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Abstract
This paper explores the human perception of space and light as a unifying
and underlying principle in art, science and the spiritual. Space and
light are presented as a joint entity space-light which is regarded as
a prior given of human experience, both of the objective and the subjective.
If science is the systematic investigation of the objective, then the
spiritual is presented as a systematic investigation of the subjective,
with art as a possible mediator between these two worlds. Two British
mystics, Douglas Harding and Thomas Traherne, are introduced as having
systems of thought with roots in the prior given of space-light, while
the anthropic principle from science is introduced with some of
its implications for light and space.
Keywords: consciousness, light, virtual worlds, Thomas Traherne, Douglas
Harding, anthropic principle
When
consciousness is empty of thought, it is filled with space and light
Art, Science and the Spiritual
The electronic arts comprise a relationship and discourse between art
and science, culture and technology. At the turn of the millennium it
seems that Western thought, with its Enlightenment ideals intact and a
booming Western economy, has triumphed. Science is generously offering
partnerships with the arts, while the arts are content to frame their
deepest questions within the scientific paradigm. So why bring in the
spiritual at all? What single question of importance to the West has been
answered by the spiritual? What single freedom has the spiritual brought
to artists? Do not the majority of the Indian sub-continent, supposedly
the home of the most ancient and sophisticated spiritual traditions in
the world, aspire to the middle-class comforts of the West?
All this would be true if it were not for the most important outstanding
scientific question to spill into the new millennium: the nature of consciousness.
The question was scientifically unaskable at the end of the nineteenth
century, but has become scientifically inescapable at the end of the twentieth.
The proposition at the heart of much of my work is that certain forms
of spirituality, or forms of mysticism, present a framework for understanding
and inquiry into the nature of consciousness, a framework that conventional
science not merely lacks, but the adoption of which would contradict its
ground rules. By proposing a new look at the spiritual, or by accepting
it as a third and equal partner to art and science, I hope to fructify
both art and science, and also to preserve the natural boundaries of all
three. As a trained scientist I have a respect and understanding of its
principles that make me flinch at some of the pseudo-science brought to
bear on consciousness studies; at the same time, as a life-long student
of the mystical, I am equally disturbed by the uninformed hi-jacking or
patronising of the spiritual by scientists.
Let us look in more detail at the three-way relationship between art,
science and the spiritual, by considering pairs of relationships:
Art
and Science: This relationship is a familiar one to the electronic
arts practitioner, perhaps more often as a relationship between
art and technology. Science itself also has an impact on art, in
terms of propositions about the physical world that artists engage
with, and in terms of new imagery generated by its instruments;
imagery of worlds normally to small or too distant to impinge on
our unaided senses. Art in turn provides the scientist with a fluidity
of thinking and the intuitive modes of apprehension that are central
to the great scientific discoveries. It may not do this in a direct
way, but studies like Arthur Koestler's have shown the parallels
between artistic and scientific creativities [1].
Art
and the Spiritual: This relationship can be likened to a centuries-long
marriage ending in apparent divorce towards the end of the 19th
century. Roger Lipsey, art historian, has suggested that a phrase
from Constantin Brancusi, `an art of our own', sums up the desire
by 20th century artists for emancipation from the `baggage' of religious
tradition [2], though Modernism has been shown rather surprisingly
to have strong roots in the spiritual. (Some of these arguments
are presented in Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Science.[3]) However, there is a visible interchange between
art and the spiritual in all periods of history. Art provides the
spiritual with language and metaphor, poetic expression, and artistic
forms for celebration. The spiritual in turn provides subject matter
for the artist, or may present propositions about the subjective
world (as science does about the objective), that artists engage
with.
Science
and the Spiritual: This relationship seems the most contentious,
in that both provide world-views that are claimed by many in their
respective communities as sufficient and exclusive. My claim is
the opposite: that neither are sufficient for a full understanding
of human experience, and that to exclude one or the other is to
live half a life. Ken Wilber's idea of epistemological pluralism
[4] is useful in this context, though it is not the
same as the extreme relativism proposed by some post-modernists.
The interchange between science and the spiritual that I am interested
in is one that does not blur the boundaries or confuse epistemologies.
A thoughtful delineation of the spiritual should help place science
in perspective, and to keep its methods pure. Science in turn can
help in the spiritual by training the mind in rigour, doubt, and
enquiry. The dogmatists of the spiritual have much to learn from
the humility of the scientist, while the dogmatists of the scientific
have much to learn from the holism of the spiritual.
The set of
relationships just outlined imply no hierarchy or priority as areas of
human endeavour and enquiry, indeed a more equal weighting across all
three would be beneficial to much of contemporary discourse. However there
are many senses in which one could rank these activities: science no doubt
coming first when it comes to solving problems of survival, and in providing
explanations of the physical. In terms of profundity however, science
would rank third. We could say that science deals with the most superficial
level of our human experience, the material; art deals with something
closer to home, the emotional; and the spiritual deals with the core of
our subjective existence, consciousness. When science registers as profound
with us I would suggest that it is borrowing the language of art (physicists
and mathematicians often talk of beauty), or even the language of the
spiritual (a scientific breakthrough is awesome). Art, in dealing with
the human dimension of our lives has a natural profundity, but again,
it will borrow the language of the spiritual (a work is divine, mystical,
transcendent).
Going back to science, we find that the language of science itself is
utilitarian and sterile. In the writings of some of the great scientists,
such as Einstein, Schroedinger or Eddington we find a meta-science or
metaphysics which is far from sterile, but, as pointed out above, these
writings draw their profundity from the poetic or the spiritual. Most
of the great scientists talk of awe in certain moments of discovery, Einstein
going as far as to say that he was deeply religious in his science.
The British-born scientist and Templeton prizewinner Paul Davies has said
that `science is a surer path to god than religion [5].' He not only claims that the scientific
experience can open a door to the transcendent, but also that science
is sufficient to take the spiritual enquiry to its ultimate (he uses the
term `God' for this, because of his Christian, theocentric intellectual
inheritance, inappropriate I think in a multi-faith world). Certainly,
any profound experience can open this door (for instance, a sunset, a
work of art, nature, falling in love) but the spiritual is not within
the language or scope of science. In the autobiographies of so many great
scientists we see that `the door is opened' but the scientist does not
walk through it. Why? Because the room one would enter would be outside
science. Even the great Richard Feynman, who insisted on making art important
in his life, in as far as he could as a full-time scientist (he reached
good amateur status in both painting and music), stopped short his spiritual
enquiry after some desultory experiments with isolation tanks [6].
This brings us to a useful question: can art mediate between science and
the spiritual? The single case of Richard Feynman would suggest not, but
the increasing interaction between art and science gives a different indication.
Leonardo da Vinci is a man who could have moulded Feynman's vision; an
interplay of art and science which, at the heart of the Enlightenment
ideal, was sufficient for the deeper needs of the individual. However,
if the problem of consciousness continues to raise its profile in the
scientific community, then art and science will have to turn to the spiritual
for answers.
Space and Light: Physics
Having made some opening remarks about the relationship between art, science
and the spiritual, let us look at a theme that links all three: space
and light. I would prefer to call them `space-light', as a single term,
in that for the sighted at least, they are not separable. We do of course
have an aural and kinaesthetic sense of space (perhaps olfactory as well
for animals), but, as this is an essay intended for electronic arts practitioners,
the visual will be central to the discussion.
To start with, a quick historical journey through science on a ray of
light. Einstein when young tried to imagine what would happen if he could
`ride a beam of light'; what would he see as he caught up with the speed
of light? His question, answered only after plotting his own idiosyncratic
course through science education, led to a revolution in scientific thought.
Light would play a central role in the `new physics' of the 20th century,
but it was also central in the early triumphs of science, and even in
the questions that gave birth to the scientific method.
From Greek times people were aware that a group of heavenly bodies, called
planets after the Greek `to wander', followed erratic paths that could
not be explained. Saint Augustine claims to have abandoned his first religion
(Manicheanism) because one of its leading bishops could not provide suitable
astronomical explanations, and the problem survived a further thousand
years. It was the joint efforts of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton
that eventually provided the solution in terms of the heliocentric theory,
elliptical orbits, and the inverse square law of gravitation. None of
these men would have progressed however without the key contribution of
Tycho Brahe, who invented the telescope (and made lengthy and detailed
recordings with it). Newton honoured his predecessors by saying that if
he could see so far it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
But what did he see with? The telescope. Science was born through
the observation of the planets by means of the first and most significant
piece of research technology ever invented. Earth-bound, science could
not arise, because of the difficulty of separating out cause and effect,
shown for example in the Greek misconception of force as that which produced
velocity. Because the planets move in a vacuum, and are mostly only affected
by the sun, they present what is known in science as a simple two-body
problem. (To solve problems with three interacting bodies is not just
50% more difficult, but orders of magnitude more difficult, and when we
come to more complex systems, then chaos theory rules.) However, the success
of science with the planets gave experimenters the confidence to tackle
more complex earth-bound problems, and also showed how external influences
must be limited in order for an analysis to be made. In effect the heavens
showed the model for the scientific laboratory.
The problem of the planets (which Richard Tarnas believes was central
to the development of the Western mind [7])
was a space-light problem: the problem was spatial, and the solution found
through the first instrument of light: the telescope. The second instrument
of light could be considered to be the microscope, which allowed biology
and chemistry to develop, and the third instrument (I would claim) is
the visual computer. Light then played a central role in the establishment
of science, which for several hundred years after Newton seemed to promise
a complete logical explanation of the universe, and, by implication, of
human experience. By a quirk of fate, it was light again that heralded
the end of science. I should say of course `end of science' a figure of
speech like `the end of history,' figures of speech that hide serious
points however. By the `end of science' I mean the entry into science
of paradox, a direct challenge to Aristotle's law of the excluded middle,
that a thing cannot be both `a' and `b' at the same time. Light, it turned
out, was two things at the same time, a particle and a wave. This is light-paradox
number one. Light-paradox number two takes place at the atomic level:
it is called quantum indeterminacy (and is illustrated with the Schroedinger's
cat gedanken-experiment). Light-paradox number three takes place
at high speeds: observers travelling at such speeds experience time-dilation
and space-contraction Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The origins of light-paradox three are satisfyingly found in an experiment
made with simple lenses and mirrors: the Michelson-Morely experiment,
the most famous null-result in physics. Put simply, it says that the speed
of light is invariant with respect to the observer. We know the speed
of light in a vacuum is about 186,000 miles per second. If I travel towards
a light source at 100,000 miles per second, then measurements of the speed
of light relative to myself should give a joint velocity of 286,000 miles
per second. If a colleague were to travel at 100,000 miles per second
away from the same light source then he or she should measure a joint
velocity of only 86,000 miles per second. In fact we would both measure
the same velocity, 186,000 metres per second. An absurdity! But it
turns out that the invariance of the speed of light with respect to the
observer is part of the deep structure of existence, like the inverse
square law, or the periodic table. However, the reasons that the paradoxes
of light hold a difference significance for us than the other discoveries
mentioned, is not just that they undermine the notion of science as rational,
but that they point to something anthropocentric about the structure of
the universe.
Scientists John Barrow and Frank Tipler have made a study of scientific
results that have anthropocentric implications, summing up their approach
as the `anthropic principle'. Their arguments are presented in The
Anthropic Cosmological Principle,[8] perhaps one of the most significant
books written on the implications of science this century. In its `weak'
form the principle holds that the nature of the universe is such as to
make the development of human life inevitable, because we could not exist
in any other type of universe, and therefore could not ask questions about
its nature. Few scientists admit to holding this principle in its strong
form however, which is put thus: `the evolution of the universe is as
dependent on consciousness as consciousness is dependent on the universe'.
The symmetry of this statement puts consciousness (the ultimate subjective)
and the measurable universe (the ultimate objective) on equal footings
and co-dependent. This radical view, if more widely accepted, would mark
the `end of science' as we know it, and the start of a more holistic approach.
My proposition here is that the anthropic world-view would not have arisen
without light. Light was essential to the birth and death of a particular
form of science; light is also at the centre of artistic and spiritual
languages.
Science has recently engaged in a sometimes-bitter dispute with non-scientists
who have proposed that science is `a social construct.' The extreme relativism
of some forms of feminist and post-modern critical theory inevitably led
to this proposition, and many spheres of human activity find liberation
in such an approach. For those who participate in the hard sciences, and
who may even have sympathy with the broad thrust of such an approach,
the overwhelming evidence from science is that there are immutable laws
governing the structure and behaviour of the universe. The social scientists
cite the `new' physics (the physics that has led to the anthropic principle)
for examples of so-called `laws' of science being overturned by new discoveries.
Why then should not another set of new discoveries overturn the current
theories? Where is the immutability in all this? I believe, however convincing
this argument may be at first glance, that it is flawed. (Neither is it
the basis for the `end of science' thesis.) If we go back to the planets,
then we find that at the end of the 19th century they still posed problems
in their movements, that is a few small anomalies remained, which the
inverse-square law could not explain. It took Einstein's general theory
of relativity to resolve them. So does relativity contradict the inverse-square
law? Can we find in this the relativism beloved of post-modernists, such
as found in fashion, politics and philosophy? Certainly not. Relativity
is a refinement of earlier science, valid only for massive bodies and
on large scales or velocities. Newtonian mechanics is still valid for
the vast majority of every-day calculations, and there is nothing in science
to suggest that this will ever change.
`Science is a social construct' is true in a trivial sense: science is
carried out by people who live in society, and whose behaviour is to some
extent socially determined. If we had a radically different society would
this lead to a radically different science? Not, at least, in the hard
sciences. However, it is interesting to ask to what extent the anthropic
principle is a social construct. Let us take just one of the sections
in Barrow and Tipler's book, section 4.8, which deals with the question
of dimensionality. (I have explored some of the issues to do with dimensionality
in The Tyranny and Liberation of Three-Space[9], which the following discussion
extends.)
At the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century many intellectuals
became interested in n-dimensional space, partly through the work of mathematicians
like Minkowsky, and artists such as Duchamp and the Cubists, while the
Constructivists explored imagery that attempted to portray four spatial
dimensions. Abbot's Flatland [10], a nineteenth-century social satire about a two-dimensional
world, attracted a cult following that persists today. Barrow and Tipler
have collected together serious scientific papers asking the question,
why does our world have three spatial dimensions rather than four
or two, or any other (relativity shows that there are four dimensions,
but the fourth is time). Different and independent studies apparently
show that one of the essential pre-conditions for life to evolve is a
planet in stable orbit around a sun, stable that is for billions
of years. This is only possible in n-dimensional space where n is three!
So, we learn from science that a prior given of a space that could contain
humans is that it is three-dimensional. Could this idea be a social construct?
After all it was arrived at via the anthropic principle. The answer is
yes in the trivial sense (a human has to exist to ask the question), but
no in the sense that a radically different society would not give a different
answer. The prior given of three-dimensional space is at the level of
the individual, not at the level of society.
What science shows beyond doubt, I believe, and what is probably the motivation
for most scientific study, is that the universe has a structure that can
be discovered, not invented. Another way of putting it is that this structure
is a prior given of the universe, or, to put it in a more human-oriented
way, this structure is part of the prior given of human experience. Now,
returning briefly to my opening questions, if science is so good at excavating
and delineating the prior given of our experience, why turn to the spiritual?
Because, I would suggest, at best, the spiritual performs a complementary
task in the subjective world. John Polkinghorne [11] has suggested that both science and religion are an
inquiry into what is. If we are careful about the type of religion, or
the spiritual, referred to in this statement, then yes, it is also an
enquiry. But it operates in a different way and in a different sphere:
the wholly subjective. If science provides an understanding of the prior
given of the wholly objective, then the spiritual provides an understanding
of the prior given of the wholly subjective.
It should be immediately stressed however that mainstream religion rarely
provides a context for enquiry, and so comparisons between science and
mainstream religions (of any faith) are misleading. It is generally the
mystics (using this term in the formal sense rather than the populist
one) that seem to have undertaken such enquiries, effectively turning
their lives into laboratories (and sometimes paying with their lives for
proclaiming the results). The results, often termed in the West as the
`perennial philosophy' (and argued for by Aldous Huxley in a book of the
same name [12]), can be seen as providing the
prior given of the subjective, the prior given of our interiority, or
the prior given of consciousness itself.
Space and Light: Mystics
It is commonly remarked that there are many spiritual metaphors using
light, in fact one of the few exceptions to the spiritual language of
light is found in the `Divine Darkness' of Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite
(probably a Syrian hermit of the 5th or 6th century CE). Can we make a
connection between the paradoxical nature of light in physics, and its
role in the spiritual? And can this connection take further the understanding
of the role of light in the visual arts? I believe so.
`Illumination' is term often given to the intense spiritual awakening
experienced by mystics, `enlightenment' another. However the attitudes
of East and West are very different to this event; in the West `enlightenment'
is a term reserved for an intellectual and cultural process, while in
the East it is meant in the mystic sense, that is, beyond intellect and
beyond culture. In the West the great spiritual leaders (Moses, Jesus,
and Mohammed in historical order for the three `religions of the Book')
are figures whose inner state there is no possibility of attaining, while
in the East the great spiritual leaders (more difficult to pinpoint but
including Krishna, Buddha, Mahavira and Lao Tsu) are figures whose `enlightenment'
is not just attainable, but a state required of the aspirant.
If we return to the opening remark, `when consciousness is empty of thought
it is filled with space and light' then we might examine it in relation
to our questions. I framed the sentence as summing up Eastern mysticism
in a certain way, but also to introduce a very British 20th century mystic,
Douglas Harding.
Douglas Harding
Harding was an architect, so he was predisposed to the qualities of light
and space. His `enlightenment' happened to take place in the Himalayas,
though he is convinced that the light and space of any location could
trigger the same process, indeed that it acts as a continual demonstration
of our true, enlightened, nature. A brief description of his experience
shows both the factors common to many such accounts, but also introduces
his unique and whimsical understanding of it:
What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular:
I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or
numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter
died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away.
I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could
be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new,
mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present
moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough, and what
I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown
shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and
a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in absolutely nothing whatever!
Certainly not a head.
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where
a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On
the contrary it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly
filled, a nothing that found room for everything room for grass, trees,
shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular
clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing
altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly
shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended
in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight)
utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence
was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass,
altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.
Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was
no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden
waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous
reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation,
at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused
life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early
childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see.
It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring
me in the face my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple
and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There
arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only
peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable
burden.[13]
Harding's `headlessness' is an absurdity that does however resonate strongly
with the `no-mind' of Zen. Harding also points up in a way that no mystic
has done before to the prior given of experience, when mind is silent:
it is a light-space phenomenon, curiously absent of self. Harding believes
that children and animals see this prior given unmediated and as presented,
but that the price of adulthood is to take on the notion that we are what
we look like from approximately six feet away (and in its extreme becomes
the `image-consciousness' of fashion). Our subjective experience on the
other hand is maintained as Harding describes in the above passage, and
for which he uses the shorthand `headlessness'. It takes the child-like
gravity of the mystic to recognise it however.
Einstein and Harding have this in common: they were bold enough to accept
a prior given at face value and push its implications to the limits, one
in the objective realm, and the other in the subjective realm. For Einstein
to accept the invariance of the speed of light with respect to the observer
as a given liberated his thought from conventional restraints that had
prevented others from making the discoveries of relativity, and allowed
him to develop the special theory of relativity. (He repeated this
strategy by taking inertial and gravitational acceleration to be the same
thing, against all conventional wisdom, leading to the general
theory of relativity.) Einstein remained a scientist of his time however,
in that he did not push the anthropic implication of his postulates. Harding
took his discovery at face value and created a new cosmology that places
the individual at the centre of a universe of space and light. Curiously
Einstein's discovery does the same: the speed of light is invariant with
respect to you, placing you at centre-stage. It does not matter what your
relative velocity with respect towards a light source, you conveniently
shrink (the Lorenz contraction) to allow you to measure it at the only
permissible speed (in a vacuum): 186,000 miles a second. But nobody else
experiences the shrinkage unless they travel with you!
We are brought now to a basic difficulty with this exposition: the charge
of solipsism, the view that nothing exists outside of our own mind. If
we say of someone that `they think they're at the centre of the universe'
or `they think the world revolves around them' we are saying in a colourful
way that they are selfish. But Einstein's and Harding's discoveries may
show that solipsism simply reflects part of the deep structure of our
experience, a prior given of the objective and subjective universe. Solipsism
in the West has had an interesting history, involving philosophers such
as Descartes and Berkeley, though mostly it is rejected by serious thinkers.
In the East no such problem exists. If we take the root religion of the
East, Hinduism, then we find that in its core mystical texts, the Upanishads,
an identity between the individual and the universe is a central proposition,
summed up as `thou art that' or as `atman is brahman' (meaning the individual
soul has in some way identity with the universal soul or God).
Let us continue the exploration of these ideas by taking a deeper look
at Harding's proposition that children and animals `see' better than adults
the prior given of space and light. We will do this through the work of
another British mystic, Thomas Traherne.
Thomas Traherne
Traherne was born in 1637, but his major works were not discovered until
the end of the 19th century, and some as recently as 1957. He was a chaplain
from the age of 32 until his death in 1674. I consider Traherne to be
one of the `lost Buddhas of the West', a group that includes Pythagoras,
Heraclitus, Socrates, Plotinus, Spinoza, Walt Whitman, and Douglas Harding.
Traherne's work is obscure and needs some background in mysticism to decipher,
but has an extraordinary resonance with Harding's (a British pop group
called the Incredible String Band once honoured both men with a song called
`Douglas Traherne Harding'). Passages in some of Traherne's poems could,
with some stylistic corrections for the differing periods and cultures,
come straight from Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman, Harding
and Traherne have a common goal in their teachings (for their life and
works are properly considered as teachings): to make `you possessor of
the whole world.' This phrase comes from Traherne's Centuries of Meditations
[14] and is another way of saying that one is `filled
with space and light'.
Traherne's Poems of Felicity celebrate the vision of the child,
saying for example, `To infancy, O Lord, again I come, / That I my manhood
may improve,' and `A simple infant's eye is such a treasure / That when
`tis lost w'enjoy no real pleasure.' In this child-like vision all the
contents of his visible world are his treasures, whether pebbles, childrens's
faces or the property of others. If we bracket out the archaic, poetic
language, and the theistic sections (Traherne was after all a chaplain),
then we find a vision stripped to its basics of light and space. The emphasis
he places on light is shown in this line: `The visive rays are beams of
light indeed, / Refined, subtle, piercing, quick and pure.' Traherne is
not repeating a fallacy of the Middle Ages that vision involves firing
rays into the surrounding, but making the point that vision is filled
with light. He is echoing the sentiment of Saint Katharine of Sienna who
said `I am the light by which I see.'
But can we make a distinction between childish and childlike? In an old
Abbott and Costello film they find a thousand dollars tied together with
a rubber band. They pick it up, turn it over, making remarks of amazement,
and twang the elastic. Finally one of them says: `Wow! Real rubber!'
(Note: there was a reason for this, but I like the story out of context.)
It is hard for the educated Westerner not to find Traherne, Whitman and
Harding similarly foolish, perhaps mistaking their capacity to become
the space and light for all things as a form of possession, of owning,
that cannot distinguish the realities of legal ownership; that cannot
separate the value of a thousand dollar bundle from the rubber band that
holds it together. The accusations that the mystics are foolish, solipsistic,
Panglossian or even anodyne are common. If, as I contend, they have in
fact something important to say about the prior given of space and light,
then we need to examine these accusations in more detail.
The pre-trans Fallacy
Ken Wilber has introduced into this debate the notion of the pre-trans
fallacy, that we may mistakenly view the post-transcendent individual
as pre-adult, that is childish or immature. Although we know virtually
nothing about Traherne from contemporary sources, Whitman and Harding
are well-documented, and are far from naïve, Panglossian, or anodyne,
indeed `grizzled' and `forbidding' (words Whitman used for himself) describe
them both well, though `felicitous' is certainly part of their make-up.
The paradox is that such serious mature individuals present what seems
to be the child's version of reality. As Traherne says however, it is
`to improve his manhood'. As Einstein saw, and the child in the story
about the Emperor's new clothes saw, the simple and obvious may in fact
represent the deep structure of our universe, however inconvenient to
the adult mind (or scientific establishment). There is not space here
to explore Ken Wilber's work other than to say that the arguments he puts
forward in the pre-trans fallacy are useful, though have a strong basis
in developmental psychology.
Consciousness
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was concerned how we construct a three-dimensional
coherent world from the discrete and kaleidoscopic sense-impressions that
continuously flood us. This is an early version of one of the key problems
in current research into consciousness: the question of holism. How do
we account for the unity of consciousness? If we restrict this to the
question of how do we account for the unity of our experience of three-dimensional
space, then the notion of a `prior given' as developed here may help.
We have seen that light has intense anthropic implications, and so too
does three-dimensional space. If consciousness is the ground of all human
experience, then why not identify it with space-light as the ground of
experience? In the extreme of objective experience, hard science, the
anthropic principle has established that space-light is intimately connected
with the evolution of human life, even the weak anthropic position agrees
with this. In the extreme of subjective experience, the heights of mysticism
as found for example in the works of Harding and Traherne, space-light
plays a central role. And who stands in the middle between the extreme
objective and the extreme subjective? The artist.
On could see this as an issue of simplicity: art, science and the spiritual
all tend to reduce the contents of consciousness until light-space is
relatively empty, in which, through a few bare essentials, it can be understood
and revelled in. In the simplicity of the scientific laboratory, a place
where extraneous influences are minimised (as in the celestial laboratory
of the Enlightenment), the deep structure of space-light emerges, as objective
fact. In the simplicity of the mystic's inner life the deep structure
of space-light emerges, as subjective fact. The artist oscillates between
simplicity and complexity, the purity of one period giving way to the
Gothic of the next, only to be swept aside by the re-assertion of simplicity.
Space-light is more than this however: it is in itself a delight, separately
and together. The infants of all mammal species takes a kinaesthetic delight
in their limbs, and soon extend this to a delight in space-light as they
explores their environment (watching infants with a cardboard box quickly
reminds one of this, and confirms Traherne in the sentiment that the simplest
of things are the real treasures).
Conclusion: The Arts
Having detailed some arguments from physics and mysticism concerning the
significance of space and light to consciousness, it can only be left
as an open question at this point how the artists of the new millennium
may integrate these concepts into their work. The electronic arts practitioner,
in some ways the new polymath, is well placed to use the new space-light
tools of virtual reality to explore the striking resonance regarding the
prior given of space and light across science and mysticism. It is stressed
that only certain forms of mysticism deal directly with the relationship
of space-light to consciousness, though light itself is a widespread metaphor
in the spiritual. The anthropic principle in science encompasses a rich
set of ideas that resonate outside of science, into art and the spiritual,
and may hold the key to a better understanding of consciousness. The question
as to how art can mediate between science and the spiritual is recommended
as an important one for the new millennium, though, as this paper suggests,
the fundamentals of light and space may be a fruitful starting place for
the enquiry.
References:
[1]
Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation, London: Penguin Arkana, 1989
[2] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of
Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury:
Shambhala, 1988
[3] King, Mike, 'Concerning the
Spiritual in 20th C Art and Science' Leonardo, Vol. 31, No.1, pp.
21-31, 1998
[4] Wilber, Ken, The Marriage
of Sense and Soul, Newleaf, 1998
[5] Davies, Paul, God and the
New Physics, London: Penguin 1990, p. ix
[6] Feynman, R.P. 'Surely You're
Joking Mr Feynman!', Unwin Paperbacks, London, Sidney, Wellington, 1988,
chapter `Altered States', pp 330-337.
[7] Tarnas, Richard, The Passion
of the Western Mind, London: Pimlico (Random House) 1996, p. 48
[8] Barrow, John D. and Tipler,
Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford: Clarendon
Press 1986
[9] King, M.R., "The Tyranny
and the Liberation of Three-Space - A Journey by Ray-Tracer" to be
published in Digital Creativity, Autumn 1999
[10] Abbot, Edwin, Flatland
A Romance of Many Dimensions,1884
[11] Polkinghorne, John, Reason
and Reality - The Relationship between Science and Theology, London
SPCK, 1991, p. 4
[12] Huxley, A. The Perennial
Philosophy, Chatto and Windus, London, 1950
[13] Harding, D.E. On Having
No Head - Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, London: Arkana, 1986,
p. 1; also in Hofstadter, Douglas, and Dennett, Daniel (Eds.) The Mind's
I, Penguin Books, Middlesex, England, 1981, pp. 23 - 24.
[14] Traherne, Thomas, Selected
Poems and Prose, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 187
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