arguing that spiritual traditions are culture-specific, and criticising transpersonal psychologists in particular for positing a realm of transcendent truth that is independent of all subjective and cultural interpretations (e.g. Ferrer, 2001). But in this area at least, the striking ubiquity and similarity of all of these concepts - since it is unlikely that they could have spread by cultural contact - does suggest a transcendent truth . Compare the description of imunu above, for example, with this description given by a member of the Pawnee tribe of their supreme God : 

We do not think of Tirawa as a person. We think of Tirawa as [a power which is] in everything and moves upon the darkness, the night, and causes her to bring forth the dawn. It is the breath of the new-born dawn (in Eliade, 1967, p. 13). 

And compare this with the following passage from the Indian Upanishads, describing the presence of brahman within the manifest world:

Shining, yet hidden, Spirit lives in the cavern. Everything that sways, breathes, opens and closes, lives in Spirit Spirit is everywhere, upon the right, upon the left, above, below, behind, in front. What is the world but Spirit? (in Happold, 1963, p.146.) 

Here we do appear to be dealing with a universal truth , which lends some support to the notion of a perennial philosophy . This view of consciousness as a fundamental force is close to panpsychism or panexperentialism, with the qualification that although consciousness is in all things, all things are not conscious. That is, all things do not have their own individualised consciousness. Only the structures - beginning with cells - which have the necessary complexity and organisational form to receive and canalise consciousness are individually conscious, and individually alive. Consciousness - or even experience - does not go all the way down , although - speaking horizontally rather than vertically - it goes everywhere and into everything. The simplest forms of matter do not have an interior , and are not capable of prehension and sensation. Experience and interiority only emerge at the cellular levels and above. In David Ray Griffin s (1998) terminology - which he himself borrows from Leibniz - rather than being mere aggregates , cells are centers of experience with living occasions of experience. And above the cellular levels, as structures become more complex and organised, they become capable of receiving more consciousness. As a result they become more individually conscious, with greater powers of prehension, sensation and autonomy. 

This might be seen as a form of dualism, or even vitalism, but this would be misleading. Consciousness is not a force which is separate from matter, and enters into and animates fundamentally inert structures. It is embedded in all matter from the beginning and cannot be separated from it. Everything is alive, even though simple structures may not have experience . 

This concept of consciousness can be extended to help explain why higher states of consciousness occur. Scholars of mysticism generally agree that there are certain common features of higher states of consciousness which have occurred independently across cultures throughout history. These include an intensified perception of the phenomenal world, a sense of inner peace and wholeness, a sense of oneness with the manifest world (or a sense of transcending boundaries), and a sense of becoming a deeper and truer Self (e.g. James, 1985; Underhill, 1960; Stace, 1964). The justification for using the term higher for the experiences is that subjectively they appear as an intensification or expansion of ordinary consciousness, and to reveal a truer and wider vision of reality. Those who have them often feel that their ordinary consciousness is a kind of sleep in comparison. In the words of the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali, this is a state whose relation to your waking consciousness is analogous to the relation of the latter to dreaming. In comparison with this state your waking consciousness would be like dreaming! (in Scharfstein, 1973, p. 28). 

There are, of course, attempts to explain such experiences in purely physicalist terms, such as Persinger's (1987) and D'Aquili and Newberg's (2000). But these neurological correlates may only be the results of higher states of consciousness rather than causes of them, the footprints of mystical and spiritual experience rather than the experience itself. At the same time, physicalist theories of higher states of consciousness are subject to the explanatory gap . McGinn has written that You might as well assert that that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb as suggest that the soggy clump of matter which is the brain produces consciousness (McGinn, 1993, p.160). And we can say the same for the suggestion that increased or decreased activity in different parts of this soggy clump of matter might produce higher states of consciousness. 

There appear to be two basic types of higher states of consciousness, which have distinctive causes. Fischer (1971) made an important distinction between ergotropic higher states of consciousness ( high arousal , active or ecstatic states which involve sensory content) and  trophotropic higher states ( low arousal passive and serene experiences, with no sensory content). Throughout history human beings have made a conscious effort to produce ergotropic high arousal states by disrupting the normal homeostasis of the human organism. To do this, they have used practices such as fasting, drug-taking, hyper- and hypoventiliation, self-inflicted pain and prolonged dancing (Krippner, 2000). All of these change our normal body chemistry and neurological functioning. They result in an internal imbalance in homeostasis (Green, 1987), which can (although by no means always) give rise to a higher state of consciousness (of the egrotropic type). 

The second type of higher states of consciousness - including Fischer s trophotrophic states, and also passive and serene experiences which do include sensory content - may be specifically related to consciousness as a fundamental universal force. If it is true that consciousness is canalised into us, and that universal consciousness is a kind of force or energy (which is how indigenous peoples and mystics describe it), then presumably we would experience this as a kind of force or energy in ourselves. This is how indigenous peoples and Eurasian mystics experience universal consciousness: a phenomenon which is both sentient and energetic, a consciousness which is animate and dynamic. In Hindu terms, ultimate reality - or brahman - has passive and active aspects, Shakti (sentient consciousness) and Shiva (energetic consciousness). This universal consciousness is canalised into us and becomes our being. In its passive sentient aspect, it becomes our consciousness - that is, consciousness in terms of awareness - and in its active energetic aspect, it becomes our life-energy, the energy which makes us alive, and which we expend through mental functions such as perception, cognition and concentration, when it manifests itself as psychic energy.  

Psychologists often assume the existence of attentional energy (e.g. Deikman, 2004; Csikszentmihalyi, 1992; Marchetti, 2004) or psychic energy (e.g. Novak, 1995; Csikszentmihalyi, 2003) without making it clear exactly what this energy is. Others talk more obliquely of mental effort (e.g. Gross, 1996) or pool of attentional resources (Kahneman, 1973), seeming to assume the existence of some form of mental energy without actually using the term. More explicitly, the philosopher Michael Washburn (2002) suggests the essence of our being is a life-energy which expresses itself in three different ways: as psychic energy, as libido (or sexual energy), and as spiritual power. He notes that psychic energy is used continually, fuelling our ongoing conscious experience, while libido and spiritual power are both 'potential' energies, which are usually latent but become 'activated' by certain stimuli.

Earlier psychologists also used the concept of life-energy or psychic energy very freely. Both Freud and Jung, for example, used the term libido for psychic energy. Although they had a different views on the nature of this energy - typically, Freud saw it as sexual in origin - they both saw the psyche as a 'closed system' with a finite amount of energy, which could be 'portioned out' in different amounts to the different structures and functions of our minds. In Freud's model, the id, the ego and the superego competed against one another to monopolise psychic energy. If you spend most of your time chasing after hedonistic pleasures like sex and food, your 'id' is monopolising your psychic energy, and leaving little over for the ego and the superego. Whereas if you have a very powerful conscience and are constantly assailed by feelings of guilt, the superego is monopolising most of your psychic energy. Freud also believed that one of the problems caused by repression is that the act of repressing instincts or old experiences can take up a large portion of our libido, leaving less energy for other functions.

For Jung, psychic energy was the power behind all of our experience - such as thinking, concentrating, instincts and sexual desire - but which was of a different nature to that experience. As he saw it, psychic energy could be actual, manifesting itself as the 'dynamic phenomena of the psyche, such as instinct, wishing, willing, affect, attention, capacity for work etc.' Or it could be potential, when it shows itself as 'possibilities, aptitudes [and] attitudes' (1928/88. p.15). And as with Freud, if a lot of energy was used up by one of these functions then there would be less available in other areas.

William James also took the existence of psychic energy for granted. He often refers to it as 'vitality,' and in his essay The Energies of Man, he puzzles over the question of why we all feel more or less alive on different days, and how most of us feel as if we should be more alive than we are, as if there are reserves of vitality inside us which 'the incitements of the day do not call forth.' James notes that it's only when we make an effort to act that we are able to 'raise the sense of vitality.' As he puts it, 'excitements, ideas and efforts are what carry us over the dam.' (1917, p. 75)

Like the concept of universal spirit-energy (to use the Ainu term), life-energy or psychic energy is a common cross-cultural concept. The Indian concept of prana is very close to it, as is the Chinese Taoist concept of chi. According to Indian Tantric philosophy, prana flows through thousands of tiny channels throughout our body, called nadi. The body has seven main energy centres, the cakras, which can be active to different degrees, and utilise different amounts of prana. (There are obvious similarities here with Freud s model.) According to Tantra, the ideal is to allow as much energy as possible to flow upwards to the highest cakra, at the crown of the head, which is associated with a state of inner peace and mystical union (Feuerstein, 1990). In ancient Egypt - as with the canalisation hypothesis - the life-energy of an individual was seen as essentially the same nature as universal spirit-force . Universal energy (akh) expressed itself as ba, the animating spirit of the natural world, and ba was itself channelled into the individual by the body s shadow or double , ka (Lamy, 1981). Similarly, the Stoics of ancient Greece believed that, as well as being the soul of the universe , pneuma was the force which animated living beings. Beings could have varying concentrations of pneuma inside them, making certain life forms more intelligent and more conscious than others. Human beings were a higher life form than animals, for example, because of their greater concentration of pneuma (Sandbach, 1975). Elsewhere, the Maoris of New Zealand referred to psychic energy (or life-energy) as tapu (not related to the word taboo), in parts of New Guinea it was referred to as rokao, the Algonquian Indians called it orenda, while the Ainu - like the Stoics, the Unfaina and other indigenous peoples - made no distinction between the spiritual energy which pervades the universe and that which constitutes the life of an individual being (Levy-Bruhl, 1965; Monro, 1962). In both cases, the term ramat is used. As the anthropologist Neil Gordon Monro wrote of the Ainu, When living things - men, animals, trees or plants - die, ramat leaves them and goes elsewhere, but does not perish (1962, p.8). 

If these perceptions are valid, and life-energy does exist, it is clearly distinct from energy as we normally think of it, as in the chemical energy which we absorb from food and which fuels the functioning of our bodies. It is a non-physical energy whose existence has not - at least so far - been empirically detected. (This is also true of universal spirit-energy , which would presumably be essentially the same form of energy, only in its external manifestation.) However, it is interesting to note that the practice of acupuncture - which Chinese tradition has always held works through the manipulation of the flow of chi throughout the body - has now been received widespread scientific validation, although tellingly, the question of how it works has remained a puzzle (e.g. White et al., 2004; Linde et al., 2005). 

The existence of life-energy or psychic energy certainly seems to make sense from a subjective point of view. As Marchetti (2004) puts it, Every time we direct our attention towards an object, we spend our [attentional] energy on it. We have the sense that our level of life energy continually fluctuates, according to how much we have expended through concentrating or attending to stimuli. If we have been concentrating hard, we might feel lethargic or fatigued; if there is a surplus of life-energy we feel alert and vibrant. Our moods seem to be affected by our level of life- energy too. When we feel mentally fatigued we often feel depressed, whereas when we feel mentally buoyant , with a high level of life-energy, we usually feel cheerful and optimistic. We use many metaphors which seem to assume the existence of this energy - we say that we are run down , drained , or that we need to recharge our batteries. In addition, it has been suggested that the purpose of automatization may be to conserve psychic energy. Activities such as driving, typing or playing a musical instrument are initially painstaking conscious processes, but at a certain point there is a switch to fully automatic processing , the purpose of which is to conserve attentional energy so that we can focus our minds elsewhere (Norman & Shallice, 1980; Deikman, 2004). 

You might argue that all of this could be explained in terms of muscular energy. Perhaps we simply feel energetic and cheerful when we have absorbed a lot of energy from food but have not expended any yet, and feel drained when we have been physically active because we have expended a lot of muscular energy. But one argument against this is that we often become tired in situations where we expend hardly any physical or muscular energy. For example, an office worker who feels exhausted after spending a day filling in forms and typing information into a computer expends has expended comparatively little physical energy. The same applies to a student who spends the day reading text books or a writer who feels exhausted after a four hour stint in front of the computer screen. The energy that we use in these situations is clearly not muscular - if anything, it is mental rather than physical. 

Conversely, we can often feel very energetic and alive at times when we have expended a great deal of physical energy. Every morning I do yoga for around 15 minutes, and afterwards I always feel a new surge of energy flowing through my body. Almost everybody who does yoga or related practices such as Chi Gung or Tai Chi experiences this - in fact this is the main purpose of the practices, to intensify and ease the flow of prana or chi. People who play sports and go for long and vigorous runs, walks or climbs are familiar with this feeling too: at the end of the activity they might feel physically tired but at the same time experience a mental glow and feeling of aliveness. For example, when the psychiatrist Thaddeus Kostrulaba took up jogging he was surprised by how, after every run, he felt an odd shift in feeling a sense of well-being, a sense of energy. (in Murphy & Whyte, 1995, p.66). In terms of physical energy this does not make sense. After expending muscular energy we should feel less alive and more tired. But it seems that there is a non-physical energy inside us which can, paradoxically, be intensified by certain forms of exercise.

However, it is not the purpose of this essay to try to prove the existence of such a form of energy. All I would like to suggest is that, if the canalisation hypothesis is true, it is a logical step to assume the existence of an inner psychic energy. This might be seen, speculatively, as the inflow of universal consciousness that is received via our brains. What we experience as psychic energy may be fundamentally the same as the spirit-energy which pervades the universe, mediated through the neuronal networks of the soggy grey clump of matter in our heads, or transmitted by the antenna-receiver of the mind. 

For the purposes of this essay, my main point is simply that the existence of psychic energy can also help to explain higher states of consciousness. The basis of my explanation is the assumption that life-energy functions as a closed system, as Freud and Jung believed. It is quantitative; there is only a certain amount of it at our disposal, which has to be shared by the different mental functions and processes. 
It might be said that we expend our psychic energy in three main ways: through cognitive and mental activity (mainly what Novak [1995] describes as the endless associational chatter of the ego-mind); through the concentrative effort we make to deal with the tasks and chores which fill our lives; and through the processing of various forms of information such as perceptual stimuli and verbal information. However, when, for some reason, this constant outflow is halted and a higher than normal inner concentration of static life-energy - together with an increased stillness of the energy - we are liable to experience higher states of consciousness. 

According to Novak (1995), this is why the practice of meditation often generates higher states. He notes that the endless associational chatter of our minds monopolises psychic energy, leaving none available for us to devote to what he calls the open, receptive and present-centred awareness . However, when a person meditates she diverts attention away from the automatized structures of consciousness which produce thought-chatter . As a result they begin to weaken and fade away, which frees up the psychic energy which they normally monopolise. As a result, in Novak's words energy formerly bound in emotive spasms, ego defence, fantasy and fear can appear as the delight of present-centredness. It can be seen here that Novak - although he does not explicitly say so - is assuming the existence of a finite closed system of psychic energy. 

Deikman (2004) also makes a connection between mystical experiences and energy when he suggests that they are 

 brought about by a deautomatization of hierarchically ordered structures that ordinarily conserve attentional energy for maximum efficiency in achieving the basic goods of survival Under special conditions of dysfunction, such as in acute psychosis or in LSD states, or under special goal conditions such as exists in religions mystics, the pragmatic systems of automatic selection are set aside or break down, in favour of alternate modes of consciousness. 

In other words, the quietening of ego-chatter creates a surplus of energy which means that there is no need for these structures to conserve energy anymore. As a result our perceptions become de-automatized, and we develop an intensified awareness of the phenomenal world.

Meditation halts the normal outflow of life-energy (manifesting itself as psychic energy in particular). When a person sits down to meditate, she removes herself from external stimuli by sitting quietly and closing her eyes. She might hear some sounds from the street outside, or catch some smells wafting through the window, but compared to a normal situation - say, walking down the street or working at the office - this is nothing more than a trickle of sensory information, which requires hardly any effort to process. She is no longer active either. She might be using some psychic energy to concentrate on her mantra (or her breathing or a candle flame), but after a while, when her mind is quiet enough, she will probably cease repeating the mantra to herself. At this point her mind will not be focused upon any object, and she will be expending no energy through concentrative effort. And when the endless associational chatter of mind fades away, the third major outflow of energy will be closed. 

The end effect of this is that, after a successful meditation, there is an intense inner concentration of our life-energy, our life-energy is concentrated and intensified rather than dispersed and dissipated - and this results in spiritual experiences. 

Another important aspect of this is that, as well as being intensified, in meditative states our life-energy is stilled, or purified. At the same time as using up a large portion of our energy, the constant thought-chatter of our minds creates a constant disturbance inside us. In Meister Eckhart's (1996) phrase, there is a constant storm of inward thought, a chaos of swirling images and impressions which we have absolutely no control over. In fact, the storm of inward thought largely controls us, changing our moods (often generating states of anxiety and worry) and determining our emotional state. Emotions are another kind of disturbance to our being, whether they are triggered by thought-activity (such as when thinking about the past triggers feelings of guilt or bitterness, or when thinking about other people gives rise to hatred or jealousy) or by the events and encounters of our day to day lives. And our desires create more disturbance, whether they are physical desires for sex or food, or - more frequently - psychological desires for affection, excitement or self-validation.

But in meditation most of this disturbance may fade away. As the chattering of our mind slows down and fades away, so do our desires and emotions (which are largely triggered by thought-chatter, after all), so that our being becomes still and peaceful, like the still surface of lake. And this will contribute to the spiritual state we feel, particularly the inner feelings of well-being and peacefulness, and of connecting to a deeper and truer Self. 

This stilling of life-energy always goes together with its intensification. The two cannot happen separately. In order for it to be intensified, our life-energy has to be stilled. Our thought-chatter and emotions and desires have to be stilled in order to harnass the energy which they normally dissipate. 

Meditation is, we might say, a conscious attempt to intensify and still our life-energy, both in the short and long term. (In the long term it is an attempt to permanently halt the associational chatter of the mind, which may lead to a permanent alteration of the structures of consciousness, if a point is reached where the chattering ego-mind becomes so weakened that it disappears as a psychic habit.) However, there are situations in which life-energy may be intensified and stilled more accidentally, and give rise to higher states of consciousness. This is probably, for example, the reason why natural surroundings are a frequent trigger of spiritual or mystical experiences. (Laski, 1961; Hardy, 1979; Hay, 1987) If a person is alone amongst natural surroundings she is relatively inactive, and absorbing and processing comparatively little information, and so largely closing two of the main channels through which psychic energy drains away. And at the same time the beauty of nature may have a similar effect to a mantra in meditation, directing attention away from the chattering of the ego-mind. Cognitive activity may fade away, until life-energy intensifies, bringing a sense of inner peace and wholeness and heightened awareness of the phenomenal world. 

Perhaps this is why music is a significant trigger of spiritual experience (Laski, 1961; Hardy, 1979) When we listen to music we usually become relaxed and are exposed to comparatively little external stimuli (aside from the music istelf), which reduces the outflow of our life-energy. And the music itself focuses our minds, quietening our thought-chatter. The following is a good example of this: 

I was sitting one evening, listening to a Brahms symphony. My eyes were closed, and I must have become completely relaxed, for I became aware of a feeling of expansion , and seemed to be beyond the boundary of my physical self. Then an intense feeling of  light and love uplifted and enfolded me. (Hardy, 1979, p. 85) 

Similarly, one person told Marghanita Laski how, while listening to Mahler's tenth symphony, they experienced a sense of weightlessness, a complete sense of liberation a tremendous expansion, a different dimension altogether (Laski, 1961, p. 390). The incidence of spiritual experiences amongst athletes and sportspeople (e.g. Murphy & Whyte, 1995; Taylor, 2002) can be explained in similar terms. Some of these may be due to homeostasis disruption, since the exertions of some sports will obviously create internal imbalances . However, sports also often demand an intense degree of concentration. This is particularly the case with sports which involve long periods of monotonous rhythmic activity, such as long distance running or swimming. The activity itself serves as a focusing device, and quietens the chattering ego-mind. As the Kostrulaba writes of his own experiences with running, after discussing the universal use of mantras to induce different states of consciousness, I think the same process occurs in the repetitive rhythm of long-distance running. Eventually, at somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes, the conscious mind gets exhausted and other areas of consciousness are activated (in Murphy & Whyte, 1995, p.66) Similarly, the poet Ted Hughes often experienced a meditative state while fishing. He notes how poetry depends upon the ability to intensely focus the mind, and believes that he acquired this ability through fishing. He describes the effect of staring at a float for long periods: All the nagging impulses that are normally distracting your mind dissolve once they have dissolved, you enter one of the orders of bliss. Your whole being rests lightly on your float, but not drowsily, very alert (Hughes, 1967, p.72).

Certain sports may also affect the flow of chi or prana through our bodies. This may be part of the reason for the feeling of alertness and aliveness many people feel after running or swimming: a feeling that the exercise has somehow increased the flow of our energy. Every part of our bodies seems to be alive with energy, as if blockages have been removed. And this may be part of the general energy-intensification which induces spiritual experience. And this, of course, relates to Eastern forms of exercise such as Hatha Yoga, Chi Kung, T'ai Chi, Judo and Karate. These practices combine the usual breath-control and attention-focusing of meditation with physical exercises which are designed to generate new energy inside us (from the energy points - or cakras or meridians - we have inside us) and remove blockages which may be preventing energy flowing through to certain parts of our beings and causing illness. In a sense, then, at the same time as serving as a kind of meditation, sports such as running and swimming may also have a physical yoga-like (or Chi Gung-like ) effect.

This may also be part of the reason for connection between sex and spiritual states. The sheer pleasure of sex can shift our attention away from the ego-mind, which may fall silent as a result, bringing what D.H. Lawrence (1973) described as the strange, soothing flood of peace which goes with true sex. As Jennifer Wade writes, sex can take people to the same realms as trance, meditation, drugs (Wade, 2000, p. 120). 

Similar explanations can be made for other prominent triggers of spiritual experience, such as literature, the contemplation of art, creative work, relaxation and physical activity (Hardy, 1979; Laski, 1961). I am certainly not trying to say that all spiritual experiences (of the low arousal type) can be explained in these terms. Sometimes the experiences seem to have no apparent cause, and may be - at least so far as we can see - a matter of grace or accident. But I do believe that a large percentage of them can be seen as related to the intensification and stilling of life-energy.

This connection between mystical states and an intensification of life-energy is often inferred by mystics and spiritual teachers, and occasionally stated explicitly. The Hindu text the Moksha-Dharma compares the transcendental Self to a sun, and notes that through the process of concentration (dharana), the rays of the sun - or the whirls of consciousness - are gathered up and focused inwardly. As a result the yogin experiences the intense radiance of the Self, and attains a state of samadhi (Feuerstein, 1990). In the Christian mystical tradition, Meister Eckhart describes how mystical experience occurs when you are able to draw in your [intellectual and sensory] powers to a unity and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed (1979, p.7, my italics). Or again, he states that to achieve union with God, a man must collect all his powers as if into a corner of his soul (ibid, p.20). Similarly, St. Gregory of Sinai described spiritual experience as the total lifting of the powers of the soul to what may be discerned of the entire majesty of glory (in Happold, 1986, p.223). The terms powers and powers of the soul here are equivalent to psychic energy, while the terms drawing in , collecting and lifting - and also the gathering up of the whirls of consciousness described in the Moksha-Dharma - refer to what I describe as generating a high concentration of life-energy. 

Long-term spiritual development can also be seen as a gradual, long-term effort to intensify and still life-energy. The traditions of monasticism, renunciation and detachment can be partly seen as an attempt to close down the channels through which energy drains away. The monk renounces the responsibilities of family and social life, endures long periods of silence and solitude, and lives without possessions, all of which will have the effect of conserving and concentrating psychic energy. This underlying purpose of detachment was noted by Underhill (1960), who described it as a process of stripping or purging away of those superfluous, unreal, and harmful things which dissipate the precious energies of the self. Speaking of the practice of voluntary poverty , Underhill notes that possessions are a drain upon the energy of the self, preventing her from attaining that intenser life for which she was made. Even the practice of celibacy can be interpreted in these terms. Although in the Christian monastic traditions celibacy was often rooted in a dualistic repulsion to the body and its desires, in Eastern spiritual traditions it was usually seen in a more pragmatic way, as a method of conserving - and harnessing - the energy of our being. As Swami Prabhavananda (1952) wrote of celibacy, for example, Sexual activity, and the thoughts and fantasies of sex, use up a great portion of our vital force. When that force is conserved through abstinence, it becomes subliminated as spiritual energy.  

In a similar way, in the Christian tradition the practise of asceticism was often a morbid and neurotic expression of an anti-physical dualistic ideology. But in its less extreme forms, there was undoubtedly a positive transcendental aspect to it. It was also a method of taming or controlling what ascetics called the body of desire in order to conserve - and redirect - the psychic energy which it normally monopolises. As Underhill notes again, The mortifying process is necessary because those senses have usurped a place beyond their station; become the focus of energy, steadily drained the vitality of the self . Underhill actually refers to a wrong distribution of energy .

Similarly, the yogic ascetisicm of tapas was defined by Swami Prabhavananda (1952) as the practice of conserving energy and directing it toward the goal of yoga obviously, in order to do this, we must exercise self-discipline; we must control our physical appetites and passions (p.102). Tapas usually involves chastity (brahmacarya) and the subjugation of the senses (indirya-jaya) and is believed to generate an intense form of energy, ojas, which is sometimes experienced as heat (the literal meaning of the word tapas). The first two stages of Patanjali s eight-limbed path of yoga also involve self-control and an effort to tame the body of desire . The purpose of yama (often translated as restraint) is, as Feuerstein (1990) puts it, to check the powerful survival instinct and rechannel it to serve a higher purpose (p. 186). This frees up psychospiritual energy, which the adept can use at the niyama (discipline) stage, when he attempts to harmonize his relationship to life at large and to the transcendental reality (p. 186).

It might seem that I am advocating a retreat from an open participation with life, and suggesting that only the monastic way of life can lead to enlightenment. But this is not the case. The effort to tame or subjugate physical appetites does not necessarily - and should not - entail a mind/body duality or a sense of disgust towards the body. In the same way, withdrawing from everyday life does not necessarily entail a feeling of disgust towards the world , or a sense that the everyday world is inimical to spiritual development. The practices should be seen purely as a matter of economy, of permanently taming our desires so that they no longer monopolise our psychic energy. In the same way that after many years of regular meditation the chattering ego may become permanently quietened, it seems that after a long period of self-discipline, the body of desire may become less dominant, so that the individual is no longer as disturbed by the desire for sensory pleasures, status and possessions etc. After a certain amount of time a new kind of psychic organisation is formed, which includes a different distribution of energy. In Tantric terms, the lower cakras become less active, utilising less prana, and the higher cakras become correspondingly more active. 

This is certainly how many mystics viewed the practices of detachment and mortification (or asceticism). They were not - at least ideally - ongoing or permanent processes, but processes directed to a particular end: a release from what Underhill calls the tyranny of selfhood and from the dominance (and energy-monopolisation) of our lower, hedonistic impulses. Many mystics strove for years to attain this freedom, at which point they often relinquished their lives of detachment and became extremely active. St. Catherine of Sinea, for example, spent three years living as a hermit and an ascetic until she attained a state of deification . At that point she abandoned her solitude and was frenetically active for the rest of her life, teaching, converting non-Christians and serving the poor and sick (Underhill, 1960). The same is true of other mystics such as St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and St. Francis of Assisi. The purpose of detachment and mortification is to produce a transformation of being, a permanent redistribution of psychic energy, which equates with a permanently higher state of consciousness, or ascendance to the higher transpersonal realms. 

In other words, this process of withdrawal and energy-conservation - which does not in itself entail a dualistic attitude - is only a temporary one. Once it is complete, and once the individual has brought about this new psychic organisation, there is no reason why he or she should not fully engage with the everyday world again - as many mystics did - and respect and revere the physical and material realms, and see them as the manifestation of spirit-force. And in any case, there is no need to take these practices to the extremes which some mystics and ascetics did. Perhaps, rather than wearing hair shirts and whipping ourselves or retreating to a monastery, we can achieve the same effect by following the middle way of moderation and morality which the Buddha recommended. 

If an intensification and stilling of life-energy is a significant cause of low arousal spiritual experiences, the common characteristics of the experiences should be explicable in these terms. We have already seen how states of intensified psychic energy cause a heightened perception of the phenomenal world: through what Deikman [2004] refers to as a deautomatization of perception . The canalisation hypothesis can account for the sense of oneness with the manifest world which spiritual experiences feature too. Since the energy of our being is in essence one and the same as the spirit-force which pervades the universe, it is not surprising that in intensified states we experience a sense of union with all reality. In a real sense, we are the universe. The essence of our being is the essence of all reality. In the same way, it is also not surprising that, in what Stace (1964) called extravertive mystical states, we perceive an underlying oneness amongst all of the seemingly separate and disparate phenomena of the world. All the phenomenal world is pervaded with the same Spirit-force, and therefore it is a unity. If consciousness is a fundamental force, these are direct experiences of reality. 

As for the sense of inner peace or joy which spiritual experiences generally feature, I would suggest that this may be related to the canalisation hypothesis in two ways. As we have seen, the normal associational chatter of the mind generates a constant psychic disturbance, the storm of inward thought (Eckhart, 1996). In states of intensified life-energy this storm usually fades away (it has to, to free up the psychic energy which is normally monopolised by thought-chatter), and our consciousness becomes more still. The sense of inner peace is, therefore, partly a direct experience of this stillness. We feel peaceful inside precisely because this storm has faded away. At the same time this feeling may partly arise from the fact that, as the Indian mystical traditions suggest, bliss is the nature of being or consciousness - being-consciousness-bliss (Sat Chit Ananda) is the essence of reality. Life-energy has a qualitative aspect - in the same way that, for example, water has the quality of wetness, it has a quality which we experience subjectively as joy or bliss. When life-energy is intensely concentrated - and the normal clutter of our minds is quietened - we are likely to experience this bliss. 

And finally, I would suggest that the sense of becoming a truer or deeper self may be related to another effect of the associational chatter of the ego-mind. This generates and sustains our normal sense of identity, our normal sense of being an I inside our heads. If spiritual teachers are correct, this normal sense of I is only a superficial and shallow self which alienates us from our true identity. As the Svetaswatara Upanishad puts it, this is the self with a small s , the bird which stands on the branch of the tree and eats the fruit therefore , while the other bird - Self with a capital S - looks on in silence (Mascaro, 1990, p. 89). In states of intensified and stilled life-energy the small and limited self fades away, allowing us to make contact with our real nature, the atman which the storm of inward thought normally obscures. 

The concept of life-energy can, therefore, be used to explain why higher states of consciousness occur - and in my view this is another reason for considering the possibility of its existence. According to this view, there is a direct connection between our own consciousness and consciousness as a fundamental universal force. Our own being issues from universal consciousness, and always remains in union with it. If the canalisation hypothesis is correct, higher states of consciousness cannot be explained in terms of neurological malfunctions (as per Persinger, 1987) or as a regression to a pre-egoic state of mind (Moxon, 1920; Freud, 1930). Rather, they are direct and simple experiences of the reality of the universe. 

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• Sandbach, F.H. (1975). The Stoics. London: Chatto & Windus.
• Scharfstein, B. (1973). Mystical Experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 
• Smart, N. (1971), The Religious Experience of Mankind. London: Fontana. 
• Stace, W. (1964/1988), Mysticism and Philosophy. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. 
• Taylor, S. (2002). Spirituality: the hidden side of sports . New Renaissance, 10 (4). 
• The Upanishads (1990) Ed. Juan Mascaro. London:Penguin. 
• Taylor, S. (2003). Primal Spirituality and the Onto/Phylo Fallacy: A Critique of the Claim that Indigenous peoples were/are less Spiritually and Socially Developed than Modern Humans. The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 22, 61-76. 
• Underhill, E. (1911/1960) Mysticism. London: Methuen.
• White, P., Lewith, G., Prescott, P. & Conway, J. Acupuncture versus Placebo for the Treatment of Chronic Mechanical Neck Pain: A Randomized, Controlled Trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 141, 12, pp. 911-919. 
• The Upanishads (1990). ed. Mascaro, J. London: Penguin. 
• Wade, J. (2000) Mapping the course of heavenly bodies: The varieties of transcendent sexual experiences. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 32, 103-22. 
• Washburn, M. (2002). Psychic energy, Libido & Spirit: Three Energies or One? Retrieved from www.personaltransformation.com, 12/11/07.
• Wilber, K. (1996). Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala.
• Wilber, K. (2000). IntegralPsychology. Boston: Shambhala.

(Originally published in Abraxas 19, 2003)

If you want to reach a higher state of consciousness there are basically two ways you can go. On the one hand, you can try the 'external' way of changing your life, so that the experiences you have affect your consciousness; alternatively, you can try the 'internal' way of changing yourself, and working directly on your consciousness. 

Rimbaud has been called an 'existential saint', and this is completely accurate, since, as much as any Christian or Sufi mystic, his life was dominated by an effort to break through to a higher state of consciousness. From the age of 15, he had only one desire, even if this might not always have been fully conscious: to transcend the 'sleep' of ordinary consciousness and wake up to a more intense reality. Like Richard Jefferies or D.H. Lawrence, he sensed that 'ordinary' reality is only part of the story, and that the world is full of vast, unknown regions of thought and awareness which, as he wrote, 'our pale reason' hides us from.

During the first part of his life Rimbaud chose the second of the above options. Even here there are two different paths we can follow. You can transform your consciousness gradually, by following a 'spiritual' path: by meditating regularly, attempting to be 'mindful' of your surroundings and experiences, and trying not to be materialistic and hedonistic, or to be attached to external sources of happiness. The cumulative effect of these practices is to intensify the lifeforce - or spirit - inside us, which means that there's more vitality available for us to use perceptually, and we experience 'awake' vision of the world. As well as this, with so much vitality retained inside us, we develop a sense of inner well-being, and a sense of being connected to our 'real self'. 

The other possibility is to intensify your consciousness much more dramatically, by a process of what we could call 'disrupting the equilibrium.' Our bodies strive to maintain a state of homeostasis, where we have the right balance of chemicals inside us, the right temperature, the right amount of fluid, and so on. They do this automatically by breathing, sweating and digesting food (amongst other things), and we do our conscious bit to help by eating when we're hungry, drinking when we're thirsty, sleeping, staying away from pain and discomfort, or from harmful or disruptive chemicals. But the strange thing is that when we go against nature, and intentionally disrupt this homeostasis, we're liable to experience intenser states of consciousness. Human beings have always exploited this fact, and practised methods of 'disrupting the equilibrium' for spiritual purposes, including fasting, sleep deprivation, frenzied dancing, self-inflicted pain and altered breathing patterns. This is why the ascetics wore hair shirts and belts of nails, why native Americans went without sleep for days before ceremonies, and why the members of the Greek and Roman mystery cults fasted and beat themselves. It's also one of the reasons why human beings have always used drugs. Although some drugs have the effect of numbing rather than awakening us to reality, many of them - especially psychedelics - disrupt homeostasis so directly and dramatically that they give us instant access to the highest states of consciousness. 

Rimbaud knew this instinctively, and was determined to use this method to become a 'voyeur' or visionary. At the age of 16 he wrote his famous Lettre du Voyant to his schoolteacher Izambard, where he describes his method of 'awakening' the mind. 'The poet becomes a visionary,' he writes, 'by a long, immense and reasoned disordering of all the senses,' as a result of which he becomes 'The Supreme Sage...for he arrives at the unknown.' According to him, this 'disordering of the senses' means disrupting the workings of the mind with sleep deprivation, alcohol, drugs, sickness, solitude, and sex, and at the end of the process the poet will emerge as the prototype of a new human being, with a new language which is 'of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything.' 

To this end, he did everything he could to 'disrupt the equilibrium' of his own being. He tried to keep his mind awake by living like an ascetic, ignoring his physical needs and subjecting himself to pain and discomfort. He smoked hashish, drank absinthe, and attempted to practice magic and alchemy. He also began to see his poetry as a way of disabling the ordinary conscious mind, and breaking through to higher realms of reality. 
This way of transforming consciousness is fraught with danger though. Too much pain or suffering, or too many drugs, can disable your body as well as your normal consciousness. Drugs can permanently damage the structures of your psyche as well, as many 'chemical visionaries' of the 60s found to their cost. These methods are always ultimately futile too, because the more intense states of consciousness they bring can only ever be temporary. The effects of drugs always wear off, dancing has to stop, at some point you have to eat and sleep again (at least if you want to say alive). The equilibrium always re-establishes itself; you always have to return to our normal consciousness. It's a little like cheating - when we take drugs or fast we don't actually change our fundamental being, we just escape it for a while. And another problem is, of course, that now that you've experienced the exhilaration and beauty of these higher states, the ordinary world seems even more dreary and unbearable, and your sense of ennui increases. 

After his four years of trying to 'derange his senses' Rimbaud realised this, and decided he could go no further. At the age of 19, full of self-disgust and a sense of futility, he abandoned his attempts to become a visionary. And since for him poetry was closely linked to his attempts to disrupt the equilibrium - both as a method and as a creative result - one of the world's shortest and strangest literary careers came to end too. 

Rimbaud didn't abandon his attempts to 'wake up' though. For the next 18 years he continued to struggle to keep his consciousness at the most intense possible pitch. The only difference is that he no longer did this consciously. Now he switched to the first of the options I mentioned, and attempted to transform his consciousness more indirectly, by living an incredibly restless and adventurous life. 

The key to the amazing restlessness of the second half of Rimbaud's life is the fact that familiar environments and experiences have a deadening effect. The first time - or the first few times - that we're exposed to a new environment or experience it's intensely real to us. But after a while we begin to de-sensitise to it, to switch off to its reality, and all that's left is a kind of shadow. A good example of this is going abroad. Ten years ago I went to live in Germany, for example, and for the first three or four months it was an exhilarating experience. It was exciting just to walk down the street, or to get on a tram, with my consciousness being bombarded with new impressions and information. I felt intensely alive, as if I was 'awake' in a way that would have been possible in my home country. But slowly I found myself switching off to the reality of my surroundings, and after a year or so it was all gone. The town seemed just as dreary and oppressive as any English town, and I was back in the same state of boredom and frustration. 

In other words, unfamiliarity wakes us up, generates a higher state of consciousness - but after a certain amount of time a mechanism in our minds switches our attention off to it, and we fall asleep again. 

However, one way of getting around this is to always expose yourself to unfamiliarity, to never stay in one place or in one life-situation long enough to let this 'familiarity mechanism' (as we could call it) edit out reality. And this is exactly what Rimbaud tried to do. At a time when most people never went more than a few kilometres beyond the villages they were born in, and when transport systems were scarcely developed, he travelled the world like a man on the run, with 'wind in the soles of his shoes' as his friend and lover Verlaine wrote. He had done some travelling before, of course - he'd made several attempts to run away from his dreary home town, Charleville, and had even reached London, where he and Verlaine worked as French teachers. But at the age of 19 he finally escaped for good. He went back to London for a while, then headed for Stuttgart, where he studied German. From there he walked to Italy, where he worked as a dock labourer. Then he returned to Paris and enlisted for the Dutch army, and sailed with them to the Sunda islands. But as soon as the ship set to port he deserted and fled to Sumatra and Java. From there he worked his way back to Cyprus, where he worked as quarry hand, then went to Africa, where he remained for the next few years. He became a trader and gun runner, and a close friend of the King of Shoa. He was the first European to enter certain parts of Ethiopia and achieved some fame as an explorer. However, when the French Geographical Society contacted him to ask for details of his journeys, he didn't bother replying. He showed the same indifference when he learned that his poems had been published back home and he'd become famous as a 'lost poet'. 

Rimbaud probably did manage to sustain an intense or higher state of consciousness by living this kind of life. Although he died at the age of 37, we can probably also say that, in a way, there was much more time in his life than for most people who live a full life span. Our sense of how time passes seems to be closely to be the amount of 'perceptual information' which we absorb. This is why there always seems to be more time in a week on holiday than a week at home - because on holiday we're surrounded by unfamiliarity, and process much more information from our surroundings. It's also why time passes quickly in states of absorption - because when our attention is completely immersed in a TV programme, a computer game or a book we take in very little perceptual information. And so because, unlike most of us, Rimbaud never let the 'familiarity mechanism' reduce the perceptual information he received from his surroundings to a trickle, those last 18 years of his life were probably stretched to the length of several decades - if not more - of an ordinary, settled person's life. 

There are still massive problems attached to this way to attempting to keep the mind awake though, which Rimbaud himself encountered. One problem is that, again, you aren't actually changing your consciousness, you're just trying to keep its effects at bay. In a way Rimbaud was on the run - from his normal state of mind, with its reality-filtering mechanisms. Since these mechanisms would always start to function after a certain amount of time, he had no option but to keep moving. And again, this soon gives rise to a sense of futility, of being helplessly propelled from place to place with no real reason to be anywhere. You start to ask yourself, as Rimbaud did, 'What am I doing here?' 

Another problem is that a life of constant wandering doesn't allow you to satisfy basic human needs, like the need for a constant group of friends, for a partner and a family, and for security and territory. It's like jumping straight to the top of the hierarchy of needs, to decide that you want self-actualisation and nothing else. As a result there's no foundation to your life; you're always unstable and liable to fall to pieces.

And this is what happened to Rimbaud. Eventually, when he began to tire of his restless life, more fundamental human needs did start to manifest themselves. He decided to go back to France, planning to find a 'nice peasant girl' to marry and to settle down and start a farm. But by this time his health was beginning to fail, and soon after his return he became seriously ill: he had to have a leg amputated and became paralysed down one side of his body. And he realised that he'd made a mistake anyway, and felt as oppressed by the familiarity of France as he had 20 years before. He jumped to the top of the hierarchy of needs again: after a few months he decided to go back to Africa, even though he was so ill that he could hardly walk or feed himself. He got as far as Marseilles, where he died in hospital. 

Nobody - except perhaps for the great mystics and ascetics - ever sacrificed so much and was so fearless in his attempts to transcend our ordinary 'sleep' consciousness as Rimbaud. This is why he is such a hero figure, the existentialist equivalent of Hercules or Odysseus. But no matter how heroic his struggle was, and no matter how intensely he lived, we can't avoid the conclusion that, ultimately, Rimbaud failed. He lived and died dissatisfied, and never did manage to 'wake up' permanently. The problem, we can see now, is that he chose the wrong ways of doing this. In the end what he teaches us is that the two approaches he took were dead ends, and that the only satisfactory way of 'waking up' is to try to change your consciousness from the inside - not with drugs and other homeostasis-disrupting methods, but with spiritual and psychological practices which cause a slow but permanent transformation. 

(Originally published by thinkdeeply.com, 2003)

Sometimes it seems as if happiness and human beings just weren't made for one another. Our ancestors probably found it difficult to be happy because of the sheer physical suffering and the tragedy that filled their lives.

Until very recent times, most adults had to watch some of their children die, and regularly mourned the deaths of other relatives and friends. They could only expect to live until 40 at the most themselves, and spent their short lives fighting against hunger and the elements, suffering from constant malnutrition, toothache and eye problems, as well as from a host of diseases which modern medicine has now eliminated. There was also a good chance that at some point their lives would be devastated by war, or raids by foreign invaders. Because of this our ancestors' lives were 'nasty, brutish, and short', as Thomas Hobbes wrote. 

For many people in the world life is still full of this kind of suffering, of course, but those of us who are lucky enough to live in the world's richer countries have largely been freed from it. You might expect that, as a result, we would all live in a state of happiness. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Our lives simply seem to be filled with a different kind of suffering. Whereas our ancestors' suffering was mostly physical, ours is psychological. Many of us seem to carry around a fundamental dissatisfaction and boredom which we try to escape from by treating ourselves to more and more material goods and more and more pleasures and entertainments, by immersing ourselves in distractions like television or our jobs, and by taking drugs. At the same time millions of us suffer from different kinds of psychological malaise - depression, eating disorders, self-mutilation - or else spend a large part of our lives oppressed by anxieties, worries and feelings of guilt or regret, and negative emotions like jealousy and bitterness. Or more generally, many of us feel a sense of being 'let down' by life. We strive for happiness but never seem to find it, and feel as if the world has somehow cheated us. 

But why is happiness so difficult to find? Is it just a natural fact that the life is hard and full of suffering, so that there's nothing we can do about it? Is it simply that, in the worlds of Dr. Johnson, 'man is not born for happiness'? 

I don't believe this is true. In fact I believe the opposite: that happiness (or contentment) is human beings' most natural state. The problem - simplistic though it may sound - is that we've lost our bearings, and have largely forgotten where true happiness is. It only seems so difficult to find because we're looking for it in the wrong place. 

Different Kinds of Happiness 

In order to attain a clearer picture of where true happiness actually might lie, it's perhaps useful to go through the normal ways in which we look for happiness in our lives. Generally speaking, in the modern world we think of happiness as something that comes to us from the outside. We generate it through doing certain things and having certain things. There are several different ways in which we try to do this, which I believe can be categorised as follows: 

Materialistic Happiness. This is the 'happiness' which buying and possessing material goods gives us. When we go shopping and buy a new dress, a new piece of furniture or a new car this presses a kind of instinctive 'pleasure button' inside us, so that we feel happy for a few hours or perhaps 
even a few days. And then there is the positive feeling which actually owning these goods after we've bought them. (There is also the feeling of status and importance which material goods give us, which crosses over into 'ego-based happiness' - see below.) Materialistic happiness appears to have its roots in our ancient past. We can probably trace it back to a time when our ancestors needed to acquire and possess goods to improve their chances of survival. To them this would have meant possessing livestock, food they could store through the winter, or goods they could exchange. This instinct for possession is still inside us, and gives us a feeling of pleasure when we satisfy it. 

Hedonistic Happiness. This is closely linked to materialistic happiness, since one of the attractions of money is that it can enable us to live hedonistically. We're all instinctively programmed to find certain things pleasurable, such as food, drink, drugs, sex, and comfortable living conditions (e.g. a comfortable bed and furniture, soft, plush carpets, heating etc.). There are also many instinctive 'thrills' we get in certain situations, such as being surrounded by crowds of people and loud music and bright lights, driving, sailing or flying at high speeds, or being amongst pleasant climatic conditions. These are all 'pleasure buttons' which give us a 'buzz' of well-being when we press them. Some of the buttons have been purposely placed there by nature to make sure that we will survive and reproduce - e.g. food is pleasurable so that we'll want to eat, and sex is pleasurable so that we'll reproduce. Others are more accidental buttons caused by chemical changes inside us, such as when speed or danger give us an adrenaline rush or produce endorphins. 

Ego-Based Happiness. This is the happiness we're chasing after when we try to 'get on' or 'make it' in the world. It makes us strive to become successful, powerful and famous, and to accumulate 'status symbols' like expensive cars, big houses and designer clothes (which is the connection with 'materialistic happiness' above). On the simplest level we experience 'ego-based happiness' when people compliment or praise us - when your boss tells you you've done a good job, for example, when your husband tells you you look beautiful, or if you're an actor or musician and the audience applaud your performance. We don't always need other people for this though - we can praise ourselves too, as we do when we 'pat ourselves on the back' after we've completed a challenge or achievement such as passing an exam, climbing a mountain or negotiating a higher wage. In all of these situations we feel a glow of 'ego-based happiness' and our self-esteem and confidence increase. And fame and power are so attractive to us because they give us an endless - even constant - supply of ego-based happiness. Famous people are effectively being praised and complimented continually, even when there are no sycophants around them to tell them how great they are - the glances of passers-by are always reminding them of how special they are. Similarly, powerful and successful people - though they may not be famous - are continually being told how special they are by the respectful way other people treat them, by seeing evidence of their power around them (e.g. the hundreds of workers they employ, the premises they own etc.). 

Ego-based happiness probably also has its roots in instinct. After all, as Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs' shows, self-esteem is a basic human need, as instinctive as the need for food or shelter. When we are given 'fixes' of self-esteem this also, therefore, presses a 'pleasure button' inside us. 

These three kinds of happiness make up the basic 'happiness paradigm' of our culture. There are other kinds of happiness which we search for and regularly experience, but since these aren't quite so important to this essay - and I don't have unlimited space - I'll deal with these more briefly. 
We also try to find happiness by changing our circumstances (which would probably be called circumstance-changing Happiness). This expresses itself in the constant desire which many of us to change our lives in some way. It's connected to 'materialistic happiness', since it often manifests itself in a desire to become rich, but can be expressed in other ways: in the desire to change your appearance, for example, to move to a different house in a different area, or to get a better job.

Event-based happiness is what we experience this when we undergo what psychologists call 'positive life-events' - in other words, when good things happen to us, such as marriage, the birth of children, passing an exam, getting a job etc. We usually associate it with major events such as these, but we often experience it on a smaller scale too - when you get a raise in salary, for instance, when the sports team you support wins a match, or when you meet a famous person or someone else you admire. 

Future-based happiness is the positive feeling we experience when we 'look forward to' things. Often, when the present circumstances of our lives aren't so positive - when you're having a boring day at the office, for example - future-based happiness is what keeps you going. You look forward to the meal you're going to eat when you get home, the programmes you're going to watch on TV this evening, or the party you're going to at the weekend - and as a result your present situation seems more bearable. 
Need-Satisfaction Happiness is the happiness we experience when any of our fundamental needs are satisfied - the basic physical relief you feel when you eat when you're hungry or when you go to home rest after a long day's work; or the psychological relief you feel when you find a secure job after a long period of temping, or the emotional relief you experience when you find a romantic partner after being alone for a long time. 

Defects 

Some of us are more oriented around one particular type of happiness than another. People who live in a state of 'need-deprivation' - who are homeless, poor, or don't have a romantic partner, for example - usually think of happiness purely in terms of satisfying their needs. A rich housewife who spends most of her time shopping is mainly oriented around 'materialistic happiness', while first year university students who spend their time socialising and drinking are probably mainly oriented around 'hedonistic happiness'. 

Most of us spread our search for happiness fairly evenly though. If you look closely at your own life, you'll probably find that you experience (or at least look for) all of the different kinds of happiness we've looked at on a fairly regular basis. You might have 'fixes' of materialistic happiness when you buy new clothes or CDs, fixes of hedonistic happiness when you drink alcohol or go to a party, and fixes of ego-based happiness when you catch a member of the opposite staring at you across a bar or when your partner tells you that you're a fantastic cook. You might experience need-satisfaction happiness when you have social contact after being isolated for a while; 'event-based happiness' when you hear that a friend is going to get married; and 'future-based happiness' when you think of the holiday you've book in a month. You might also look for happiness through changing your circumstances - by re-decorating your kitchen or having a new hairstyle, or by dreaming of moving to a country with a better climate or of winning the lottery. 

The first three types of happiness (materialistic, hedonistic and ego-based) are undoubtedly the ones which are most important to us though. Many of us take it for granted that we can find happiness by pursuing the 'American Dream' of wealth and success, and think of life as a kind of competition to 'get on' and accumulate as much of them as possible. But whether these kinds of happiness actually can satisfy us - even the highest levels of wealth and success - is very debatable. In fact there are many studies by psychologists which suggest that this isn't the case. Studies of pools and lottery winners, for example, show that their new found wealth has little effect on their level of happiness. After a short period of high level happiness they return the same 'base level' they experienced before. Surveys also show that America's increasing wealth since the Second World War hasn't been accompanied with increasing happiness. In 1946 38% of Americans said they were 'very happy'. In the late 50s the figure had risen to 53%, but in the mid-70s it was down to 27%, and in the mid-80s it had risen again to 33%. Surveys of the levels of happiness in different countries also have some surprising results. As the psychologist Michael Argyle writes, they show that 'International differences in happiness are very small, and almost unrelated to economic prosperity.' 

We've all seen plenty of evidence for this too. We all know of pop stars, film stars and other celebrities whose massive wealth and success doesn't seem to have brought them any happiness. We've all heard stories of 'privileged' aristocrats and other children of rich parents whose inherited wealth seems more of a curse than a blessing, and who experience a sense of emptiness and purposelessness which leads to drug abuse and psychological problems. The richest person in Great Britain, for example, is the Duke of Westminster, with an estimated fortune of 1,750 million. But apparently his wealth hasn't made him any more immune to unhappiness than anybody else. In a recent newspaper interview the Duke revealed that a year ago he'd suffered a breakdown which had plunged him into 'a black hole of despair,' and stopped him working or attending any social events for three months. The experience had only served to forcibly remind him of what he'd always known, which was that, as he said, 'You can't buy happiness, you can't buy health, and you can't buy inner peace...People think a new video recorder or a fast car can make them happy but they don't.' 

But if we look closely we can see some very obvious reasons why these types of happiness can't truly satisfy us. One problem is that they are all very temporary. The sense of well-being we experience when any of our 'pleasure buttons' are pressed only lasts for a short time. With hedonistic happiness it only lasts as long as the act or situation which produces it - as long as the party lasts, as long as it takes for the drugs or alcohol to wear off, or as long as you can make sex last. Materialistic happiness usually lasts a little longer, since the short-term thrill of buying something is followed by the instinctive pleasure of owning it. And ego-based happiness probably - at least in certain cases - lasts longest of all. If a stranger comes up you on the street and tells you you're beautiful, for example, or if your first novel is published and is given rave reviews by every newspaper, you might feel a glow of ego-based happiness which can last for days. 

But so what if they wear off after a while? you might think. There's no reason why we can't give ourselves another 'fix' of happiness as soon as that happens, and so keep ourselves in a constant state of happiness. And this is what many of us try to do, of course. But the problem here is that all of these types of happiness are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In the same way that, say, a heroin addict has to ingest larger and larger quantities of the drug to achieve the same effect, if we regularly treat ourselves to these types of happiness we become slowly resistant to them. Every time you buy yourself a new dress or a new item of furniture the amount of pleasure you experience decreases slightly, so that if you want to have the same effect next time you have to buy yourself something a little more special and a little more expensive. Every time you achieve a little success which gives you some ego-based happiness, you need a higher level of success next time around to feel the same. In the same way the pleasure you derive from a casual sexual encounter or from driving a fast car becomes slightly duller every time you experience it. This effect may be so small that it's difficult to notice, and if you don't experience these pleasures very frequently it may not take place at all, but people who live very hedonistic lives may find that they need to progressively intensify their experiences until they enter the realm of 'dangerous' pleasures like hard drugs or promiscuous bondage-based sex. And they may also find that, after this, they reach a point which I call the 'end of pleasure', at which they have become so numb that no amount or intensity of hedonism can stimulate them, and they feel a sense of dissolution and boredom which may result in suicide. 

Another similar problem is that most of these types of happiness are subject to what psychologists call 'adaption', the process by which we get used to situations once we've been in them for a while, and cease to value and appreciate new aspects of our lives. One of the main pieces of evidence for 'adaption' was the finding that badly disabled people such as quadriplegic patients were just as happy as other people, and also that - as I mentioned above - people who won large sums of money were no more happy than others. It seems that at a certain point we 'switch off' to the past and stop seeing our present situation in relation to the previous, so that we don't feel lucky or unlucky in the present, but instead a kind of neutral blankness. And it's easy to see how this would affect the kinds of happiness we've mentioned. A high degree of wealth or success might make us happy for a while, but as soon 'adaption' takes place we'll be back where we started. In the same way we also quickly become adapted to changes in circumstances, such as a move to a new area or a newly decorated house, so that they cease to affect us after a short time. 

Finally, these kinds of happiness are also problematic because they all come from outside us. This means that they're all dependent on external circumstances, which are always liable to change in such a way that they can no longer provide us with happiness. If this happens we're completely helpless. If you're a person who lives off ego-based happiness, for example, what happens when you start to lose your looks, when the company which you're head of goes bankrupt, or when your fame or celebrity begins to take a downturn? Or if you live off materialistic and hedonistic happiness, what happens when you lose your job, when a burglar steals all your prized possessions, or when you lose all your savings in a stock market crash? 
It's because of this seeming unattainability of happiness that some philosophers have concluded that it's impossible to find contentment, and that human life is destined to be full of frustration and suffering. Albert Camus, for example, believed that true happiness is impossible because life involves a continual striving which can never be satisfied - he compares human life the Greek myth of Sysiphus, who the gods condemn to roll a boulder up a hill until gravity forces it down again, whereupon he goes back to the bottom and starts rolling again. Similarly, the German philosopher Schopenhauer believes that happiness is impossible because we look for it in the present, but the present moment is so fleeting that as soon as any situation arises which provides happiness, it disappears straight away. 

But there is another possibility, which Eastern - rather than Western - philosophy suggests to us: that there is a kind of happiness which comes from inside us, and isn't subject to any of these problems. 

Inner Happiness

There is, in fact, a kind of inner-based well-being we regularly experience but which we don't normally think of as unhappiness because it's not part of culture's 'happiness paradigm'. 

The American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent over 30 years studying the question of what makes human beings happy, and has also come to the conclusion that happiness is not, as he says, 'the result of good fortune or random chance,' or 'something that money can buy.' According to him, we come closest to experiencing true happiness when we experience the state of 'flow', which he defines as 'a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to complete absorption in activity.' When we're in 'flow' we forget ourselves, forget our surroundings and the circumstances of our lives. The negative self-talk which normally fills our minds fades away and we feel that we are one with the activity we're performing. We experience flow when we have challenging and demanding tasks to do at work, when we play games, sports or musical instruments, or even when we become absorbed in household chores like mending a fence or doing the gar

(Originally published in Paradigm Shift)

Enlightened people are like spiritual dynamos; they have a very strong presence which touches the people they come into contact with, transmitting something of their enlightenment to them. Even people who aren't at all spiritual usually feel a sense of well-being in their presence, and so feel attracted to them without knowing why. But for people who have made some spiritual progress already, the effect can be extremely powerful. Contact with an enlightenment person may enable them to make the final jump to permanent enlightenment themselves. 

This is one of the reasons why many spiritual traditions place so much emphasis on the role of a guru. The guru is so important not just because of the advice and guidance he can give you, but because he can transmit his spiritual power to you, giving you a taste of enlightenment and speeding up your spiritual development. (In Sanskrit, this is called satsang, literally good company. )

The early 20th century author and spiritual teacher Paul Brunton became aware of this when he visited the ashram of the great sage Ramana Maharishi, while travelling around India in search of spiritual wisdom (as described in his book A Search in Secret India). Brunton realised that Ramana was a truly enlightened man the first time he met him, someone who had completely transcended his ego and become one with ultimate reality. He felt the spiritual effect of his satsang straight away. He sensed that a steady river of quietness seems to be flowing near me, that a great peace is penetrating the inner reaches of my being. While sitting near him, he realised that his mind was becoming more still, and suddenly all of the intellectual questions he'd had about spiritual matters no longer seemed important. The only question in his head now was Does this man, the Maharishee, emanate the perfume of spiritual peace as the flower emanates fragrance from its petals?  

At the end of his first visit to the Ashram, Brunton is in the hall with Ramana and some of his disciples, sitting quietly while the sage slips into a holy trance. He feels a sense of awe building up inside him, as a powerful force started to fill the room, emanating from Ramana. In his trance-like state, Ramana gazes at him, and Brunton feels that he's looking deep into his being, and is aware of his every thought and feeling. He feels that a telepathic current is passing between them, that Ramana is transmitting his deep serenity to him, and begins to feel a sense of euphoria and lightness. He feels that his own being becomes one with Ramana's, and that he has gone beyond all problems and all desires. The sage's disciples leave the hall, leaving Brunton alone with him, and for a moment he feels that his body disappears and him and the sage are both out in space - but then he makes a fatal mistake. He hesitates, wondering whether he should go with the experience, and the spell is broken. 

After this, Brunton resumes his travels around India, meeting magicians and miracle workers and self-proclaimed gurus who are less enlightened than they claim to be, and eventually returns to the Maharashi's ashram. Again he experiences an ineffable tranquillity when sitting close to him, and again he experiences revelations which he is sure are nothing else than a spreading ripple of telepathic radiation from this mysterious and imperturbable man. And finally, after a period of wrestling with his own thoughts and his intellect, he has an experience of genuine enlightenment which changes him forever: 

I find myself outside the rim of world consciousness. The planet which has so far harboured me disappears. I am in the midst of an ocean of blazing light. The latter, I feel rather than think, is the primeval stuff out of which worlds are created, the first state of matter. It stretches away into untellable infinite space, incredibly alive. 

The American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen had a similar experience when he first met the Indian teacher who became his guru, H.W.L. Poonja - who was, coincidentally (or perhaps not!), a direct disciple of Ramana. Cohen had had profound spiritual experiences before, but had spent many years feeling frustrated and disillusioned, yearning for spiritual liberation but being disappointed by a series of other teachers. But shortly after meeting Poonja, when the teacher told him, You don't have to make any effort to be free , he experienced enlightenment: 

His words penetrated very deeply, I turned and looked out into the courtyard outside his room and inside myself all I saw was a river - in that instant I realized that I had always been Free. I saw clearly that I never could have been other than Free and that any idea or concept of bondage had always been and could only ever be completely illusory. 

After this, Cohen spent three weeks with Poonja, and surrendered to his guru, let himself become one with him, giving up his own identity and everything which made up his life. He began to experience waves of bliss and love that at times were so strong that I felt my body wouldn't be able to contain it. And from that point on, although his initial euphoria faded a little, he had a constant sense of being always in the present with much contentment and calm. I feel no desire for other than what IS.  

And now that he had attained moksha himself, Cohen gained the ability to affect other people in the same way that Poonja had affected him. My wife and I went to one of Andrew's talks several years ago in Manchester, England, and for days afterwards Pam - my wife - felt like a different person. There was a feeling of freedom inside her, a sense that - in her words - nothing mattered, that I didn't have any problems. I didn't want anything because I was happy as I was. My life was quite stressful at that point but suddenly none of the stress could affect me. And she's sure that this wasn't so much because of what Andrew actually said but the effect of simply being there, in his presence. 

I was a little jealous because I didn't have any of those feelings - at that time I was taking a more intellectual approach to spiritual matters, and was so busy trying to understand what Andrew was saying conceptually that I must have been shut off from the feeling dimension. A couple of years before then, I'd started to visit a spiritual teacher called Russell Williams, and also took a largely conceptual approach to his teachings. Russell - who I still go to see now - is 82 years old, and has been the president of the Manchester Buddhist Society for over 50 years, even though he's not specifically a Buddhist. He doesn't chant or meditate or read Buddhist scriptures, and doesn't adhere to or promote any particular set of teachings. He's a humble self-realised man, who talks about the most profound spiritual truths and the most intense spiritual states as if they're the most simple and natural things. In my first years of going along to Russell's twice weekly meetings, I used to wonder why most people didn't seem to be paying attention to what he was actually saying. He was saying some of the most profound things I'd ever heard and people didn't seem to be listening - they'd be staring into space, or sitting with their eyes closed. They rarely asked questions, seeming content to let Russell be silent, when as far as I was concerned he was full of wisdom which I wanted him to share.

But about three years ago I began to realise why this was. Perhaps I'd changed, become less interested in the conceptual side of spirituality, or perhaps I'd finally completed a long process of getting attuned to the atmosphere at the meetings, but when I went to see Russell I started to experience very strange, pleasurable states of consciousness. Even when I'd been taking a conceptual approach, I'd often experienced feelings of peacefulness and well-being, which sometimes lasted for a couple of days afterwards. But this was something stronger. The first time it happened, I was staring at Russell while he was speaking to me, and began to feel very relaxed and calm, as if the flow of my life-energies was becoming smoother and lighter. And then, all of a sudden, everything became unfamiliar - the light became brighter, the colours began to merge and the distinctions between people and objects began to fade away. My main feeling, however, was of a powerful sense of strangeness - the scene was completely alien, as if I'd landed on a different planet. Even though it was accompanied with a sense of exhilaration, I was a little scared and pulled away from it. 

Over the following months I had the same experience several times again, and I learned to relax and trust it. I let the sense of strangeness overcome me, and as the light in the room became brighter, all objects began to shimmer and merge into one another. The light seemed to be flowing out and immersing everything in its brightness. The room was filled with this beautiful shimmering haze of golden light, and I was filled with a deep serenity, a glow of intense well-being filling my whole body. I could feel down in my legs and my feet, as if I'd taken a sedative of some kind. And even when I didn't have this particular experience at the meetings, I usually had a very powerful feeling of calmness and serenity inside me. I was often aware that my breathing had slowed down dramatically, and when I left I found myself doing everything very slowly, with a natural mindfulness. My mind was still and quiet, and outside everything looked beautiful and alive. 

After a few months I was talking to one of the members of the group, and said to him, I've been having really very strange experiences here over the past few months. I tried to describe them, and he laughed and said, So now you know why we've all been coming here for so long! Now you're really a member of the society.

I still have these experiences now, and I'm certain that they're the result of satsang, of being in the presence of an enlightened person. The experience of the scene becoming unfamiliar and the light becoming brighter usually only happens when Russell is talking directly to me. In these moments I can almost feel spiritual power radiating from him and flowing into me, feel my own life-energy being affected by his. 

The big question is: why do enlightened people have this strange ability to generate spiritual experiences in others, this power to transmit their enlightenment to everybody around them? 

Spiritual experiences induced by satsang strongly suggest that the esoteric concept of an aura has a basis in fact. They suggest that our being or life-energy isn't just confined to our own mind or body - it radiates out from us, creating an atmosphere (or aura) which can affect the people we come into contact with. The auras of most people don't appear to be particularly strong, or at least don't have particularly strong negative or positive qualities, so that we don't usually feel anything palpable from them. But we've all met certain people who we instinctively recoil from, who we might not even exchange any words with but who still fill us with a sense of unease or even fear or dread. These are people who have a strong bad aura around them, perhaps because their life-energy is heavily poisoned with negative emotions and egotism. But with enlightened people, of course, the exact opposite happens. Their life-energy is so intensified and stilled, and has such powerful positive qualities, that they transmit waves of calm and bliss to everyone around them. 

But spiritual experiences are more than just feelings - they are also experiences of vision, insight and revelation. And one of the most important aspects of satsang experiences, I believe, is that they show that spiritual illumination is also communicable. Feelings of bliss can certainly spread from person to person - and so can the vision of the oneness of the universe, the awareness that the essential reality of the universe is a limitless ocean of Spirit, and the experience of transcending the ego and being reborn as a deeper and higher Self. These experiences are completely transferable - under the right circumstances, they can be passed from an enlightened person to others without any loss of intensity. 

And this, in turn, has an important bearing upon the concept of collective spiritual awakening. It's now almost a clich to state the human race as a whole may be on the threshold of an evolutionary jump, a collective shift to a higher level of consciousness which will give rise to a new era of true spirituality and harmony. Many people find this idea far-fetched - understandably so when you look at the state of the world today - but satsang experiences show us a process by which this transformation could occur. They show us that enlightenment is highly contagious. And after all, it's surely not just wholly enlightened individuals who affect the people around them. Anybody who has become spiritually developed to a degree will have some power to affect the people around them. And so it's possible that a kind of positive cycle might take place - as more people become spiritually developed, they will transmit their insight and well-being to the people around them, who will in turn transmit their spirituality to the people around them, and so on. It may be that once a certain critical threshold has been reached - once a certain number of people have become enlightened, or once the collective spiritual power of the human race has built up to a certain degree - a great wave of spiritual illumination will spread through the world like a forest fire; a process of spiritual transmission building up power and intensity, and eventually leading to an Omega point of permanent change. 

This may still sound like wishful thinking - but then again, the experience of satsang itself is miraculous, showing that the our apparent individuality is an illusion, and that we are parts of an indivisible ocean of consciousness. 

Abstract: This essay examines the question of why human beings have always had such a strong need to believe that gods are overlooking and protecting them. I discuss the characteristics of 'indigenous spirituality' and the historical origins of theism, and link this to the development of an stronger 'ego structure' amongst certain human groups. Monotheism (and theism itself) is seen as an inevitable consequence of the painful sense of separation and incompleteness which strongly egoic consciousness brings. 

Until recent times, the existence of God, or gods, was taken for granted by almost everyone. 'He' was - or they were, if we're speaking of polytheistic religions -a powerful psychological reality to most of the world's population. Wherever human beings have lived, gods seem to have naturally sprung from their psyche.

In my opinion, the amazing prevalence of this belief has never been explained satisfactorily. Many of the explanations for God and religion tend towards an 'intellectualist' or a 'consolationist' approach. The 'intellectualist' approach suggests that human beings invented gods and the religions associated with them in order to explain the world around them. On the one hand, religion explains strange natural phenomena. When the sun moves across the sky, when the thunder roars, when crops die, or when a person dies for no apparent reason - all of this can be explained in terms of the actions of gods or spirits. Religions can also explain how the world came into being (God created it) and why life is full of evil and suffering (it's because of the Devil, or else it's a test God has set us, and He will punish or reward us when we die). (Boyer, 2002).

Generally, the consolationist approach maintains that religion consoles human beings against our mortality and the sheer hardship and suffering which fills our lives (Boyer, 2002). Both Marx and Freud, for example, were proponents of the 'consolationist' view. To Marx religion was the 'universal ground for consolation' or, in his famous phrase, the 'opium of the people' (Hamilton, 1995). The working class required this consolation because of the alienation which the capitalist system produces, and the sheer misery and oppression they were forced to endure. For Freud belief in God was a neurotic regression to childhood, with God representing an omnipotent father figure. But at the same time Freud believed that religion had a consoling function in that it helped to make some sense of an arbitrary and meaningless world, and also compensated human beings for the 'privations' which civilisation causes. Being 'civilised' means repressing our instincts and impulses, which brings frustration, and results in us inflicting suffering on each other. And as Freud writes, religion's task is 'to even out the defects and evils of civilisation, to attend to the sufferings which men inflict on one another in their life together' (in Hamilton, 1995, p. 58).

On the other hand, from the perspective of transpersonal psychology, we might take the Jungian view that God is not exactly a physically real being - as Christians or Muslims believe - but is nevertheless psychically real. For Jung (e.g. 1969) the collective world of archetypes is as a real as the physical world, and God is one of the most powerful archetypes - hence the omnipresence of belief. Ken Wilber takes a slightly different approach, suggesting that the concept of the monotheistic God is an intuition of Spirit, conditioned and filtered through the archetypal realms. According to him (Wilber, 1981), monotheism is an evolutionary step forward from the 'magical' religion and polytheism of 'primitive' cultures. Until around 2500 B.C.E., he argues, the mean level of human consciousness was pre-egoic, and even during the 'high membership period' (from 4500 to 1500 B.C.E.) the highest level of consciousness which gifted individuals like shamans could access was the psychic or Nirmanakaya realm. But beginning at around 2500 B.C.E., the human race (or at least some human groups) began to evolve to the egoic level - and since their average level of consciousness was higher, gifted individuals were able to 'jump' to a greater height and reach the subtle level. Particularly when what he calls the 'incipient egoic-rational' phase began at around 500 B.C.E., more and more human beings began to access the subtle levels, and the development of monotheism was the result. Wilber's view suggests that the 'God concept' was so widespread simply because some human groups evolved to a point where the subtle levels - even if they were not their normal state of consciousness - became more accessible. At the subtle levels, and within the cultural context of the pre-scientific world, God was a reality.

Primal Religion

One of the surprising things which cultural anthropology teaches us, however, is that not all human groups have concepts of gods. Indigenous tribal peoples like the Native Americans, the Australian aborigines and traditional pre-colonial Africans, were generally not, and are generally not (although the picture changed somewhat after they were exposed to Christian culture), theistic.

For peoples such as these, there are no deities who preside over certain localities or certain aspects of life. In fact to them the concept of 'God' or 'gods' has either no, or very limited, significance [1]. It's true that some indigenous peoples have a concept of a creator God, but these are usually very remote and detached figures. They seem to have been developed purely as a way of explaining how the world came into being. After creating the world, this 'God' steps aside and has very little influence. As Eliade (1967) noted:

Like many celestial Supreme Beings of 'primitive' peoples, the High Gods of a great number of African ethnic groups are regarded as creators, all powerful and benevolent and so forth; but they play a rather insignificant part in the religious life. Being either too distant or too good to need a real cult, they are involved only in cases of great crisis (p. 6).

The Azande, for example, have a concept of a supreme being called Mbori. However, according to the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, there was only one rarely performed public ceremony associated with him, and individuals never prayed to him or even mentioned his name (Lerner, 2000). Similarly, the Fang people of Cameroon believe the natural world was created by a god called Mebeghe, and that the 'cultural world' - of tools, houses, hunting, farming etc. - was created by another God called Nzame. However, as Pascal Boyer (2002) notes, 'these gods do not seem to matter that much. There are no cults or rituals specifically directed at Mebeghe or Nzame they are in fact rarely mentioned (p.160).' According to Lenski's statistics (1995), only 4% of hunter-gatherer societies and only 10% of simple horticultural societies have a concept of a 'creator god concerned with the moral conduct of humans' (p. 88).

There are two main elements of the spirituality of indigenous peoples, neither of which involve gods in the sense that we think of them. One of these is their awareness of an animating force which pervades the whole of the phenomenal world. All native peoples appear to have a term for this 'spirit-force'. In America, the Hopi called it maasauu, the Lakota called it wakan-tanka, and the Pawnee called it tirawa, while the Ufaina (of the Amazon Rain Forest) call it fufaka (Heinberg, 1989; Hildebrand, 1988; Eliade, 1967). The Ainu of Japan called it ramut (translated by the anthropologist Monro [1962] as 'spirit-energy'), while in parts of New Guinea it was called imunu (translated by early anthropologist J.H. Holmes as 'universal soul' [in Levy-Bruhl, 1965]). In Africa the Nuer call it kwoth and the Mbuti call it pepo.

This force is not a personal being. It is not a deity which watches over the world and who human beings can appeal to for help and worship. It has no personality and no gender. Here a member of the Pawnee tribe describes their 'supreme God':

We do not think of Tirawa as a person. We think of Tirawa as [a power which is] in everything and moves upon the darkness, the night, and causes her to bring forth the dawn. It is the breath of the new-born dawn 
(in Eliade, p. 13).

There is some confusion because occasionally anthropologists translate these terms as 'God'. Evans-Pritchard (1967) did this with the Nuer term for 'spirit-force', kwoth. At the same time, however, he was careful to point out that kwoth is not an anthropomorphic deity: 'The anthropomorphic features of the Nuer conception of God are very weak and, as will be seen, they do not act towards him as if he were a man I have never heard the Nuer suggest that he has human form' (p.7). 

These concepts are strikingly similar to the universal spirit-force which spiritual and mystical traditions speak of - the brahman of Vedanta or the dharmakaya of Mahayana Buddhism, for example. It is striking that whereas for primal peoples the concept of 'spirit-force' seems to be a widely accepted - and commonly perceived - truth, for more 'civilised' Eurasian it is an esoteric and mystical concept, which we associate with higher states of consciousness. To us brahman is not the obvious, objective reality which it is to primal peoples. According to Vedanta, we normally see the world under the shadow of maya, which hides the truth of the oneness of the universe - and of our own oneness with it - from us. It is possible for us to become aware of this oneness, but only through a long period of following certain spiritual practices and lifestyle guidelines - such as meditation, the eight-limbed path of Yoga or the eightfold path of Buddhism - which have the effect of refining and intensifying our consciousness. This is indicative of the fundamental psychological difference between indigenous non-Eurasian peoples and 'modern' humans, which occurred as a result of the event which I have called 'The Ego Explosion' (Taylor, 2002, 2003, 2005). In fact, as we will see in a moment, the loss of awareness of this all-pervading spirit-force is one of the defining characteristics of theistic religion.

The second element of native religions is belief in spirits (in the plural). The world teems with spirits - both the spirits of dead human beings and 'natural' spirits which have always existed incorporeally. As E.B. Idowu writes of traditional African religion, 'there is no area of the earth, no object or creature, which has not a spirit of its own or which cannot be inhabited by a spirit' (1975, p.174). Like the Great Spirit itself, individual spirits are not anthropomorphic beings with personalities, like gods. They are not beings at all. As Idowu writes, 'they are more often than not thought of as powers which are almost abstract, as shades or vapours' (pp. 173-4). And spirits are involved in the world in a way that gods are not. Unlike gods, they are never separate from it, but always moving through it, or living within its rocks, trees and rivers.

Early religious scholars tended to believe that animism was the result of a mistaken generalisation. According to Comte, since they themselves were conscious beings, our early ancestors simply assumed - in the absence of any other evidence - that all things had an inner, subjective life too (Hamilton, 1995). Freud believed that spirits and demons were the 'projection of primitive man's emotional impulses' (1938, p. 146), while more recently, Wilber (1995) has suggested that animism is the result of what he calls 'pre-personal fusion' with the world, the lack of a clear distinction between subject and object. However, these explanations contain the underlying ethnocentric assumption that spirits are an illusion, that they cannot genuinely exist. The idea that spirits may be a genuine objective reality may seem absurd in a climate of post-modern rationality. but we should at least be open to the possibility, especially bearing in mind that Buddhist philosophy accepts the existence of entities invisible to the human eye (such as the peta-yoni, asura-yoni and devas), and suggests that we become sensitive to them as our consciousness becomes more refined through spiritual practice (e.g. Narada, 1997). Since we appear to have lost the ability to sense the presence of spirit-force around us, then it is at least possible that we have lost the ability to sense the presence of spirit entities around us too. 

However, if we decide that spirits are illusory, it is possible to interpret them in 'intellectualist' terms. It's not such a big step from sensing that all things are alive in a general way - because of the spirit-force which pervades them - to believing that all things are alive in the sense of being autonomous active forces. Spirit became individuated into spirits, and individual spirits were attributed with causative powers. When a wind suddenly arose, for example, this could be explained as the action of a wind-spirit, changes of seasons could be explained in terms of the actions of 'the spirits of the four winds' (as the Plains Indians believed), and illness and death could be explained as the influence of 'evil' spirits or sorcery (as most primal peoples believe). At any rate, whether they are objective realities or not, spirits do have this 'intellectualist' function to indigenous peoples. 

August Comte and James Frazer also believed that theistic religion was a fairly late development. According to Comte, the earliest human beings were at the 'fetichistic' stage of development, which comes before the polytheistic and monotheistic stages (and later, the metaphysical and the positive stages) (Hamilton, 1995). While in Frazer's terminology, early human beings were at the 'magical' stage, which comes before the religious and the scientific (Frazer, 1959). And the fact that contemporary native peoples do not have 'theistic' religions suggests that there is some truth to this view, if we can assume that these peoples are representative of an earlier phase of human culture [2]. As Jacques Cauvin points out, the prehistoric artwork contains none of the images of deities which feature prominently later:

Though it is known that religious feeling has accompanied the human species of a long time, it is not easy to date the appearance of the first gods. Palaeolithic art already had a 'religious' content, but it seems not to have had reference to gods (

Theistic religions are particularly characteristic of the peoples of the Europe, the Middle East and Asia. It seems to be the case that, before colonial contact from the 16th century onwards, the indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas and many other parts of the world did not have theistic religions. In Africa the situation is a little more complex, due to earlier European and Arabic influences, but even there theistic religions were a late development, and very rare until recent centuries.

The Birth of Gods

A controversial subject here is the 'Goddess religion' which, according to scholars such as Marija Gimbutas (1974) and Riane Eisler (1987, 1995) was spread throughout Europe and the Middle East during the Neolithic era, from 8000 BCE to around 3000 BCE (e.g. Gimbutas, 1974). However, there is actually very little evidence that, during the early part of this period at least, a 'goddess' was worshipped.

Prehistoric human beings seem to have been obsessed by the female form. Judging by the massive numbers of them which have been found, particular throughout Europe and the Middle East, female figurines seem to have been their major art form. Along with the vagina-shaped shells (which were placed on and around dead bodies), the large number of depictions of vulvae, and the practice of staining vulva-shaped cavities with red ochre (to represent menstrual blood), they attest to an awe of the female form and her reproductive processes. But to leap from this to the belief that these human beings worshipped a Goddess is unjustified. As Morris Berman points out, 'The goddess in these images is surely in the eye of the beholder; it is not in the images per se' (2000, p. 130). During the latter part of this period, goddesses certainly were worshipped as anthropomorphic deities - for example, the Sumerian goddess Nammu, who gave birth to earth and heaven, the Egyptian goddess Nut, and Cretan goddess Ariadne. But we can see this later phase of obvious goddess worship as a transitional stage between primal spirit-religion and patriarchal theistic religion. 
In fairness to these scholars, they do state that Goddess religion was not purely, or even mainly, anthropomorphic. The idea of an all-pervading 'spirit-force' was important too. In fact some of the descriptions these scholars give us make Goddess religion sound exactly like 'spirit-religion' of native peoples. According to Riane Eisler, goddess religion, 'bespeaks of a view of the world in which everything is spiritual (inhabited by spirits) and the whole world is imbued with the sacred: plants, animals, the sun, the moon, our own human bodies' (1995, p. 57). Descriptions like these make one wonder, however, whether the concept of a Goddess is actually necessary.

The first indisputable archaeological evidence of theistic religion appears later, during the 4th millennium B.C.E., among certain peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia. Peoples like the Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, the Indo-Europeans and the Semites developed religions based around the worship of higher, metaphysical beings with anthropomorphic (and occasionally theriomorphic, in the case of the Egyptians) characteristics - i.e. gods. These gods were apart from the world of human beings, observing and controlling its events from a higher realm, presiding over different aspects of life such as war, love, travel, agriculture etc. As Cassirer (1970) writes of the Roman gods, for instance, 'They are, so to speak, administrative gods who have shared among themselves the different provinces of human life' (p. 97). The earliest of these gods that we know of are the gods of Sumer, where An was the supreme sky god, Utu was the god of the sun, Nannar of the moon, Nanshe was the goddess of fish and magic, Ninisina was the goddess of writing, and so on. The most familiar of them to us are the gods of ancient Greece, where Zeus was the king of the gods, Poseidon was the god of the sea, Ares was the god of war, Aphrodite the goddess of desire, and so on. Like many other peoples' gods, the Greek deities were almost laughably anthropomorphic figures, like comic book superheroes. They squabbled with each other, took each other to court, had headaches, and sometimes even had sex with humans (in which case, if they got pregnant, half divine 'heroes' like Hercules were born). And as well as pantheons of 'official' gods, there were a massive number of local gods, of individual towns, mountains and rivers, and even family gods. Like spirits, gods covered every part of the natural world, but in the sense of presiding over - not actually being present in - all natural things. 

At first traces of the old spirit-religions blended with the new god-religions. As I have suggested above, the early goddesses may have been a kind of intermediary stage between spirits and male gods, since the female psyche was more closely linked to the nature, and possessed the same nurturing and caring characteristics. As scholars like Gimbutas and Eisler tell us, the Goddess - and goddesses - was a symbol of the one-ness, the fecundity and the benevolence of nature. The idea of spirit-force was not completely forgotten by the early Egyptians either, who referred to Akh and Ba (the former referring to the universal soul, the latter the animating spirit which flows from Akh and pervades the whole of nature). Even in Greece, there was a pre-theistic stage of religion, Eue theia, when there was, in Cassirer's words, 'a natural kinship, a consanguinity that connects man with plants and animals' (1970, p.91). It was only later, when this connection was broken, that gods came into being.

In time, however, these aspects of the old 'spirit religions' faded away. By around 2000 BCE, all prominent deities were male (Eisler, 1987; Baring and Cashford, 1990; DeMeo, 1998) and spirit-force only existed as an esoteric concept. As Baring and Cashford (1990) write, 'Towards the middle of the Bronze Age the Mother Goddess recedes into the background, as father gods begin to move to the centre of the stage (p. 152).' And by this time the ancient sense of participation with nature had been replaced with a desire to dominate the natural world. In Baring and Cashford's words, 'the Goddess became almost exclusively associated with 'Nature' as a chaotic force to be mastered, and God took the role of conquering or ordering nature from his counterpole of spirit' (p-xii).

These peoples - particularly the Indo-Europeans and Semites - were war-like as well as theistic, and over the following millennia they conquered large parts of the world (see Gimbutas, 1974; Eisler, 1995; DeMeo, 1998). The Indo-Europeans eventually conquered the whole of Europe, parts of the Middle East and India, while the Semites conquered most of the Middle East. Over time they split into different groups. The Indo-Europeans sub-divided into peoples like the Celts, the Greeks, the Romans and the ancient Hindus, while the Semites sub-divided into peoples like the Hebrews, the Philistines, the Arabs and so on. And wherever they went, and whoever they became, their religions retained the same basic polytheistic character.

Monotheism came much later. The world's first ever monotheistic religion was founded by the Egyptian Pharaoh Ikhnaton in the 14th century B.C.E., who proclaimed that the only God was Aton, the sun God, and that all the old gods were obsolete. There is some evidence that Moses lived in Egypt at this time, where he was the son of a noble family (Moses actually is an Egyptian name), and that he assimilated this concept of one God and took it into the desert with him. This may be how the Jewish religion began, which eventually gave rise to Christianity, and - later still - to Islam.

The development of monotheism was probably not in itself such a significant event, however. The development of theism was the really momentous development, and monotheism can be seen as an extension of polytheism, possibly caused by an intensification of the original processes which produced theism (which will be examined in a moment). In Frazer's terminology, the important shift was from the magical to the religious stage, and the religious includes both polytheism and monotheism. And far from being evidence of an evolutionary advance towards the subtle realms (as Wilber believes) the fact that by the end of the first millennium CE most of Europe and large parts of the Near East and Africa worshipped One God is also largely attributable to accidental historical factors: the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, for example (which meant that Christianity was immediately the official religion of the whole Roman Empire), and the missionary zeal and military power of the early Muslims. 

The questions we really need to answer, then, are: why did theistic religion emerge during the 4th millennium BCE? Why was the old spirit-religion replaced by a new religion of gods? And why is it, in the first place, that native peoples do not have concepts of gods?

The Intensified Sense of Ego

In order to answer these questions, we need to look at the fundamental psychological differences between 'modern' human beings and indigenous non-Eurasian peoples. 

According to the early 20th century anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the essential characteristic of indigenous peoples was their less 'sharpened' sense of individuality. In his words, 'To the primitive's mind, the limits of the individuality are variable and ill-defined' (1965. p.68). He notes that, rather than existing as self-sufficient individual entities - as we experience ourselves - indigenous peoples' sense of identity is bound up with their community. He cites reports of primal peoples who use the word 'I' when speaking of their group, and also notes that indigenous peoples' sense of individuality extends to objects they use and touch. A person's clothes, tools and even the remains of meals and their excrement are so closely linked to them that to burn or damage them is thought to death or injury to the person. (This is one of the principles by which witchcraft is believed to work.) Similarly, George B. Silberbauer notes that, to the G/wi of the Kalahari, 'identity was more group-referenced than individual. That is, a person would identity herself or himself with reference to kin or some other group' (Silberbauer, 1994, p.131). In other words, such peoples do not just live in a group, as a collection of individuals, the community is part of their being, an extension of their self. In the same way, they do not feel that they just live on land, but that their land is a part of their very identity, as much as part of their being as their own body. This is one of the reasons why being forcibly 'relocated' by governments is such a tragedy for them. Their attachment to their land is so powerful that they experience this as a kind of death. The Fijian anthropologist A. Ravuva, for example, notes that the Fijian's relationship to their vanua or land is 'an extension of the concept of self. To most Fijians the idea of parting with one's vanua or land is tantamount to parting with one's life' (1983, p.7).

The naming practices of certain indigenous peoples also suggest that their sense of individuality is less defined than the European-American. For us, a name is a permanent label which defines our individuality and autonomy. But for indigenous peoples this often isn't the case. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) found that among the Balinese, personal names and even kinship names are rarely used. Instead the Balinese commonly use tekonyms - i.e. terms which describe the relationship between two people. As soon as a child is born the mother is called 'mother-of ___' and father is 'father-of ____', and when a grandchild is born they are called 'grandmother-of ____' and 'grandfather-of ____'. As Gardiner et al (1997) note, this 'denotes a very different understanding of the person, emphasising the connectedness of the individual with the family' (p. 113). Similarly, Australian Aborigines do not have fixed names which they keep throughout their lives. Their names regularly change, and include those of other members of their tribe (Atwood, 1989).

In general, American-European peoples appear to have what Markus and Kitayama (1991) refer to as 'independent selves', whereas native peoples have 'interdependent selves'. And this relative lack of 'self-ness' is one possible explanation for the egalitarianism of most primal societies. If we see social inequality as being generated by the lust for power, status and wealth of individual human beings, and these in turn as being facets of a strongly egoic mode of consciousness, then a less egoic form of consciousness equates with a less pronounced desire for power and wealth, and therefore a more egalitarian society. Anthropologists generally agree that this is a common characteristic of primal peoples, and in particular of foraging bands. According to Lenski's statistics (1995), only 2% of hunter-gatherer societies have a class system. And as Christopher Boehm (1999) writes of the human beings of pre-Neolithic times, 'they lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralisation and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions and outside the family there were no dominators' (p. 4).

This egalitarianism made it very difficult for primal peoples to adapt to the European way of life, with its emphasis on private property and individual gain. The Native Americans, for example, found it impossible to work in the way that white people did, cultivating their own pieces of land or trading or running stores for profit, because it conflicted with what Ronald Wright (1995) describes as the 'ethic of reciprocity' which was fundamental to most Indian cultures. 

Some European colonists were actually aware of this difference themselves, and realised that they would only be able to truly 'civilise' the natives by developing their sense of 'self-ness'. Senator Henry Dawes - whose Dawes Act attempted to turn Amerindians into small-scale landowners - went to heart of the matter when he wrote of the Cherokees in 1887, 'They have got as far as they can go [i.e. they are not going to progress any further], because they hold their land in common There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation' (in Wright, 1995, p.363). The English missionaries in Australia tried various measures to develop the aborigines' sense of individuality. As Bain Atwood (1989) writes, 'the missionaries sought to make each [aborigine] an integrated centre of consciousness, distinct from the natural world and from other aborigines' (p. 104). To this end, they made them live in separate houses and tried to stop going into each other's. They also baptised them so that they would think of themselves in terms of a permanent name. None of this worked though. The aborigines never developed a sense of personal ownership over their houses or the possessions inside them. They wandered in and out of each other's houses all the time, and continually swapped possessions.

The fundamental difference between European-Americans and primal peoples, then, may therefore be that we have a stronger and sharper ego structure than them.

The Ego Explosion

The stronger ego structure which characterises Eurasian peoples appears to have developed at a particular historical point. Archaeological evidence for this includes new burial practices which became common from the 4th millennium BCE onwards. In Europe, prior to this, communal burial was the norm, and people were buried without markers and without possessions. People would be buried in shallow temporary graves and then, at a certain time of year, be reburied in a permament communal site (Griffith, 2002). But during the 4th millennium BCE people were buried as individuals, with identity and property, as if their individuality mattered, and as if they thought it would continue after death. Chieftains were buried with their horses, weapons and wives, as if it was impossible to conceive of such powerful and important people ceasing to exist, and they were bound to return to life at some point. As the Swedish archaeologist Mats Malmer has written, these new burial practices (and the new emphasis on private property linked to them) are part of a 'surprising change [that] occurred in Europe, a new social system giving greater freedom and rights of personal ownership to the individual.' Referring specifically to the beginning of the third millennium BCE, he calls these new European peoples 'the first individualists' (In Keck, 2000, pp.47-48).

Texts and inscriptions from the fourth millennium BCE also show a greater emphasis upon individuality and personality. For the first time, people's names are mentioned and their speech and their activities are recorded. We learn about who did what, why kings built temples and went into battle, how goddesses and gods fell in love and fought with one another. As Baring and Cashford (1991) write, 'We become aware not only of the personality of man and women but also the individuality of goddesses and gods, whose characters are defined and whose creative acts are named' (p. 154).

Similarly, the new myths which appeared throughout Europe and the Near East during the third millennium BC suggest a new strong sense of individuality. Whereas before myths had been based around the Goddess and nature (or symbols of them), now they became stories of individual heroes pitting their will and strength against fate. According to Joseph Campbell, these show 'an unprecedented shift from the impersonal to the personal' (quoted in Baring and Cashford, 1991, p.154). In fact many of these heroes actually battle against symbolic representations of the Goddess of the Earth such as serpents, suggesting the new sense of separation and alienation from nature as the ego became more developed. In the Sumerian myth the Enuma Elish, for instance, the Earth goddess Tiamat - represented as a serpent - is killed by the sky god Marduk. Marduk takes her place as the creator of life, and now gods and goddesses - and by extension human beings - are 'outside' nature, detached from their creation rather than an organic part of it. Myths such as this symbolize what Owen Barfield (1957) calls 'a withdrawal of participation'. Whereas earlier human beings - and indigenous peoples - felt deeply interconnected with natural phenomena, now nature is something 'other' to be tamed and exploited. 

There are also suggestions from other myths that earlier human beings were less individuated, and that our strong ego structure developed at a particular - fairly recent - historical point. The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil suggests this, as also does the notion that they were 'given understanding' and that they 'realised that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and covered themselves.' The Chinese myth of the Age of Perfect Virtue suggests that human beings lost their harmony with the Tao as a result of developing a new kind of individuality and self-sufficiency. Individuals began to live by their own will rather than the will of nature. As a result they were much more aware of themselves and their own behaviour. Chuang Tzu tells us that the 'true man of ancient times did not grow proud in plenty, and did not plan his affairs He could commit an error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make a show' (in Heinberg, 1989, p. 69). In other words, these ancient men acted without analysing their behaviour, presumably because they were less self-aware, and as a result they were from feelings of guilt and pride. Similarly, the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata states that the 'holy men of old' were 'self-subdued and free from envy' (in Heinberg, 1989, p. 68).

And I am not, of course, the first person to suggest that these myths contain elements of historical truth. Scholars such as Ernst Cassirer (1953-7), L.L. Whyte (1950), Jean Gebser (1966), Julian Jaynes (1976), Joseph Campbell (1964) and Wilber (1981) have all suggested that our strong sense of individuality was not shared by earlier peoples, and emerged at a particular historical time. According to Whyte, this is when the conflict between rational and instinctive behaviour which typifies modern man originated; according to Jaynes, this was when human beings ceased to obey the voices of the gods and started to think and act as individuals; while Campbell shows that at this point the myth of the individual hero pitting his will and strength against fate begins to take precedence over myths based upon the goddess and natural phenomena. According to Cassirer, early human beings lived in a state of 'cosmic continuity', in which there was no sharp distinction between the individual and the environment. But later human beings developed a subjectivity, and the duality of subjective-objective and outer-inner. 

These authors agree that the transition to a stronger sense of individuality specifically involved the human groups I have mentioned above: the Sumerians, Egyptians, the Indo-Europeans and the Semites (amongst others). However, perhaps due to the lack of archaeological evidence available to them, the dates they suggest for the transition are contradictory. Campbell suggests during the 3rd millennium BCE, while Whyte and Jaynes suggest during the 2nd millennium BCE. The researches of James DeMeo (1998), however, suggest that the Ego Explosion - as it might be termed - occurred much earlier, at around 4000 BCE.

DeMeo's monumental work Saharasia uncovers evidence of a massive environmental disaster which began at around 4000 BCE: the desertification of the large region of the earth which he calls 'Saharasia', which until that time had been fertile and widely populated with humans and animals. Parts of Saharasia - particularly central Asia and the Middle East - were the homelands of these groups, and this environmental change affected them massively. On the one hand, they were forced to leave their homelands (which explains the mass migrations of the Indo-Europeans and Semites over the following centuries), and on the other hand, the new living conditions they were forced to endure apparently transformed their psyche. DeMeo's research strongly suggests that this was the historical point where war became rife, when societies became socially stratified, when patriarchy began, and when human beings began to experience guilt and shame towards bodily processes and sex.

DeMeo himself interprets this transition in terms of Wilhelm Reich's concept of 'armoring'. The pain and suffering which the Saharasian peoples confronted with made them 'wall themselves off' from the world and also from their own feelings. They covered over their natural pleasure-seeking impulses with secondary pleasure-denying instincts, and impulses such as the maternal-infant and the male-female bonds, connection to nature, the sexual instinct, trust and openness to other human beings were disrupted. 

However, we can also, in a sense, bring DeMeo's archaeological-geographical findings together with the theories of Cassirer et al. and suggest that the Saharasian environmental change was the cause of the 'Ego Explosion'. The historical connection is clear - these were exactly the peoples affected by the environmental disaster, and they are the peoples who modern European-Americans are descended from (as well as many other Eurasian peoples who share our sharpened sense of individuality, such as the Semitic peoples and the Chinese and Japanese peoples). 

Perhaps the sheer hardship of these human groups' lives when their environment began to change - when their crops began to fail, when the animals they hunted began to die, when their water supplies began to fail and so on - encouraged a spirit of selfishness. In order to survive, they had to start thinking in terms of their own needs rather than those of the whole community, and to put the former before the latter. Sharing was no longer an option, since there were not enough resources to support the community as a whole. At the same time perhaps the new difficulties the groups faced as their environment changed brought a need for a new kind of intelligence, a practical and inventive problem-solving capacity. If they wanted to survive they had to deliberate, think ahead, find quick solutions, and to develop new practical and organisational powers. For example, as their lands became more arid they might be forced to come up with new methods of hunting or farming to increase their yields, to find new water supplies or ways of making the ones they already had last longer (such as irrigation). They might have to find ways of protecting themselves against the heat and dust of the desert or against invaders who might to try to steal their supplies after their own had disappeared completely. In other words, the Saharasian peoples were forced to think more, to develop powers of self-reflection, to begin to reason and 'talk' to themselves inside their heads. And they could only do this by developing a stronger sense of 'I'. After all, self-reflection is the 'I' inside our heads talking away to itself. If you want to be inventive or to deliberate or plan ahead, you have to have an 'I' to think with. In other words, this is perhaps how what Barfield calls 'Alpha thinking' developed. And as he notes, this type of thinking inevitably results in a sense of separation from the environment, and an 'individual, sharpened, spatially determined consciousness' (in Wilber, 1981, p.28).

The Origins of Theism

And at the same time as apparently giving rise to war, patriarchy and social stratification (for reasons which I do not have space to suggest here) the psychological transformation caused by this environmental change apparently gave rise to theism. Again, the historical link is clear: the groups who migrated away from the Middle Eat and central Asia after desiccation began - the Indo-Europeans, the Semites and others - were the very same groups who developed theistic religions (and who also became war-like, patriarchal and socially stratified). In James DeMeo's (1998) own terminology, for these peoples matrist 'natural religions' (centred around an awareness of animating and spiritual forces) gave way to patrist 'high God religions', characterized by dominating male gods separated from nature, who demand obedience and certain forms of moral behaviour.

The question we need to answer is: how did the new strong ego structure apparently bring an end to indigenous spirit-religion, and give rise to theism? How did it bring about the shift from the magical to the religious stages (in Frazer's terminology), or from the fetichistic to the polytheistic (in Comte's)?

Perhaps most significantly, this transition entailed a loss of awareness of the presence of spirit force pervading the world, which can be explained in terms of a redistribution of psychic energy. In his essay 'Meditation and the Consciousness of Time' (1996), Philip Novak describes how, in normal states of consciousness, the ego monopolises our psychic energy. He notes that our ordinary consciousness is taken up with 'endless associational chatter and spasmodic imaginative-emotive elaborations of experience' (p. 275). Because of this, energy which could be 'manifested as the delight of the open, receptive and present-centred awareness' (ibid.) (as it is with indigenous peoples) is, in his words, 'gobbled' away. And we can see the Ego Explosion as the point when this state of affairs began. The Saharasian peoples' more powerful egos required more of each individual's psychic energy in order to function, and this was only possible by sacrificing energy which had previously been used by other functions. And in this case energy which had been devoted to 'present-centred awareness' was sacrificed. That energy was diverted to the ego; as a result there was less psychic energy to use perceptually, and the individual no longer perceived the phenomenal world with the same intense, vivid vision. As a result their attention became 'switched off' to the presence of spirit-force. And if we accept that spirits are objective realities, this was obviously the point when we 'switched off' to their presence around us too. 

This loss of the awareness of Spirit was itself part of the reason why gods became necessary. Because of their awareness of spirit-force, and their sense of connection to the cosmos, the world seems to be a meaningful and benevolent place to native peoples. As the theologist H. Sindima writes of traditional African religion, 'Nature and persons are one, woven by creation into one texture or fabric of life, a fabric or web characterised by an interdependence between all creatures. This living fabric of nature - including people and other creatures - is sacred' (1990, p. 144). Through losing their awareness of spirit-force, the Saharasian peoples seem to have lost this sense of harmony and meaning. Rather than being animate, natural phenomena became soulless objects, and the world became a cold, mechanistic place. In other words, these new strongly 'egoic' human beings lost the sense of being 'at home' in the world. What Campbell (1964) calls 'the Great Reversal' occurred, when the sense of the sacred faded away, the human psyche became riddled with guilt, and the body became associated with sin. 

At the same time, perhaps even more importantly, these peoples began to experience a painful new sense of separateness to the world, and lost the sense of kinship to nature and to other living beings which primal peoples seem to experience. The psychological effects of this were momentous, and partly explain the 'Great Reversal' Campbell describes. This is the terrible 'human condition' which existentialist philosophers and psychologists often describe so dramatically - for example, when Fromm (1995) writes that '[Man's] awareness of his aloneness and separateness makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison' (p. 7). This sense of aloneness also brings a sense of incompleteness. Individuals become isolated fragments, broken away from the whole, and as a result have a fundamental sense of unfulfilment (in the literal sense), of not being sufficient as they are, a sense of lack.

In my view, theism was a psychological strategy these human beings used to deal with this new state of being. The belief that gods were always present, watching over them, acted as a defence mechanism against their sense of isolation, and also an attempt to assuage the sense of coldness and indifference they experienced from the world. If the gods were there, they were never alone. If gods were controlling events and protecting them, the world was a more benign place. 

Another important 'compensatory' factor of theistic religions are their concepts of an afterlife. For the most part, native peoples views of the afterlife are not particularly special; they certainly don't envisage death as an ascent to a paradise where the individual ego survives for the rest of eternity, sating itself with endless pleasures and enjoying perfect happiness. For them the afterlife often isn't very different from this life. The Cheyenne Indians, for example, believe that after death they carry on living in the same way, but as insubstantial spirits, like shadows (Service, 1978). Members of the Lengua tribe of South America told the missionary W.B. Grubb that, 'The aphangak or departed souls of men in the shade world merely continue their present life, only of course in a disembodied state' (in Levy-Bruhl, 1965, p.314). And for native peoples life after death doesn't necessarily mean immortality. As Levy-Bruhl points out, 'Everywhere primitives believe in survival, but nowhere do they regard it as unending' (p. 313). The Dyaks of Sarawak, for example, believe that everyone dies between three and seven times, until their souls become absorbed into the air. (Levy-Bruhl, 1965). On the other hand, some native peoples have a more purely spiritual conception of the afterlife. Evans-Pritchard (1967) notes of the Nuer, for instance: 'When a man is dying the life slowly weakens and then it departs from him altogether, and Nuer say it has gone to God [or Spirit] from whom it came Life comes from God [or Spirit] and to him it returns' (p. 154). 

But after the Ego Explosion the afterlife became important as a consolation for the sufferings of life; the psychological suffering which the sharpened sense of ego brings, and the 'social' suffering of war, oppression and poverty (much of which was also an indirect consequence of the Ego Explosion). We can assume that the intensified sense of individuality which came with the Ego Explosion brought an intensified fear of death too. After all, if you define your identity purely in terms of your own being, rather than as a part of your community or as a part of the cosmos itself, then the dissolution of your own being is a terrifying prospect. We can therefore see the concept of immortality as a response to this terror of death. 

Pascal Boyer (2002) misunderstands the 'consolatory' function of religion. He notes the popularity of New Age mysticism, which provides comfort by telling people that they have enormous physical and intellectual powers at their disposal, that the universe is benevolent, that they are connected to all kinds of strange energy forces, and so on. The puzzle here, Boyer believes, is that this 'religion' has sprung up in 'one of the most secure and affluent societies in history' (p. 24), where there is little war, infant mortality, famine and social oppression. But this isn't the point, of course. There is a much more fundamental form of suffering which all human beings are exposed to, no matter how rich or secure we are, and which we will always require consolation against: the aloneness and separateness of the ego, and the terrible prospect of its dissolution. 

Perhaps Gods - and God - had a secondary 'intellectualist' function too. Without an awareness of Spirit, Saharasian peoples could not explain the world in terms of the actions of individual spirits. But, of course, anthropomorphic gods took over this role, and became the explanation behind natural events. When the wind rose up, for example, this was not because of the action of 'wind spirits' anymore, but because the god of wind was angry; and when a person died of illness this wasn't because of evil spirits, but because of 'the will of God'. 

There is some evidence that, during later millennia, the strong ego structure which these groups developed intensified even further, leading to an intensification of war, patriarchy and antipathy to sex and the body (DeMeo, 1998). And this may have been partly responsible - together with the historical factors I mentioned above - for the transition from polytheism to monotheism. A stronger ego structure brings a more painful sense of separation, and the monotheistic god became necessary to assuage this, since He, we can presume, offers an even greater sense of protection and a greater sense of thereness than assorted polytheistic deities.

The transition from spirit religion to theism was also signalled by a new division between the sacred and the profane. As Service (1978) notes, in 'primitive society generally, conceptions of the sacred, or supernatural, so permeate activities that is difficult to separate religious activity from such activities as music and dance or even from play' (p. 64). Indigenous cultures generally do not have special 'places of worship' such as churches or temples, special 'holy days' or 'religious specialists' like priests. The key to this, of course, is the individual's awareness of spirit-force. There cannot be a division between the sacred and the profane because the omnipresence of spirit-force - or spirits - makes everything sacred. Every place is potentially 'holy' and every individual has access to the divine. But now that awareness of spirit-force was lost, a compartmentalisation of religion took place. The divine became contained within particular places, such as churches and temples, and religious specialists began to act as intermediaries between human beings and gods.

Conclusion

Of course, not everyone conceives of God as a personal being who overlooks the world and controls and intervenes in its events. Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme used the term 'God' to describe spirit-force, or brahman, and encountered a great deal of hostility from the church authorities precisely because this was not the same personal 'God' which conventional Christians worshipped. At the same time there are many concepts of God as both personal and spiritual at the same time - i.e. 'God' exists as a spirit-force which pervades the universe, but at the same time can manifest himself as a personal being, or at least have powers of agency and influence. The concept of God of the Bhagavad-Gita, for example, is similar to this. Similarly, Keith Ward (2002), suggests that concepts of God or gods arise when human beings try to grasp ultimate reality. We cannot directly perceive the pure spiritual essence of the universe, and so have to 'image' forms which represent it. These concepts makes sense when we consider that there is a large grey area between complete ego-separateness and one-ness with the cosmos. At any point along this continuum, there will still a degree of existential trauma and therefore a need for consolation, and a consequent need for a personal god - even whilst there is an awareness of Spirit.

The point I am trying to make, then, is that the concept of God is a psychological strategy which only became necessary when certain human groups developed a strong ego structure. The development of theism was not the result (and the indication) of an evolutionary movement advance towards spirit - as Wilber believes - but the result of an accidental historical event which caused a movement away from it.

In a sense the born-again Christians who tell us that there is a 'god-shaped hole' inside us are correct. The 'hole' is our fundamental sense of lack and incompleteness, caused by our strong sense of separateness from the cosmos. This is why, to Richard Dawkins' bemusement, religious beliefs are so persistent, even with so much apparent evidence against them. It's true, however, that particularly in post-enlightenment Europe, the 'opium' of religion has become less readily available. Science has taken over religion's secondary function of explaining the world, and in the process negated its primary function. As a result many people are forced to find other ways of filling the 'god-shaped hole', which might include materialism, power, success, drugs, hedonism, and even supporting soccer clubs. 

However, perhaps the best way of dealing with this sense of lack, and the only way which can be truly successful, is not to try to fill it, but to try to remove it - or perhaps more accurately, to transcend it. This is what spiritual traditions such as Vedanta or Buddhism offer us: methods of weakening our ego structure, overcoming our sense of separation and incompleteness, and reconnecting with the cosmos. In a sense they offer us techniques of undoing the negative effects of the Ego Explosion and returning us to the holistic and harmonious experience of the world of native peoples. As Novak (1996) notes, the practice of meditation reverses the ego's domination of consciousness. The normal structures of consciousness need to be constantly fed with attention. But when we focus our attention upon the present, as we do when we meditate, they are deprived of their attention-food, and begin to weaken and fade away. As a result, says Novak, 'the mind acquires a new habit of spending less energy on the imaginative elaboration of desire and anxiety and more on perceiving present reality' (p. 275). 

In other words, spiritual or transpersonal development does not help us by giving us a consolation for our 'terrible' human condition, but by enabling us to change the state of being - or psyche - which is responsible for our suffering. When we reach a certain level of transpersonal development, the need for consolations such as religion, drugs or materialism naturally falls away, simply because we have transcended the state of ego-isolation which created that need. We discover that our existence is not an 'unbearable prison' of separateness and aloneness after all, because the whole universe and everything in it, including our own being, is pervaded with the 'invisible and subtle essence' of spirit-force.

Endnotes

[1] When I speak of Native Americans as native peoples here I am excluding peoples like the Incas, Aztecs and Maya, who had many of the characteristics of European culture - a high level of technology and social organisation, a high level of warfare, of social inequality etc. Unsurprisingly, their religions were more similar to European polytheistic religions than to primal spirit religion, although they do seem to have included some elements of the latter. For example, Service (1978) notes that 'unlike most primitive peoples, the Inca addressed prayers to divinities and made offerings' (p. 345). But at the same time the Inca believed that the world was pervaded with dachakamag - their term for spirit force. This suggests that, in terms of the argument of this essay, these peoples also underwent a kind of Ego Explosion, which meant that they developed a stronger ego structure than other Native American peoples (although, judging by these elements of spirit religion, perhaps not as strong as Eurasian peoples).

[2] Some authors have warned against seeing contemporary tribal groups as representatives of prehistoric human beings (e.g. Roszak, 1992). However, at the time European peoples first had contact with them, these were cultures which had apparently been unchanged for thousands of years. In any case, what anthropologists' reports of these cultures correspond very closely to what we know of prehistoric human beings - e.g. their animistic worldview, their tribal system, and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. As Lenski (1978) wrote, 'Comparisons [between anthropology and archaeology] are not only valid but extremely valuable The similarities are many and basic; the differences are fewer and much less important' (p. 137).

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