Chapter 12: The Essential Human Creative Irrational

The nature of our inquiries links prehistoric and historic literature with psychoanalysis and modern day economics leading to the field of self-study and human development in an attempt to move towards the highest levels that we might attain[1].  It may be difficult at first to reconcile the rational scientific and medical concepts of personal development with the irrational concepts found in mystical, philosophical and religious thought; but there is certainly overlap – if not direct connection among them. And which of these human traits is more important to our development, both personal and societal? Rather than the question of which is more important, perhaps it is a question of engendering enantiodromia to strive for a proper balance between the two? In the end, what is it that the creative irrational has taught us about ourselves and what is needed for a proper life as a human?

Societal Implications of the Creative Irrational

            From animal behavior studies we infer that animals are basically rational. Animals act for the purposes of food, shelter, procreation and immediate pleasures. Humans act for these basic needs as well, but additionally as we have shown, ever demonstrate an irrational side. This is a side that operates, if not in opposition to the immediate rational needs, certainly operates in a manner that has very limited immediate benefits. Yet, these irrational impulses seem to have played a key role in the evolution and eventual success of modern day Homo sapiens. As the only species to truly physically dominate the present day world, we are unique. We are more creative in our approach to life, imagining unseen scenarios, ranging from the first control of fire, to the immense power of the nuclear warheads to chasing down exoplanets. What is missing from modern day human perspective is the importance of our irrational side, especially that concerned with our spiritual nature. We are so busy building and breaking things, including other human beings, that we seem to have lost our connection with the power that moved the early hunter gatherers to build Göbekli Tepe or the ancient Egyptians to produce the earliest pyramids with their enclosed literature. These are just two examples of human irrationality at work in history. It has even been questioned whether our highly valued conditions of statehood as the pinnacle of civilization is a reasonable, e.g. rational, expectation from what we know of the history of human development[2]. Ariely from his modern behavioural economics research states “We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It’s just they way we’re wired.[3]” What was the original reaction of early humans when one of them struck two rocks together to create a spark and blew such sparks into a flame? Was it horror or amazement? We can’t say if the megalithic structures of the Göbekli Tepe site were initiated by a single human with a creative irrational question. Nor can we say how that person might have so engaged the interests of the creative irrational of his/her fellow hunter gatherers that they could be distracted from their perceived valuable time and effort with their regular activities and been enticed towards cutting, hauling and erecting huge rocks? But without a doubt their interests did get engaged and the constructions did get finalized. 

The literature discussed here, treated as symbolic expressions for our internal, direct perceptions, leads us to wonder how we could so completely have lost touch with what appear as distinct and subtle but welcome dimensions of potential experience. For the Egyptian civilization, the outcome of the remarkable insight that individuals can live more fully may help to explain the fact that it was maintained over such a long period, up to 3,000 years. Similarly, Platonic thought continues to influence modern-day Western culture and has done so for 2,500 years. But in spite of such longevity and influence, how is it possible that the general population in the modern Western culture has so totally lost touch with such critical knowledge? Our present Western World based as it is on the concept of competition, is so very new on the timescales of human evolution. While there have been wars through the last millennium, it is only a little over a couple of hundred years since Darwin’s generation formalized the concept of “survival of the fittest” to underscore “progress” as the prime cultural driver. As early as the Ancient Egyptian culture there was a contrast between the mutuality of these many different levels of existence such as between humans, the Pharoah, the neters and Ra. Such mutuality has been replaced in what we call “modern civilization” with a false sense that humans can operate without concern for the other aspects of the World such as clean water, fresh air and other living beings! This may be the reason that our present world seems relatively purposeless. We may be seeing a state of serious degradation; one that might well lead to a general loss of a sense of both personal and collective values in our whole society. Can “over-rationality” have led us astray from our initial creative irrational human condition?

It is noteworthy that the recognition of different levels of Being is dependent on the esoteric interpretations of the Ancient Egyptian written words. A proper understanding of the texts must have been intentionally introduced throughout their society through their teachers. The full society seems to have marked the creative forces of the world during its experiences of the annual celebrations held during the many seasonal festivals, which helped to highlight and distinguish these “higher” aspects from the vicissitudes of their daily lives. How is it possible that we have so totally lost touch with all knowledge of the mysteries that seem to have been absorbed by the general populace of Egypt?  Without an open acknowledgement of the esoteric sensitivity of humans to such influences as are represented in the gods or neters, it is difficult to imagine how such a circular mechanism of cause and effect could have been discovered, or could continue to operate. 

Now that we can blast our way into space, split the atom, rewire the genetic code and identify distant planets that might sustain life, we seem to have lost our way.  Not that we should start running around willy-nilly irrationally jumping off cliffs, but maybe there is a need to work directly on exploring the proper balance between our two sides – rational and irrational. Maybe the works of the artist and the shaman need to be valued more than that of the engineer or the sports hero. We have only a limited physical world, in spite of the great dreams of establishing colonies on other planets while the truly human world of the spiritual remains untapped and for the most part “unexplored”, perhaps neglected, by modern day Western societies. 

On a species level we separate Homo sapiens from all other species based on the creative irrational. But what has given rise to human success measured in our survival in all spaces on Earth? To quote from Thaler’s book, “Amos (Tversky) used to joke that there once were species that did not display the endowment effect, but they are now extinct.”[4]  The endowment effect is the irrational human tendency to overvalue what they already possess over what they might possess[5]. We showed it earlier in Figure 41, but we need to consider it more fully.

Personal Implications of the Creative Irrational

The whole of our life’s journey is a most personal one in which each of us must find his/her own way.  It is obvious from the many, many unnoticed moments in our lives that we spend most of it asleep. We lack attention to ourselves. Walking, talking, eating and thinking are all done “unnoticed” by us. Yet for many of us, there are those moments of awakening that permeate many of our memories, especially in childhood, and enable us to actually see ourselves as we are.  Rightly so! Such moments leave us hungry for more. They drive us with our weak and untrained attention to wish to encounter moments of awakening again. We are drawn to Be. It is something that separates us from other primates and animals.  It is inherently human. We call it our creative irrational.

In a previous chapter we presented the highly detailed representation of the Ancient Egyptian’s understanding of the various human bodies. It is part of the first known literature written by humans. What we found was a range from the lower “filth” up to the ever-present Ra. What emerged is a concept of our real and continuing existence that relies on an exchange amongst the chain of bodies – most of which do not exist until we undertake the necessary work of preparation and attention. We discover in these teachings that the Egyptians detected and expressed the necessity for the mutuality of relations between physical and spiritual worlds. That is, the creators of the Egyptian literature developed it as a realization that the purpose of humans on earth is that our presence is necessary at all levels to elicit a sense of aim in relation to the entire story of existence. These interactions may thus be taken to represent the primary basis for their beliefs about the different ways a person can live life.

 But it must be made clear that we still can connect with the various bodies within us. To make this explicit we present another personal experience of one of the authors (PRB). This effort and the resultant experience from a year-long experience of training to qualify for a Boston- marathon (Figure 44) has been a vivid reminder for him about the ways we live as opposed to the ways we could live.

Figure 44. Author upon finishing his Boston Marathon – and a year of counting.

 We describe it as follows:

“Having run training exercises for a decade without success in achieving the speed required to qualify for the Boston marathon, it became evident that I needed to focus my attention better on being present to the running effort - the beginning, the middle and the end. As an experiment I undertook the task of counting every third footfall, each minute of each run. For every minute run, for every beep of my watch, the count would go from 1 to 90 repeatedly - all summer long. From a running point of view, this ensured that my speed would be consistent no matter what the external conditions were - from feeling fresh at the beginning to being bored in the middle to being exhausted at the end. It meant that running up hills required shorter strides and downhill longer.

“On a mundane level, the counting exercise worked well to keep my attention in the present of my running. On a more spiritual level, it gave rise to great clarity with respect to my many “I’s”. For several moments in that summer of running, there was an “I” who was running, an “I” who was counting, and an “I” who was feeling self-satisfied with the success and an “I” who was complaining about almost everything - the running, the counting, the thirst, the tiredness - everything.

“The complainer was as devious a devil as one could imagine! In some instances he argued for the end of the counting discipline because - “we" had done enough counting, “we” were successful enough with the counting - it was helping but it wasn’t worth the effort.  The complainer knew all the phychological buttons to push - and he pushed them.

“While the active observation of the complainer was shocking enough, more importantly, there was clearly an observing “I” who existed on a higher level than the others. This “I” could observe all the other “I’s”, without interfering with them. This “I” was in touch with the runner, the counter, as well as the complainer. This “I” didn’t judge or try to change them, this “I” just participated in the moment. The moment of observation was calm and focused. 

“Of course those brief moments of connection passed quickly; my attention not sufficiently well developed to stay with any such moment for long. In an instant it was back to the struggle to run, count and breathe; yet, for a precious instant there were the many “I’s” right there to be seen.

“In the end the counting exercise did get me properly trained for a well-executed Boston marathon. But of the thousands of kilometres run and the hundreds of thousands of steps counted, the few moments of being aware of the many “I’s” and their different levels of existence remain the most memorable and powerful moments that continue to be remembered to this day.”

This story highlights two aspects of the creative irrational and the spiritual spectrum. The first is the fact of many "I's and their levels. The second is the need for a determined attention over long periods of time. In regards to many I's, the story makes it evident that there is much more going on within us than is generally accepted as "me". It is amazing that we have a single contained image of ourselves that is rarely challenged. While this running anecdote can’t been seen as evidence for enlightenment, it certainly points the way to the existence of multiple levels of ourselves that are rarely appreciated in our day-to-day rational lives.

The second aspect that this example highlights is the difficulty in making such observations and the requisite attention. The summer of counting followed decades of running – and disappointments at not being sufficiently skilled at running marathons. Between runs the overall intention required repeated remembering and focusing of attention. It was also a time of life when the runner was fully involved in writing and thinking about higher consciousness[6]. What is it that kept the runner in this case in touch with his aim to count - even when exhausted from long hot training runs in the summer heat? What or who was there, reminding the runner to keep trying, to keep counting, to keep to his objective even in the winter cold? This attention plays a critical role in self-study. It is difficult not to get lost in the internal and external distractions of life. Attention is the only tool we know that can address this. Jung's term “individuation” seems to allow one to use a selection of tools towards self-development. Whether it is the “counting/running” exercise of the story, “meditation” or as “incubation”, all these methods seem to be based on self-guided attention. The creative irrational is there to be experienced.

In spite of all of this effort and the unexpected irrational results, we can’t espouse this particular effort as a recipe for others – it just happened to work in this particular situation for one specific person. Yet it undeniably worked and confirms that such an experience of the levels of existence are accessible to modern day humans. It confirms a shared experience with insights from others such as presented in Table 2.

For the individual in daily life it is apparent that many of these levels of Being are never fully perceived. It likely required special preparation and venues for the Pharaoh to be fully initiated into the highest levels of Being. Later in the Platonic tradition it required something to make the chained prisoners refrain from turning their head. In the Gurdjieff teaching it is a life of constant “conscious labours and intentional suffering.” Nevertheless, they all highlight the various levels of Being that allow us as individuals to be open to more of ourselves than our day-do-day hungers, moods and fleeting desires reveal. They lay out a framework for connection through our higher bodies to greater awareness and consciousness.

Our study here connects our present observations with the notable insights throughout the history of modern humans. Although the allegories and words used in the attempts to present the more-than-merely physical aspects of our life vary in time and tradition, they all capture key attributes of human existence that relate to ourselves as individuals with essential creative irrational traits:

·      Ancient Egyptians: to become one with Ra

·      Plato: to perceive “the Sun” and return

·      Plotinus: “striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All”

·      Gurdjieff: “gaining one’s horns”

·      Jung: Individuation.

The selection of traditions and approaches to the question of the creative irrational that we explore in Table 2 provides a consistent supporting conceptual model of a “spirituality spectrum” of individual self-awareness and being, from naiveté or “asleepness” to the highest personal objectives of our self-study. This schematic acts as an aid for marshalling our attention towards a single common theme rather than arguing the distinguishing differences between traditions. The various descriptions help direct our efforts towards studying ourselves in a way that may not be evident individually, but they all point to the key human question of “Who am I?” It is an attempt to bring together the past work of others to more fully appreciate the possibilities of what life offers. It allows us to share our thoughts and to delve together into the cultural significance of what has taken place in the past.  Together the various representations of our Being presented in this schematic provide a consistent view of possible levels of this Being that spans the full written history of humankind.

Of course, we might be mistaken to accept our present state as the pinnacle of our development.  But we can also be motivated to strive for the higher in ourselves that many searchers have experienced and described before us. Plotinus perceived and understood something of the task; pointing out that this striving is a love of the Higher Intellectual Principle that one can detect in oneself and that emanates from an Intellectual Principle that always dwells in us. We find the best summary of all of this effort in the words of Plotinus who states “I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.”[7] The whole question about what is divine, what is spiritual seems to have dogged us since humans started differentiating from other hominin species. But one major challenge in learning from our history remains how to connect endeavors of art and constructions by early humans with the refinements that we can appreciate in the written Pyramid Texts and Greek literature. We develop the creative irrational concept to capture a common shared human motivation that has driven us to address the more-than-physical, spiritual, real life available to human beings since the beginning of time. Once humans began to fully express their thoughts in written language we became able to see their understanding in much more detail. But the limitations of written language for dealing with the more-than-merely physical continue to challenge us. For individuals who have had the privilege of experiencing moments of life on the scale of the anecdotes that we present in this book we can easily imagine powerful moments of experiencing occurring without the need for written language. Whether on a natural mountain top or in the created spaces of a Göbekli Tepe Stone circle or the experiencing of myself  in the Hypostyle Hall of the Ancient Egyptian temple of Karnak, moments of awakening beyond the physical still occur in our lives. The challenge is to bring the memory of such experienced events to the reading and study of the present moment so as to make the most of both written and “unwritten” knowledge.

It is only through a sensitivity of humankind to the opportunities afforded by our higher centers that the whole system can persist. Such a conclusion implies that the present exoterically oriented world of humankind is not capable of long-term self-promulgation. That is, it appears that the knowledge expressed in these higher bodies is the essential discovery. It is necessary for a continuation of this sense of need. It may initially be expressed in our too-vague longings for a wholeness or “Oneness” based on the obscure innermost longings of humans as individuals within the species. Without this ultimate individual sensitivity to our individual natures that can rise above our continued insistence on personal, rational self-interest, we are condemned by our all too often state of disregard to entropy and eventual destruction of that society. Our present-day lack of perception of this basic need, can only lead to inevitable disaster. Without the injection of some unknown influence that can fill the place left by our current ignorance of the need for a more complete appreciation of ourselves, and that can help us re-experience what constitutes the wisdom of the ancients, it is difficult to see how our civilization can survive on the basis of our present technical sophistication alone.

            The realization that the experience of Ra in us is the goal of our work on ourselves is at the highest level of all possibility to which our lives may aspire. Plato carried forward the Ra metaphor of the sun into his Allegory of the Cave. The Sun itself dazzles the one who after much effort and determination climbs out of the Cave of ignorance into the light of knowledge of what truly exists.  For Plotinus it was the Monad or The One. For Gurdjieff it was expressed as our Common Endless Creator. All of these traditions are indebted to the Ancient Egyptians and their representations of Ra. Their representation of our participation in the highest level of possible existence constitutes for us the goal of our study, our search for meaning in life, our creative irrational. We still have much to learn from them about our creative irrational and ultimately our spiritual needs and possibilities. This book is about how we can understand and encourage this striving and work on this highest of aims: that of striving toward the Divine in oneself. 

The subject matter we are dealing with comes from historical, psychological and cultural factors that are very broad and deep within us, and deserves a much broader perspective than we could hope to have given in a single book. Yet, the foregoing quote of Plotinus refers us to some insights into how great minds have attempted to deal with the alluring question of the irrational more-than-merely personal. The purpose of this chapter is not to convince readers that we have the answer to what is possibly the most challenging of human questions, but to point out that recognizing and trying to understand this “beyond” is a necessary component of any study aimed at perceiving and coming towards Being – and that there exists some guidance that may assist us in our struggles towards understanding our human nature. It is an essential part of our personal search: that we find those aspects in ourselves that are not superficial ephemeral things. Personally this requires a strong, intentional action. One that can lead us towards a new level of existence: no longer weak and vacillating but one that is both higher and independent of our usual mechanical level of consciousness. It depends on being able to transcend ordinary thought, feeling and sensation, towards a unified level of perception of that state that Plotinus recognized as the union with the Spiritual level of Being – the Monad. We believe that this need for a higher level of consciousness is captured in the concept of the essential creative irrational. We wish in this book,  to make our concept of “Being” clear enough to others and especially our readers, that we can jointly discuss it and elaborate on it. It requires that there be no misunderstanding of this need for a transcendence of ordinary thought.   

This new concept of the creative irrational is certainly tied to the thoughts of Edward de Bono’s[8] and what he calls a “creative pause” where a stopping of the flow of directed thoughts can result in the answer to one’s questions. Certainly this is similar to Einstein’s efforts at “stuffing the goose” and Jung’s appreciation for the importance of dream content in accessing our hidden psyche.” It may also be related to the predictive dreams of Dunn[9].

An example given by Jung as a portrayal of what he believed are problems with our individual understanding of our situation in this world, is included in his discussion of the importance of Gnosticism and its influence on our view of ourselves[10].  In a commentary on what is expressed in the Gnostic tradition on the psychology underlying our sense of self, he wrote: 

“…. its obviously psychological  symbolism could serve many people today as a bridge to a more living appreciation of Christian tradition….if we wish to understand the Gnostic figure of Christ …[who] symbolizes man’s original unity and exalts it as the saving goal of his development.  By ‘composing the unstable’, by bringing order into chaos, … consciousness is reunited with the unconscious, the unconscious man is made one with his centre which is the centre of the universe.”  

In this single statement, Jung expresses the profound desirability of this intuition towards unity on the part of the individual.  He emphasizes later that it is also “exceedingly dangerous, for it presupposes a coherent ego-consciousness capable of resisting the temptation to ‘identify with the self.’”  He goes on to point out moreover, that while this situation may be relatively rare, if it occurs it can lead to an ego inflation that distorts the view of oneself - a condition that may itself demand professional treatment in order to re-establish a sense of proportion! We are required to exercise great care and judgement alongside our best efforts of Attention..

To follow the paths suggested by these expressions, we believe that our main aim now must be to follow those that lead us towards understanding the powerful idea of what Jung termed “individuation”.  Jung used the word to describe an important phenomenon of man’s personal development that has been aptly defined and dealt with at length by him in a number of his writings.  It demands our full attention if we are to appreciate its central place in probing the real breadth and depth of this delving into the nature of the process of personal development. We promised an elaboration of ideas underlying this term in our discussions of the investigative activities of early 20th century psychologists in Chapter 8.  We are here undertaking part of the process of making good on this promise.

This discussion on individuation raises the question of how we are to understand what is meant by our creative irrational that we can use in discussing this whole philosophy of self- development.  Is this awakening of consciousness a specific act in our state of being that leads us to comprehend stages within what the ancients called “Form”?  If so, how is it possible for us to distinguish the degrees of consciousness in our concepts of change such as we presented in Table 2above? Are we not either awake or asleep?  Is there really any “in-between”?  Before we get to such questions we feel a need to fully explore the “why” of this awakening.  The answer to this “why” helps us to understand the “what” of the awakening that can arise from it.

            By way of an initial example, we insert here the recollection of a vivid moment which is a moment of seeing in the presence of Being that is at the base of our personal experience of our creative irrational. Although it happened many years ago it is an example of the direct experience and memory that constitutes a milestone along the path.  It took place at a special mountain retreat that was maintained by Dr. Michel de Salzmann at a special place in the Swiss Alps to which I (LMD) had been invited.  He welcomed visitors from various places to attend meetings that he conducted there.  The guests were all interested in the “Gurdjieff Work”. All other participants were from backgrounds similar to mine, some from North America, others the British Isles, or the countries of Scandinavia.  Meetings, discussions and intense physical work took place there during the summer period for about a week for each attending group[11]. In the course of one such period the following exchange took place between Michel and me:  

       “I had gone to work on a particularly, steep hill-side project down-hill from the main house when someone told me that Michel was looking for me to come to see him.  I was rather glad to have a break from the pick-and-shovel project on which I was working.  So I wiped off the sweat, took a few deep breaths, and went happily up to the area where he was and sat down heavily on a nearby bench. He looked at me with a faint smile at my state, and asked me what I was thinking about?  I said only that I had wanted to ask him, why it seemed to me that I always understood what he was talking about, whether he was speaking to me personally or to others around us.  He thought for a moment, looking at me, then with an amused smile said, ‘Because we are the same type, of course’.”  

            For some reason, the remark completely satisfied me, and I asked no more questions.  It seemed perfectly clear at that moment that I again knew exactly what he was talking about!  Afterward, when I was by myself I realized that there were many ways of interpreting what he had said.  What were the types? In particular what are the types in the context of Gurdjieff’s teaching?  How well did I really understand them?  Was he even referring to Gurdjieff types?  Certainly he was a trained psychiatrist. He practiced professionally when he was not at this summer hilltop setting. Patients came to him from many areas to his office in Paris. There were many possibilities of interpretation of his use of the term “types - none of which I had overtly explored either then or on my own. But the momentary experience left a lasting memory of the direct experience of a connection with Michel. 

The memory of being in the presence of my “Being” as something much greater than my everyday life continues to persist today. Memories of such states, and this instance is only one example of many experienced in the lives of the authors, lie at the base of a continuing desire for something more. They support an ongoing striving for a fuller life. They are key to what we feel as our own personal creative irrational. By use of this phrase we are able to direct our attention to both the ellusive state of Being that we aspire to as well as to the more “ever present” effort required to experience it. By using the word “will” we capture both the desire as well as the internal movement required over time to make progress towards it. We know through experience that daydreaming about past states is useless. We need to cultivate an internal drive that maintains a connection with those past precious moments of our lives and moves us usefully forward and upward to what we know is necessary.

            What more is there to say, about either then or now?  The best one can do after such an experience is to try to remember it within oneself. Can I recall it when I speak about it?  Does not much come flooding back to me, given a moment to be quiet and come inside myself?  Is there then not a moment when what I call “I” actually exists as an individual that is additional to, and apart from those I call “I” in my daily life?  It is only then that I feel within myself a kind of separation from my customary self and can move inside to someone who is palpably apart from this usual “me”.  It is as though I have within myself a capacity to exist at these two different levels of my “Being” at the same time.  There is the one that I have always known about, who is now experienced as a natural part of what I call “I”, but there is also this one who is experienced as another being that is seen and felt to be separate from that usual Being. Thus one is clearly seen to be separate while existing in this same body, with all the contained thoughts, feelings and sensations that are natural to it.

The personal stories that we have presented here are meant to open both our own and others awareness to the fact of such experiences. We and others like us, who have a significant sense of inquiry, need to notice and remember such experiences, and to realize that their appearance always requires efforts of what we understand as “presence” from us: a requirement to give to them a requisite living attention.

Bringing it all together – Who am I?

In this book we have collected many different examples of how our attention can be drawn to our own direct experience. We have used a number of self-study tools to explore the role of direct experience in experiencing and encouraging our creative irrational. We have found common lessons and guidance from:

1)    stone megalithic structures from the early days of hunter gathers;

2)    stories from Ancient Egypt at the beginning of human writing;

3)    stories and teachings from Ancient and Classical Greece;

4)    modern-day studies of psychology and economics; 

5)    20th Century searchers (Gurdjieff and Ouspensky); and most importantly,

6)     our own personal anecdotes of our direct experiences.

What we have attempted to do is to collect all of this experience under the unifying concept of what might be termed our creative irrational. What has often been treated as unconnected or competing insights are brought together into a common focus of our own personal desire and progress towards higher Being. In doing so we see a resultant benefit of coalescing our various interests and distractions into a single field of experience that supports and can guide our internal striving for more from our lives.

The tools that we have presented are meant as supports for appreciating our individual direct experiences. The many experiences that we present have often been treated in isolation from one another. Some are considered scientific, such as in the work of the psychoanalysts. Some are considered magical, such as the Egyptian. Some are considered interesting and entertaining stories from the distant past, such as the stories of Parmenides, Plato and Plotinus. By bringing them together within the single creative irrational as a bracket for self-study, we are enabled to see much more in common amongst them than we have seen before. 

We see them all as looking at the challenges to individual development from different points of view.  In spite of the cultural differences that underlie different myths, they all support a common goal of understanding our lives in the present world:  The philosophers we include in our study are from the lineage of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece.  We link them with the ancient Greek writers Parmenides and with the later writings of Plotinus in the early Christian period. We feel that linked together in this way they provide a unified body of knowledge that is critical to individuals living in the primarily Christian cultures of the Western World. Their thoughts and ideas are well represented in the various forms of Christian belief and can be useful to individual study – whether or not from within the strict observances of an established “church”.  Bearing in mind that one cannot rely on anyone else to help us “find the way”, it is incumbent on us as individuals to make use of the sign posts available that enable us to work to hold on to the paths that we do find.

We have drawn on the experience of the development of psychology in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s from Nietzsche to Jung. While much of the work of the early psychologists revolved around the challenges of helping individuals who had debilitating health problems originating neurologically, there is much that their work has done to enable individuals to see their own psychological operation at various levels. Jung worked to describe the higher levels of individual development in his concept of individuation.

In this summary of the topics covered, we end with the contributions of the 20th Century searcher: Gurdjieff who travelled the world in the early 20th Century and experienced the intersection of many of the World’s mysteries and the development of truly modern science. Brunton’s tales of his personal experience of snake charmers and his clear and detailed “scientific” observations of fakirs doing amazing things in the modern world, are attempts to distinguish the action of charlatans from individuals working legitimately in ways that are truly amazing. In Gurdjieff’s writings there are many insights into what is required if we are to be truly open to the unexpected – in the world and in oneself.

Of most value to us personally, are the experiences in which we were drawn away from our usual scattered awareness into situations where both the time of awareness and the depth of experience were greatly altered. We all have access to moments of direct personal experience of the levels of existence. Building on these moments we have possibilities for a self-awareness in support of our higher levels of Being. The examples that we present in this book are meant to remind readers of their own experiences and lead them to work at crystalizing their insights from their own lives.

Noticing and remembering these glimpses of our Self that are made available to us through our “direct experience” are acts of “learning to be fully present in a moment of seeing”. From all accounts, however, experiencing the bodies of higher centres named at the right end of the lines in Table 2 requires something else beside the lifetime of work that hardly needs mention. Guidance can be provided by individuals who have learned to act as teachers. We are often aided by some instances of good fortune in our life situations. But we each have to eventually find our own way towards them and learn how to use the guidance provided by both Gurdjieff and his main early pupil, Ouspensky, to continue with our efforts. There must, in fact, be as many ways as there are beings.  We need to avoid problems by paying close and frequent attention to the guidance that such authors have provided in their books and others have offered from their direct personal experiences.

It is hardly necessary to point out once again that while one must essentially work for oneself alone, one does not have to pursue this whole undertaking without making use of any help that can be made available from others, both directly and indirectly.  In fact, while we must not lose touch with the reality of our own experiences, we need as well to make use of influences that can only be recognized and marshaled in the presence of others. 

We cannot pretend, only wonder, at the possibility of an unrealistic belief that we can utilize the surprising resources that the world offers without much personal preparation and effort. Special awareness is undoubtedly necessary if we are to outstrip the power of the reactivity that has become such an unrecognizable concomitant of the attitudes that are an inevitable part of our every-day adult lives. 

 Use of the words, “wonder” and “surprise” may actually be indicators of an incipient awakening to a new level of Consciousness in us, one that will remain obscure to the mechanical mind that has had an unseen control of us and our functions for much too long. We have stated this general purpose of transcending our own limitations repeatedly, and we hope that our readers might for themselves also find or return to moments of this strange, seemingly unacceptable level of comprehension, simply because it seems at first encounter to be beyond us. 

In Gurdjieff’s major work, “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson” we are presented with an allegorical description of a strange final ceremony, conducted in front of his grandson.[12]  Gurdjieff has tried to make this process understandable to us in the form of a description of a ceremony in which the main character named Beelzebub, after his many ventures and adventures in our world, achieves recognition of his full development. The scene described is the undertaking of a strange ceremony designed to allow the perception of all observers to the achievements of Beelzebub’s development.  That is, it becomes apparent that these strange beings have a capacity to awaken within the Being of our hero, Beelzebub, his own unknown capacity to increase his own levels of consciousness. It is all conveyed in a metaphor that describes the sprouting of the number of projections on his “horns”!  Consistent with the many other representations that we have presented here, such as the Ancient Egyptian human-headed birds, Plato’s shadow puppets and the like, we need to recognize the existence of the various levels of consciousness within ourselves in order to appreciate what may be possible for a fully developed “consciousness”. The image of Beelzebub growing horns is definitely shocking as are the glowing haloes on the saintly Christians. Whether with horns or halos, there is always more to see in ourselves.

In the chapter entitled  “Becoming Aware of Genuine Being Duty” Gurdjieff says:

“.... so in the meantime, exist as you exist.  Only do not forget one thing, namely, at your age it is indispensably necessary that every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendour, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence.  Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts – as though they were conscious – that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are a part will not be able to be a good servant of our COMMON ENDLESS CREATOR and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence”.

Perhaps it will be this very morning that we will actually perceive what seems to be a real sunrise.

——————- The End ———————————-

———————— Table of Contents —————————-

[1] de Salzmann, J. 2010. The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. Shambala. Boston or London.  312 pp.

[2] Scott, J.C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press. 

[3] Ariely, D. 2010. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. Harper Perennial. New York. Page 194.

[4] Thaler, R.H. 2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. W.W. Norton & Company. New York. Page 261

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

[6] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2015. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer. Inner Traditions. Rochester, VT.

[7] MacKenna, S. 1992. Plotinus The Enneads. Larson Publications. pp 2.

[8] https://creativesomething.net/post/380010225/pause-for-creativity

[9] Dunne, J. W. 1939 (original 1927). An Experiment with Time. Faber and Faber, London. 256 pp.

[10] Jung, C.G. 1958. Psychology and Religion: West and East. Vol. 11 The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.  Bollingen Foundation.  p. 292.

[11] Shaw, F. 2010.  Notes on The Next Attention. Chandolin.  Indications Press. New York.  360pp.  

[12] Gurdjieff, G.I.  1950.  Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson.  All and Everything Third Series.  Penguin Putnam Inc. 375 Hudson St., New York.

Chapter 11: Creative Irrational in Everyone

Throughout the ages the works of humankind have been considered great to the extent that they lift our awareness of life to new levels of experience and Being. Human culture has employed metaphor, that is, a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract, to communicate its higher knowledge. There exist innumerable structures, images and literature creations that are metaphors meant to create in us a connection with our higher Being and to draw us out of our ordinary sleeping existence. Essentially they are all the result of the creative irrational that continue to influence present day audiences. It is important for us to recognize that the creations were initiated from the creative irrational in a single person or small group of people. Someone had to have the initial bright idea to create the first circle at Göbekli Tepe or the first pyramid in ancient Egypt and from Plato to Einstein individuals are always influenced by their social surroundings, but the breakthroughs in inspiration can always be traced back to a unique individual. With time and persuasion their creative irrational vision would be taken up by those around them to the point where the people would move together to achieve something previously unknown. Up until this point in our examination we have focused on those creative breakthroughs that continue to impress. But it is critical to appreciate that in most humans the creative irrational isn’t expressed by the generation of great new ideas, but by our ability to connect and support the valuation of something provided to those few incredible humans able to think new thoughts; that is to come up with something that is “beyond reason”, which is how “the irrational” is defined in the usage of Jung.

Impressionable Irrational Creations

There is a world full of human creations that stagger the imagination. In this section we present a selection with which we, the authors, are personally acquainted and so can use to reinforce the feelings that many readers will have experienced in their lives. We begin with the works of Ancient Egypt and the fact of their great works that still inspire us 5,000 years after their construction. There is an unmistakable ground level reaction to being in the presence of the mysterious human head of the Great Sphinx peering towards the eastern horizon (Figure 34). The feeling of our own small physical size in the shadows of the Pyramids of Egypt's Giza Plateau is quite different from any rational questioning of how it was built, its alignments or its other purposes (Figure 35). These two examples of the Egyptian creations are from a distinctly different age. Yet they continue to arouse awe and wonder in us, and for brief moments enable us to glimpse a connection between ourselves and the boundlessness of our Universe. They allow us to perceive the insignificance of our small existence simultaneously with an encounter with a larger reality.  Although there is undeniable extensive logic in these ancient sites, their present day impact is primarily on the irrational sides of the observer.

Figure 34. The Sphinx of Giza with the Great Pyramid of Kefren in the background. The photo is taken looking west from the base of the Giza Plateau in the vicinity of where the ancient Nile River used to flow.

Figure 35. An overview of the Giza plateau (circa 1982) with the Pyramid of Khufu right front, the Middle Pyramid of Khafren next and the smaller Pyramid of Menkaure at the left in the distance. The Great Sphinx is lost to view behind the buildings that crowded the east side of the plateau where the Nile River once flowed. All the buildings in the foreground have since been replaced by new higher buildings, so that this perspective is no longer possible.

The moments of insight invoked by such influences do not last long. Following moments of internal “seeing”, in an attempt to hold or broaden our understanding of their significance, we find ourselves occupied with details. Rather than being brought and held closer to the level of the initial heightened perception, our attentions are so readily distracted that our experience is often reduced to the level of our ordinary waking sleep with its baggage of preconception. How can we avoid becoming automatically occupied with such questions as, "How could a primitive people have moved the huge blocks from the Sphinx Quarry to their site at the Sphinx Temple?" The more important question is “What was my internal state before the awe arose and where am I now that it has passed?”

There are many examples of cultures past and present that provide us with the benefit of experiencing different qualities of ourselves through their creations. Strong impressions are created by visits to the ruins of Machu Picchu, Peru, built circa 1450 CE. The site is perched upon a remote mountain peak that, with its companion peak Huayna Picchu, forms a bowl of mountain ridges, Figure 36. When personally experienced in its original setting we comprehend something essential about the intentions of its structures, even without knowing any details of the culture itself. And yet we most often return, and get lost in questions of the mind, such as,  "How did the builders of Machu Picchu, put forth the physical effort required, when our reason tells us that modern, sea-level human beings cannot exert even normal physical efforts at such heights of the Andes?" The answers to such questions provide no support to our wish to approach the brief glimpse of what we in a retrospective state are tempted to attribute to Wisdom, the Self and Being, whether or not we yet know how to express our knowledge of such states. 

Figure 36. Machu Picchu, Peru as viewed from a Southern Ridge. The companion peak, Huayna Picchu, rises behind it to the right. Below at the left is a glimpse of the Urubamba River, an upper tributary of the Ulcayli River, flowing into the Western reaches of the mighty Amazon.

Our present Western culture also has its architectural structures built to establish awe and yearning for the higher in ourselves. The Gothic cathedrals, such as in the small French village of Chartres, Figure 37, with its incredible height of stone and airiness give rise to a sense of magnitude that comes from our rarely touched understanding of "higher" influences.

Figure 37. The Cathedral, Chartres, France.

Renaissance artists and writers were also exploring the effectiveness of metaphor for portraying our higher natures. Such great works as the plays of Shakespeare and Goethe's Faust juxtapose the foibles, weaknesses and the bestiality of our natures along with our humour, strength and nobility. They permit a glimpse of the scope of the foundations on which humanity is built, and open new dimensions of our aspirations. The "holistic" impression they afford enlivens our capacity to appreciate meanings on new and excitingly satisfactory levels. 

Works of Renaissance visual art such as the painting by Titan in Figure 38 explore humanity and its possibilities by evoking mythical themes that can be seen directly on a canvas. The image deliberately worked to show higher and lower levels of life, some represented as young children, some old - all framed between the solid earth below and the clouds floating above. 

Figure 38. Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) painting entitled “St. John the Evangelist at Patmos”[1].

The well-known and highly appreciated paintings of Van Gogh such as we show in Figure 39 show an intention to explore our direct impressions, but the meaning that they hold out to the viewer may not be so readily perceived. It is obvious within us that feelings have been touched in the artist and are being vividly communicated to the viewer, but their equivalence in the language of the mind is less certain. 

Figure 39. Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh[2].

Even when distracted by the jostling of impatient tourists or the insistence of tour-guides, personal experiences of the Sistine Chapel, are over-whelming (Figure 40)! Here architecture and painting come together to create the uplifting experience of space. The results directly relate to higher levels in the great traditions of our culture.

Figure 40. The Sistine Chapel, The Vatican[3].

 Questions of quality are unmistakable in all of these great works. Thus far we have dealt with the creative irrational in those endeavors that have left their continuing mark on the surviving western world. This very limited selection of human artful creations presented here reminds us the difficulty in assessing the relevance of the modern Western World’s rational approach to the physical world demonstrated in the great engineering accomplishments. Science was once widely applauded as evidence of the triumph of the human mind over the deficiencies of "blind nature" and its emotional undertones. Yet, the great art masterpieces continue to provide access to emotional connections that are hard to find in science and engineering. 

Questions concerning the details of phenomena tend to draw us externally. Our enquiring minds are trained to seek answers while we are less well trained to experience our Being.  Our search for answers sometimes obscures our impulses towards the higher aspects of life. Reductionist approaches result in a drop in the level of our perceptions of wholeness. The level of the questions dictates the possibilities in the level of the answers. Mechanistic approaches do not position us to appreciate both the observer and the observed. Even with their possibly confused emotional overtones of the searching for the observer, do not the efforts result in an important influence on the enlivening processes that accompany discovery?

Whether our direct experience is of art, architecture or myth, they all make use of our direct experience in a way that is difficult for us to specify rationally. This fact is sympathetically explored by Schwaller de Lubicz in his writings about pharaonic mathematics[4]. Even though the logic may not be apparent, the experiences are known to us in some part of our consciousness. Our ultimate aim in this study is to try to learn more about this, i.e. how to discern the different levels available to us. 

In the presence of ancient works of humankind such as the Great Sphinx or Machu Picchu our understanding of the wider world is directly enhanced by the impressions received. But our interpretation of this effect depends on a mixture of impulses towards the contradictory elements that arise in our total consciousness. Some may be instinctive reactions such as fear of heights. Before the present guardrails were built at the Machu Picchu site, any attempt to walk (or even creep!) along the narrow paths on some of the precipices, particularly those joining it to the isolated peak of Huayna Picchu certainly gave rise to heightened awareness. Other, ethereal, magical, feelings may be inspired in early morning by this same site at a glimpse of the wisps of morning cloud suspended over the surrounding abyss and lighted by the brass-yellow sun rising over the near, clear horizon of the surrounding bowl of mountains. Yet, our direct impressions give rise to a sensitivity to both the surroundings and to the associated inner movements of energy that take place in us. 

Nobel Prizes for Recognizing Humans are Irrational

The broader aspects of human irrationality and intuition are now being recognized and explored in the Western World in the embrace of modern day economics dealing with cognitive dissonance[5], behavioral economics and other such phenomena. 

For one of the authors (PRB) insights into the hidden irrationality of human behavour began with the kitschy publication of material on “subliminal seduction” in the mid-1970’s[6]. Of course there are many functions that occur for humans that are under their threshold of conscious perception such as breathing and heartbeat. But the idea that there are relatively large human responses that are mediated by unseen influences such as the shape of a smile on a face, the positioning of the body or unrecognized sexual components of photo images was a new and interesting insight. Although the power of subliminal stimuli turns out to be somewhat less than that promised in the 1974 publication, it is a phenomenon that continues to influence aspects of our modern western world such as the bright colours employed in all fast-food restaurants to speed patrons through their meals[7]. This is just one example of the many physical stimuli that are used to influence our decisions and actions - actions that are below our rational notice and decision-making processes. From the new-car smell, to the deliberate cover design of modern-day print books, to the “like” buttons on social media apps, the irrational continues to strongly influence modern Western humans.

It is only relatively recently that researchers have begun to explore how the influence of the irrational extends far beyond that associated with physical stimuli.  We are now beginning to see how basically irrational humans are in most of our daily decisions. To a great extent the irrational contributes to how humans survive and thrive in the modern world. 

Focused studies on the operation of the irrational in humans can be traced back to the research originated with two psychologists: Daniel Kahneman[8] and Amos Tversky[9] who were active in the 1970’s and ‘80’s at around the time that the book on subliminal seduction was published.  Their research on human decision-making has given rise to a new field of human studies that is now called behavioral economics that deals with how humans are influenced in their life choices[10]. Often humans make decisions that are contrary to rationality. Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2002) in recognition of his work[11]. His book “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow” has become a best seller[12]. In it he identifies two separate paths of human decision-making. System 1 is associated with fast automatic thinking and a second independent System 2 that carries out controlled, slowly thought-out decision making. The two systems are roughly equivalent with the two axes presented by Martin above in Figure 2 of the irrational and rational. It is curious that Kahneman  presents these two “Systems” of oneself as two separate entities with their own “individual personalities, abilities and liabilities” – much as Gurdjieff presents the centres in a three-brained being. The two systems interact and often conflict. System 1, the automatic system, strives for a quick and easy decision based on rules-of-thumb that are called heuristics[13]. System 2, the reflective system, is our analytical rational side that can come into play to verify or challenge System 1 results. For the majority of humans, System 2 is our ultimately lazy side and only becomes engaged in special situations as after extensive preparatory training or external circumstances that raises the consequence of the decision to a more conscious level. A key role of System 2 is most frequently concerned with justifications for decisions, either good or bad, made by System 1. Through many thought experiments, much like those at the basis of Einstein work in physics, Kahneman and Tversky were able to document the many different ways that we make irrational decisions. They brought human psychology into the field of economics in regards to the choices we make and in doing so highlighted the extent to which our irrational sides operate – most often without our awareness. Their research verified many biases in human decision-making that conflicted with the established purely rational approach of economics. One example is their development of the value function that represents the differing feedback from gaining or losing (Figure41)[14]. The curve in the figure represents the fact that humans feel more pain or discomfort from the loss of something, as on the left side of the figure, than they would feel as happiness or comfort from gaining the same amount of the right hand side of the figure. For instance humans generally feel much more negative about losing $10 from their wallet than they would feel as positive from finding a $10 bill on the sidewalk. This is clearly in contrast with conventional  economics where $10 is $10 whether it is lost or gained in usual transactions. Humans are not machines and see plus or minus in the two different situations quite differently. This is just one example of the many such studies carried out by Kahneman and Tversky. 

Figure 41. Value Function of human response to gains or losses relative to a reference point. The higher slope of the line for a loss relative to the slope of a gain on the right expresses the increased discomfort of losing something, such as losing $10, relative to the slope of gaining, such as winning $10.

Richard Thaler, an economist, who worked with Kahneman and Tversky at Stanford University in 1977-78, received his Nobel Memorial Prize in 2017 for his contributions to behavioural economics through his development of the ‘nudge theory’[15]. Through his studies he clarified that humans can be relatively easily influenced by small, directed stimuli to make what would otherwise be difficult choices and actions. Something as simple as placing the sweet candy treats close to the checkout lines at stores is enough to significantly increase sales of these unhealthy products. Or as PRB has experienced in The Netherlands, a painted housefly at the bottom of a urinal nudges better aim and improved cleanliness in men’s washrooms (Figure 42). This little pictorial nudge is much more effective than any number of words printed on signs and posters – even though it is impossible to imagine a rational reason for the change in behavior and attention.

Figure 42. A photo of a urinal with a painting of a housefly.

Daniel Ariely’s [16] was named one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world in 2018[17]. His book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions” highlights recognizable patterns in human irrationality[18]. Our irrationality is not random. Figure 43 represents one of his main insights into how humans make non-rational decisions. The left-hand graph presents the situation where a person is presented with two options “A” and “B”. As an example: option “A” could represent an all-inclusive trip to Paris while option “B” represents an all-inclusive trip to Rome. Both cities are similar but not the same and not directly comparable. As a result, this represents a difficult decision for a person who has never been to either city. Both cities offer things of interest, but they are not equal. The right-hand graph in the figure represents the situation where a third, obviously less desirable option is presented which he calls “-A”. The addition of this third less desirable option allows for an easier, yet irrational, comparison. For instance “–A” may represent a trip to Paris without meals. This is a very similar option to A, but is obviously less desirable without the inclusion of pre-arranged meals. Humans presented with three options have been observed to easily assess A as better than –A, and studies have shown that as a result, they also easily assess A as better than B! With keeping the initial options and just adding a third less desirable option, humans irrationally reassess the initial conditions and tend to make an easy, quick yet irrational, choice. Yes indeed an all inclusive trip to Paris is better than one without meals, but why should this have any affect on the all inclusive trip to Rome? Such influences are apparently common throughout human life choices. We tend to be influenced by what a strict economist would consider supposedly irrelevant factors (SIF)[19]. In this way more-expensively-priced aspirin has proven to be more effective in pain relief than exactly the same aspirin offered at a lower-price. A line-up of people waiting to get into a restaurant makes us falsely assume that it is a preferable restaurant. Getting something for free gives us great happiness – even if the object is less desirable than one available at a low price.

Figure 43. The left-hand graph represents a difficult human choice between two dissimilar options. The right-hand represents the addition of a slightly less preferable option called –A that leads the average person to easily select option A as the best of all options – even though option A is identical that in the left-handed graph[20].

The field of behavioural economics has established that we are very far from being rational, as are the entities that economists typically would prefer to deal with. It is our irrational components of behaviour and thought that make us so human. Their research showed that these kinds of operations are a key component of normal human behaviour. Their work showed how humans make many irrational decisions. Hearing that there is a 40% chance of rain or snow in the forecast brings wet weather to mind in a way that a forecast of 60% chance of the absence of rain would not. Storm warnings necessarily warn us of the extreme possibilities, but they also “anchor” our expectations for the worst and have us glued to the Internet for confirmation of the notable extremes. 

The work of modern day economics is becoming more and more adept at recognizing and dealing with humans as irrational beings. We can be led to appreciate the irrational as the key, essential characteristic of humans that separates us from all other species. We strongly believe that the insights of this research on modern humans holds true for much, if not all, of the time period over which humans developed. We are a species that is strongly influenced by others – beyond just the simple training and learning that all higher animals exhibit. We as humans exhibit the creative irrational in the work of the discoveries of individuals. We show a strong tendency to be irrationally influenced by their work whether it is bringing fire into a cave for the first time or exerting effort to carve and erect massive stone blocks. As an obvious expansion of Ariely’s book title “The Upside of Irrationality”[21], we see that creative irrationality is the key to human success through time. This includes the human experience of the more-than-merely-personal of the spiritual. Spirituality, once conceived by certain individuals who have directly experienced a higher consciousness, can be conveyed to others through the role of our creative irrational that exists in everyone. Modern economics are becoming attuned to the importance of this activity in structuring the modern human world. It is time for the existence of the creative irrational to be better appreciated by all participants in our society.

———- Chapter 12: The Essential Human Creative Irrational ————————-

—————————- Table of Contents ————————————————

[1] http://www.artsunlight.com/artist-NT/N-T0001-Titian-Tiziano-Vecellio/N-T0001-299-st-john-the-evangelist-on-patmos.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sistine_chapel.jpg.

[4] Schwaller de Lubicz, R.A. 1998.  The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor. (Two Volumes) Inner Traditions International, Rochester, Vermont.  1048 pp.  

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[6] Key, W.B. 1974. Subliminal Seduction. Signet.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Tversky

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

[11] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2002/kahneman-facts.html

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler

[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational

[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely

[18] Ariely, D. 2010. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. Harper Perennial. New York.

[19] Thaler, R.H. 2015. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. W.W. Norton & Company. New York.

[20] Ariely, D. 2008. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions. Harper Perennial. New York.

[21] Ariely, D. 2010. The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home. Harper Collins.

Chapter 10: Science versus Humanities; Rational versus Irrational - The Irreconcilable?

Thus far in our examination of the creative irrational as the key to individual consciousness and human success we have been primarily dealing with the insights provided by what might be called the humanities[1] as opposed to the natural sciences[2]. The former is most often considered irrational while the later is seen to be an ultimately rational undertaking. A search for the key to human success through a study of the irrational may strike the modern day Western reader as virtually unknown territory.  We are for the most part raised in a world of technology based on an overwhelming perception of “science”. But it must be noted that science and the scientific method are very recent developments in the history of humans essentially beginning in the early 1600’s with the writings of Francis Bacon – the “father of empiricism.”[3]. It has been claimed for centuries that science, developed through the efforts of pioneers like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, is the prototype of the truly objective search for knowledge.  Certainly the methods and outcomes of science have resulted in marked improvements in our quality of human life through advances in fields such as medicine and engineering. But buried beneath the apparent clarity of many of sciences’ answers, a number of outstanding questions remain hidden to the casual reader, buried if you will in a modern myth. The myth being that science is the logical rational application of scientific discoveries to improve the creations and constructions of human activities. While most average citizens get lost in the intricacies of finding a relevant testable hypothesis and what might ultimately result in a useful and productive conclusion, the key to science is the moments of creative thought by research that initiates and motivates the scientific method. As professional scientists we the authors have found in our struggles with idea generation is that the basis of science is much more irrational than is generally appreciated by non-scientist. In this regard, we can find that science and the humanities share a common basis in the role of the creative irrational. 

In 1936, Einstein wrote, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of ordinary thinking”[4].  He wrote this towards the end of a time period when a seemingly enormous gap developed between traditionalism and rationality as a result of the science of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a time when old rationalities were being questioned in new ways required to understand nuclear science, sub-atomic particles and a unified space-time continuum. Early 20th century science has challenged many of the old beliefs in its search for new and improved understandings.

In a time when science and technology play such an central role in our life activity and our thinking, we the authors see a need to explore what has been commonly seen as an irreconcilable opposition between traditionalism and rationality. In truth can we validate any real opposition? Is there a viable basis for reconciliation? In this chapter we undertake to examine the methods and claims of science that have been created and reworked over time. We aim to better appreciate the underlying creative aspects of the scientific method and to present a brief state of scientific knowledge and to get some insights into what many in the modern Western World consider to be a familiar source of knowledge: sciences’ modern myths. There is much to be gained in our search for the creative irrational by developing a greater comprehensiveness and focusing attention on the all-important creative thoughts that we find at the initiation of any and all scientific investigations. Without a doubt which clarity bridges the perceived gap between the humanities and science.

What we shall see is that science relies on an impetus from much the same sources and questions as were tapped for the other examples of the creation irrational in human existence. It has given our society expectations that it can satisfy some of the same needs and desires as were served by past beliefs and efforts. By developing a broader comprehension of the basis of science, we can clearly see its struggle to initiate new and relevant perceptions of reality. A closer examination of the salient aspects of these two sources of knowledge, science and the humanities, shows that they share a single, common reality.

The Apparent Paradox between Science and the Humanities

An apt statement of the paradoxical points of view that have appeared between what is often cited among the humanist categories as “traditionalism”, and the “rationalism” that underlies science was made in a comparison of the medieval and the modern by West:

"There can be little doubt that the medieval concept of the world was one-sided. But the contempt in which the Middle Ages are now held is a measure of the misunderstanding of the epoch; and the result of a world view that is no less distorted.

To the modern Rational mind, the universe is a gigantic fact, reducible to an infinity of constituent facts. To the medieval mind it was a gigantic symbol; in which phenomena in all their diversity were but reflections of the will of God. Indifferent, or downright hostile to matters of fact, the medieval mind was interested only in the principle behind the fact. To the modern mind, only facts count and principles take care of themselves. The scientist distrusts or even denies the reality of inner experience.... He relies upon the evidence of his senses. If he can measure it, it is 'real'. The medievalist called the world of sense an illusion; only inner experience was real. He may have believed the world was flat but he understood the universe to be a hierarchy of values, because that was his experience. Our modern thinkers may know the earth is round, but they think value is `subjective`, a mere invention of man (perhaps because their own inner experience is so poverty-stricken and disordered they cannot trust it). The medieval mind ignored the facts of the physical world, and so produced a society that was all cathedrals and no sanitation. The modern mind ignores the value of the spiritual world and so has produced a society that is all sanitation and no cathedrals. Rationalists rejoice and call this progress. But the increasingly fraught psychological state of our sanitary society suggests that in the end cathedrals may prove to be the necessity, sanitation the luxury.” [5]

An inability to weigh the power of the medieval concern for the "ideals" of human value on the same scale as the modern concern for the "facts" of human welfare is a measure of the distance between two states of mind that might be held to typify two different civilizations. But it also vividly echoes the difference between the outlooks of the humanities and science. Under certain conditions it is possible to see the two views as valid and complementary rather than alternative and incompatible. But this requires a concept of the humankind that is quite different than either the medieval or the modern.

West’s remark is an appropriate starting place because it illustrates the unconscious limitations that are required for espousing either science or the humanities in our search for knowledge. Holding strictly to one viewpoint or the other does not allow the possibility of a productive resolution. Such was the case in the aggressively held views of the opposing teams in the debates about evolution between science and religion during the mid-19th century[6] and is still all too often evident, particularly in association with science literalism in contrast to religious fundamentalism.

To the inhabitants of the Middle Ages it was obvious that the world exists on least two different levels, specifically the world of humankind and that of God, the physical and the spiritual. Progress to the medievalist was in the nature of a change in state, amounting to a transformation of being from one level to another. That is, the aim of development of humans was a qualitative one involving movement from the physical towards the spiritual.

At present, in the name of literal science, we have commonly come to equate the physical with the real. The spiritual, equated with the humanities, is unreal and irrational and is represented in our stories and beliefs. As a result, in the sciences the idea of quality has been downgraded to the measurable attributes of things, such as their colour, texture, density and/or their price. Instead of transformation in a vertical direction, we were restricted to considering changes in attributes on a horizontal “physical” plane. The confusion of the qualitative with the quantitative was complete to the point where as literal scientists we can scarcely understand, and certainly cannot trust, the objectivity of such concepts as the value of beauty, love or comedy as we explored earlier in Chapter 6. In strictly rational terms, the value of beauty is something reflected in the price that someone is willing to pay for a "work of art."  How much should one pay for a "recreational" experience of music or for a brief delving into the world of "Nature"? Until recently the latter was regarded as the subjective indulgence of appetite or habit - a holiday away from the real world of "work" and “action.” This attitude is changing with the attempt of environmental politics and economics to confer a significant value on ecological and social well-being[7]. 

Modern qualitative valuation redefined in this way is obviously still not adequately objective for the scientific view. It remains different between individuals and situations. It therefore offers only statistical criteria for the "objective" judgment that is the avowed aim of science. In short, in our so-called "modern" age, unmindful of the differences in the quality of the sense of self that arises with differences in level of perception, we have been taught to define all inner experience as subjective, hence transient and untrustworthy, thus irrational, while only the outer physical measurable world is objective, enduring and substantial thus rational. In this scientific world, progress is movement along an external horizontal gradient of matters, aggregated in different fashions and organized to different degrees of generality or homogeneity. From the point of view of the value or the purpose of a life, this is indeed a flat world, devoid of what could be called either depth or height.

From a point of view that is genuinely concerned with the value of life, this confinement of learning to a plane on which value is not a valid dimension is no alternative at all. The science of the beginning of the Renaissance may have been legitimately intent on escape from the subjectivity of vague notions of an external and only vaguely conceived, though personified, God who ran everything.  Did our world extend only from birth to death, with a possible choice between hell or salvation? The effort to be free of such subjectivity fell into the extreme opposite of rejecting value from what was included in science. Reaction was so extreme that in the name of rationality science forgot that even physics and mathematics, in all their exactness, are the products of scientists acting through the only possible medium: individual and collective human interest and effort. This is subjective to the extent that it depends on the way humans work. With this as the dominant view, however, the possibility of finding a unity between subjective and objective approaches to knowledge and understanding was virtually lost.

The tragic result of this uncomprehending dichotomy was that in the 20th century the technical ingenuity and the exactness and precision of science were used to invent, construct and drop two atom bombs. There were no comparably "objective" criteria for determining how to control the obvious threats that this technology offered to the lives of all human beings or to their environments.  An epistemology that leaves out of account the most important purposes of learning, surely invites rejection and replacement by a more comprehensive base of understanding. This was the position into which Western society plunged itself as another consequence of the 1945 dropping of atom bombs on Japan. 

It is little wonder that in the second half of the 20th Century succeeding society has shown both a suspicion and a fear of science that, despite the excitement and attraction of space travel, feels a growing need to somehow weaken and control it. It is obvious that outright rejection of science or of the technology that comes from it, would forego its many benefits. Coincidently, the resolution of the dichotomy between it and the needs for human valuation began to emerge in the late 1920's at the time that science was beginning to make breakthroughs in sub-atomic physics and our understanding of the physical universe. To understand it and its importance requires that we probe more deeply into the nature and development of science itself and those who have led us to this point.

The Origins and Evolution of Science

Science as we have known it grew out of reaction to medieval intellectualism. Activities of “higher learning” during the Middle Ages or Medieval Period from the 5th to the 15th century in Western Europe thrived on debate and argument that invited subjectivity and division, not objectivity and common understanding. The result was an incipient chaos in Western Culture throughout the Dark Ages[8]. While speculation continued to be the very life-blood of scholasticism in philosophy and religion up to the beginning of the 16th century, the importance of direct observation rationality began to reemerge with the 13th century works of Roger Bacon, circa  1219/20 – 1292[9], and Thomas Aquinas, 1225 – 1274[10]. 

Bacon reintroduced Aristotle into medieval philosophy. Bacon expounded a view that mathematics was the gateway to science and that controlled experiment was the route to the verification of thought. His requirement for external objectivity based on observations and experiment was clearly distinguished from the faith-based and wisdom-based explorations that are the basis for internal truth and experience. Basically this was an early distinction between the operation of both the rational and irrational in the lives of humans.

In the same time period as Bacon was writing, Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle to support a view that faith and reason are complementary and harmonious approaches to reality, not opposites. Aquinas’ view of science was clearly much ahead of its time. The separation of scientific as externalized or exoteric, from internal or esoteric truth was probably necessary for religious followers of the period. Both aspects of his view initially persisted and grew. Eventually, however, the faith that was reflected in religious doctrines of the time was so subjected to divisions of interpretation and argument that the earlier sense of its importance was lost from what developed as “science”. The internal basis for arriving at truth was removed from serious contention with the external revelations of empiricism, even before science was fully developed.

 But while Aquinas' view that included both faith and reason became official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, the dichotomy between an individual’s ability to receive higher levels of existence and the need for a religious intermediary, such as the church, continued to challenge medieval thought. Divisions between the church and the society continued to grow. The church couldn’t see its way to control the thoughts and behaviours of its followers if individuals were allowed to follow their own internal direct observations without the priest-based restrictions. 

The best example of the threat perceived by the church of empowering humans to trust their own direct experience can be found in the life of the first proponent of presenting religious writings in the common language of the people rather than in Latin. The Dominican priest, Meister Eckhart, circa 1260 –  1328 wrote in the local German language of the day. As he was writing at the same time as Bacon and Aquinas, it is not surprising that Eckhart was also intimately acquainted with the philosophy of Aristotle. He urged all to seek god within themselves[11]. His history shows how the established church fought against his thoughts and against any possibility of an individual’s direct observations for a connection with their higher consciousness. As a result he was condemned for heresy. His condemnation by the established church was partly the result of the continuing reactions to a literal dictation of an ultra-moralism that, nevertheless, revealed chinks in the armour of those who held themselves responsible for administering it. Such chinks had already surfaced in 1233 by the papal Inquisition of Pope Gregory IX in an attempt to resolve the conflicts by destroying diverging views it defined as heresy. The use of such power has rarely succeeded in the long run, and ultimately failed in this case, but not before the atrocities it committed had become a lasting testimony to the potential bestiality that lives in humankind alongside our wished-for rationality. In the long-run such dicta increased the resistance to the old intellectual order. Although Echart’s teachings were not well remembered for centuries his history is a clear example of the early recognition by some individuals of the two sides of human existence: the rational found in external scientific observation and the irrational found in the power of faith and direct internal observation.

A fuller realization of modern science came only with Francis Bacon, circa 1561 -1626. His codification of the rules of experimental methods gave rise to an alternative that was able to challenge the established church for authority over western civilization’s worldview. His scientific concept of Utopia, described in his publication “The New Atlantis” of 1627, was credited with the formation of the Royal Society of London in 1660 – the first national scientific institution in the world. In this environment, recognized by royal charter by the established secular head King Charles II and cultivated by the efforts of such scientific giants as Sir Isaac Newton, science was perceived as guaranteeing that its own divisions and analyses were in the interests of generalization, which is widely accepted as a move towards Unity. Multiplication of objective facts gives rise to perceptions of the rules of nature that govern external phenomena. Phenomena, such as the movements of the planets, yielded to the explanations and predictions of science, hence science guaranteed that there is a dependable reality and possibly even implied that it would eventually be comprehended as a Unity. 

The most famous example of the beginning of science and its usefulness at the time of Bacon and Newton comes from the beautifully simple example of an apple falling from a tree Even while being wrong in its basic model, the concept of gravity as an attractive force between objects is something that individuals can grasp and have a sense of directly. At the time it was inconceivable that 300 years later Einstein would exercise his creative irrational to imagine gravity as the curvature of the time-space continuum resulting from objects with mass[12].  Even the early approximate “Law of Gravity” of Newton evidenced forces so subtle and so powerful that it required a new concept of the gods themselves. There was little reason to try to reconcile such heady practical success with the confused longings that motivated the divisions apparent between “Science” and the “Arts and Religion”.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the ideal of the medievalist to approach wholeness was traded by science for a rationality that was designed from the outset to be "partial". This appears to us as irrational as the other human endeavors presented in this book. In retrospect it is to be wondered that western philosophical thought tolerated such self-limitation for as long as it did. However, the general success of scientific progress in the economic and engineering world gave little cause for hesitation. New attitudes that determined the interpretation of human relationships emerged in new theories of biology and economics that were far from representing a balance between external and internal forces. The only concern with balance seemed to be that of maintaining the balance in favour of the selected fortunate among humankind in the struggle against the blind inanimate forces of unthinking nature.

The heyday of scientific confidence appeared in the mid-19th century. New theories and discoveries of geological transformation, biological evolution and economic development were added to the rapidly growing sciences of chemistry and physics. The new technology of an industrial revolution based on them created new means of manufacturing, and new products. Simultaneous dramatic changes in transportation and communication changed the apparent size and accessibility of the world itself. In most minds this spirit of adventure, discovery and progress was both driven and rewarded by the freedom and objectivity of science. Public debates on the value of science versus religion were increasingly popular in England and Europe during the huge surge of self-confidence that emerged during the 19th century, with science amassing credulity in the process. Irvine[13] shows how important to the popularity of Darwin's Theory of Evolution were the personality clashes between Darwin's principal supporter, Thomas Huxley, and the several opposing representatives of the church, among whom was Bishop Wilberforce, already well known for his crusade against slavery. George Bernard Shaw[14], saw that the acceptance of evolution in science actually depended on its role as an apparently "objective" rationale for the economic laissez faire theories that promoted the industrial revolution and the resulting new wealth of the recently strengthened middle class. The surging rationality was supported by an underlying shadowy irrationality.

Looking dispassionately at the social environment and the popularity of theories of competition and progress, one could hardly be excused for questioning the idea that the Theory of Evolution, or other parallel scientific "advances” arose as glimpses of truth in the minds of independent scientific investigators. It is only in retrospect that it has become possible, even plausible, that the scientific insights that supported the society of the time were simply the predictable reactions of their intellectual and economic climates. In fact, the Theory of Evolution attributed to Darwin on the basis of his submission to the Royal Society of London in 1865, was simultaneously submitted to the Society through an independent, detailed and creditable investigation by Alfred Russell Wallace[15]. 

This curious and irrational fact about simultaneous discoveries of the theory of evolution, and its responsibility for pivotal changes in societal attitudes, is often still taught as an isolated example of a special event in the history of science. But we know that it is only the most famous instance of the many where science has resulted in the same observations from different isolated studies[16]. Indeed, the fact that coincident appearances of "original" scientific ideas, ostensibly independently developed, occurred had become commonly recognized  by the 17th Century to lead the Royal the Society of London to attempt to address it through its rules of priority. These were widely said to be simply rules to guard against plagiarism. The fact that they also indicated a high frequency of coincidence of “new” ideas seems to have attracted little attention. The possibility that the whole intellectual and social atmosphere was the joint reflection of a mentality that supported the consolidation of colonialism from Europe, supported its Industrial Revolution and fed the American Civil War would have required that objectivity be subject to factors of awareness, openness and motivation that were foreign to the prevailing mood of self-confident moral as well as intellectual superiority of the whole 19th century.

The phenomena relating science to its social-cultural milieu were reviewed by Kuhn[17]. He pointed out how the origin of new recognitions rests on a broad base of common experience and functioning. He recognized two interactive phases of science that he called "normal" science, and "revolutionary" science. By normal he referred to the conceptions of a deliberate, rational activity of observation, hypothesis formation and testing. It was dependent on what was called “reasonable.” This corresponds to the still popular conceptions of science, often cited by scientists themselves, particularly in what is known as “bioassay,” as indicating the correct view of all scientific endeavour.  In the term “revolutionary”, however, Kuhn recognized that process of discovery of new points of view – this being exactly related to the concept that we are presenting here as the creative irrational.  This, from the first, has always been considered by the romantics of science to reflect its true nature. It is not an unintentional result of the discriminatory use of our best reasoning. This is precisely the area of interest that attracted the attention of science greats such as Albert Einstein[18](1879 –1955), Niels Bohr (1885 –1962)[19] Kurt Gödel (1906 –1978) and Jochen Heisenberg (1939 - )[20], to questions about how problems are solved.

The 20th Century Science Revolution

Serious questions of the appropriate place for the human element in science first became significant in relation to nuclear physics. One of the most fundamental questions of physical science was whether observations can be made in the absence of some pre-existent theory. In the science that claims to depend on measurement, at least some theory about measurement systems is called for. Even more fundamental is the question of what is to be measured. Can this be decided without the intervention of the thought and experience of individual scientists? The remarkable observations and interpretations that followed from contradictions between relativity and quantum theory was the specific problem that has brought about the further attempts to bridge the gap between the scientific rules of a search for knowledge and the requirements of a search for wisdom.

Four great discoveries of the 20th century initiated this revolution: 1) the Principle of Relativity, 2) the Principle of Complementarity 3) the Gödel Theorem and 4) the Principle of Uncertainty.

Einstein published his first seminal paper on the Principal of Relativity in 1905 as the “Special Theory of Relativity”. It pointed out that the formerly accepted idea of basic absolute measures of space and time were not needed. This long accepted concept had limited the physical description of the universe to a completely static reference state, which needed instead to understand the world as the fully dynamic place we know it to be.  Removal of this limitation was critical to the new development of science as it has appeared in the 20 century. The tone for an enlarged science of physics, and new questions about what we call “Reality,” were finally set by Einstein’s theory of “General Relativity” published in 1915. These two works showed that the classical world of physics as described by Newton, could not account for the major effects of relative motion between objects. In a remarkably clearly written account, Isaacson[21]describes Einstein’s work as an “...effort to come up with a new field theory of gravity and to generalize his relativity theory so that it applied to accelerated motion [the effect of gravity].”

The next new understanding was contained in Bohr’s explanation of his “Principle of Complementarity”, showing that it is necessary to allow for the existence of light simultaneously in two mutually exclusive forms. Bohr's insight, published from the same 1927 conference that Heisenberg addressed, initially seemed to cause little comment from his hearers. That may help explain how he came to later state that the idea for it came to him in relation to reflections on the ideas of "love" and "justice" in the affairs of humankind[22] & [23].  He pointed out that these two different criteria of appreciation of events are widely known to relate to the fullest expression of human relationships, but they lead to different, mutually exclusive interpretations, before they can be adopted and applied. That is, settling between them depends, ultimately, on the intentions of what the observer of the situation deems most appropriate at that time. A choice between them must be made before either one can be applied to a particular action. In Bohr's view this situation was as fundamental to the understanding of reality in science as it is in human affairs. It was left to Bohr to realize its wider relation to argument in science.  It was in his wider appreciation of the implications of the implied relation of the observer to what is observed that later led Bohm to state,   “We are in agreement with Bohr who repeatedly stresses the fundamental role of the measuring apparatus as an inseparable part of the observed system.”[24]

The third major contribution appeared in 1931, when the Gödel Theorem was published. It demonstrated that it is impossible to test the postulates of a logical system from within that system; i.e. science necessitates the recognition of the observer. The Gödel Theorem was not published until 1931, and while its implications were somewhat more obvious for understanding the nature of the hierarchy of cause-effect relations in analysis, its general philosophical implications were not well spelled out for more than 50 years until the work of Rosen[25]. 

The Gödel Theorem proved that there is no scientific test of an hypothesis or model possible before the model, with its structure and the implied or "entailed" scale of functions, has been formulated. It is truly astonishing that it had taken so many years for a general perception of the necessity for such an understanding to appear. Only in this way could an acceptable rationale for the inclusion of biology among the quantitative sciences of physics and chemistry be established. Rosen’s seminal work in the modelling of systems in relation to biological problems appearing in systems of living organisms first enabled others to realize the critical place of level and scale of observation in scientific interpretations. He was the first to point out how biology requires that attention be given to variations at the finest scale of observations of particular phenomena, such as in the molecular structures that are now known to govern the rate of chemical reactions in biology. This modelling was essential in order for the outcome of biological processes, hence life processes generally, to be understandable. As Rosen was fond of putting it, “Biology is too complicated for it to be understood by the methods of physics.” because both physics and to a lesser extent chemistry, are dependent on an assumption of homogeneity on the finest scales of the structure of the component reacting particles. Similar insights have been seen in physics as presented in Greene[26]. “Measurement” can never be objective in the sense of being independent of the scientist making the observation!

In the late 1920s came the fourth major discovery, Heisenberg’s “Principle of Uncertainty”. In it he demonstrated that not all measurements necessary for the description of a system are possible simultaneously without changing the system. This was the first serious questioning of measurement as the objective basis for learning. But while it struck at the very base of the whole structure of science, its implications were obfuscated by technical questions about the nature of the measurement system, and the degree of precision possible in any measurement.

The implications of these four major scientific discoveries were not immediately apparent when they were released. But it was only in their light, extended by Rosen’s work, that physics and mathematics could conclude that objectivity cannot be guaranteed by external measurement alone. This interpretation appeared in paradoxes from the false and incorrect dichotomy assumed by 19th and the early 20th century science, to exist between the observer and what he observes. It was believed that only by this separation could there be a certainty of the objectivity of observations. It is with these deductions by the physicists, mathematicians and biologists that the first realization in science appeared that in addition to rational proofs there is a need for those remarkable processes of thought and understanding that give observation and analysis the scale on which to establish the balance: the hall-mark of human understanding and aspiration.

In the conventional rationalist view of science, these modern lines of scientific thought destroyed that most prized possession of "exact" science: a guarantee of its objectivity. The consequences of this simple fact seem not to have been appreciated until the computer raised them in relation to questions of the "computability" of various models. Realization that scientific discovery and proof depend on both conscious and unconscious processes, had finally overcome the anxiety which demanded the security of rationalism. This breech in the rationalist wall, whereby the aggressive early self-limitation that forever separated science from an aspiration to wholeness, was thus removed. Some of the greatest minds had recognized the need for such a point of view, but never before had it become an unequivocal currency.

 

Levels of Science

The 20th century revolution in science that we have so briefly reviewed provides an unexpected generality to our conclusions about the importance of direct experience as a source of knowledge and the essentially irrational basis of these new and ground-breaking insights into our human worldview. According to this outlook, the concept of different levels of comprehension and the related concept of different levels of observation are equally essential to both the humanities and the core of scientific discovery.

Neither science nor the humanities has yet undertaken a systematic study of the effects of different qualities of observation that appear to be of such central importance. In the remainder of this chapter, therefore, we summarize three major views of the place of quality in the act of observing that can now be seen to be reflected in the work of some of the best and earliest scientific minds. These views have been expressed at various times in the literature, and while all three points have arisen in relation to science by Goethe, Einstein and Bohr, their considerations are clearly not exclusive to it. The prominence that has been given to science is symptomatic of the role that it has been required to play throughout the development of Western culture leading to the present day. It is clearly not due to any inherent characteristics of rationality in relation to life that can be claimed as any special prerogative of science. In fact they present a need for a recognition of the operation of both rational and irrational in our lives.

The first such important statement is the expression by two of the giants of science, Goethe[27] and Einstein, of the necessity for a sense of personal responsibility on the part of the scientist. What they are talking about is, however, not the moral responsibility that is often expressed as a need to prevent possible misapplication of scientific findings in the world of technology. What they are specifically concerned with instead, is the need for scientists to take personal responsibility for ensuring that their efforts are directed to the most comprehensive possible understanding of the reality behind the abstractions that scientists produce. Abstractions are the inevitable result of intellectualizations that arise in the investigations that are science's main activity. The special conditions and language surrounding them make it difficult to see how they relate to our cultural or individual values as human beings. Only experience can help us.

One of the earliest comprehensive statements is that of Goethe. As noted earlier, he is best known for his literary masterpiece, the dramatic poem Faust, which displayed an understanding of the dark and powerful elements of the very soul of man that still has not been equaled in the scientific psychology of which it is legitimately considered a direct ancestor. Goethe was deeply interested in science and its nature, and as a result published his original early studies of the morphology of both plants and animals. Of particular interest here is his attack on the evaluation given to the Newtonian physics of light by unthinking commentators. His remarks were published in Zur Farbenlehre, in 1810. In it Goethe pointed out that the essential and important qualitative attributes of the phenomenon of light are not in any way explained by the analysis of colours in relation to the physics of wave-length. He used this fact to illustrate his view that in order for science to deal with the "reality" that since the time of Newton it had claimed as its particular preserve, each experiment needed to simultaneously be an "experience" for the investigator. He recognized that this cannot happen by accident. If science is to study reality[28], the act of making an experiment also an experience (the term “direct experience” is intended by us to indicate the same thing) required that the scientist accept a responsibility to develop a sensitivity not only to the material and the purposes of the experiments, but to his own nature as an observer. Goethe recognized the science of Newton as an intellectual abstraction that, in spite of the remarkable insights that have resulted from it, invites a deficient attitude towards research from lesser men. In his view, any experimental result that neglects the reality behind the question from which it sprang, rather than becoming a means of understanding it, actually inhibits its discovery. Reality depended on finding that quality that adds this missing dimension to scientific description.

In more recent times, Goethe's proposition about the responsibility of the scientist for the quality of experience in scientific observation is made clearer and more specific through its echo by Einstein[29] & [30] who wrote: 

"...Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things? In my opinion the answer to this question is, briefly, this: as far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. It seems to me that complete clarity as to this state of things became common property only through that trend in mathematics which is known by the name of ‘axiomatics’.  The progress achieved by axiomatics consists in its having neatly separated the logical-formal from its objective or intuitive content; according to axiomatics the logical formal alone forms the subject matter of mathematics....

 "In axiomatic geometry the words "point," "straight line," etc., stand only for empty conceptual schemata. That which gives them content is not relevant to mathematics. 

"Yet on the other hand it is certain that mathematics generally, and particularly geometry, owes its existence to the need which was felt of learning something about the behaviour of real objects...."

It would be difficult to imagine a clearer or more rational statement of the need in science, as in all human activity, for that indefinable element of quality that makes the difference between what we usually mean by the dry and unemotional term "observation", and the "seeing", of which Blake speaks in his famous line, "Seeing the world in a grain of sand ... and eternity in an hour". Science in the fullness of its functioning is not by any means irrelevant to the understanding of Universals; this position can only be true of the science that tried to totally limit itself to the rational. This weakness was detected and understood by both Goethe and Einstein. 

The time has passed when the term scientist should be used purely to define an adherence to a set of rules in the employment of some technique or other. The parts of science are as different from one another as 19th century concepts of science were from religion. It has been pointed out by Rosen[31], that the analysis of any system into its component parts loses information about the underlying unity, an idea that he traces back to the original writings of Aristotle on the "final cause" in science. Taken together, these parts of the system of learning are simply the necessarily contrasting means at our disposal for the comprehensive study of reality; that in the last analysis depends on development of the observer's capacity for comprehensiveness and reconciliation of opposites.

Plato’s admonition in Timaeus to clarity on the part of the speaker in respect to the purposes and effects of the discussion is far from being an incidental reminder of the nature of the needful correct use of the thinking functions that are alive in us. Clarity of the intent is the second important statement that needs to be involved in the performance of scientific endeavours. The distinction between the use of intelligence and reason seems to agree with what we have already discovered: that there is something of seemingly great importance, additional to the facts, involved in our attempts to distinguish "truth" from "belief". The contrast between intelligence and opinion as aspects of the needed attention to the intentions of our words complements the necessary sense of responsibility identified by Goethe. 

The third and final statement about the quality of observation to which we wish to draw attention, concerns the relationship of the individuality of an observer to the collectivity of all observers. It is a question that is raised by Bohr's statement of the exclusive differences between relationships based on love, and on justice. The relationship that we call "love" invokes the weighing of individual human considerations, such as intentions in relation to opportunity, the power of habits against aspirations, or apparent weaknesses against potential strengths. It tries to appreciate another's level of being, and takes account of the limitations of one individual's ability to conceive of another's reality. It invokes Goethe's perceptions of the need to weigh scientific facts in relation to human values, but applies it to the whole question of our attitudes to the fact of being alive in a world with other individual human beings.

By contrast, the rules of formal justice in our exterior world are statistical or aggregate criteria based on consensus. This externalized balancing is far from the delicacy that gives that extra-dimensionality of life to perceptions in the world of love. Our sense of individual being is thus contrasted with the generalities to which the rules of collective justice attempt to give expression. The concept of different levels of thinking, and with it the possibility of different levels in the very sense of existence, play an important role in an approach to how we see ourselves and our world. 

A wish to appreciate consciousness requires that we be prepared to understand the possibilities of our world in a more comprehensive, yet more exact manner than has often been invoked for purposes of the scientific description and management of our joint, social affairs. We can conclude from what has been said earlier that this must have been true for Einstein, as it was of Bohr, and of many of those thinkers that have graced the studies of physics throughout the 20th century. To them we must also the add names as early as those of Plato, Meister Eckhart and Goethe who, with those of more recent times, have all explicitly recognized that the direct experiences of our minds, our bodies and our emotions, all need to be combined in some manner that permits agreement within ourselves, and on this basis with one another. This is the real basis for an objectivity of both our rational and irrational sides that may free us to see that we can recognize the most important of universal values in common with fellow human beings. With appropriate help and care, we can perhaps learn to use these perceptions to increase the breadth of our understanding.

The Consequences

Observations from our direct experience show that much of the activity that underlies the whole scientific process is based on the creative irrational and the understanding of the ordinarily unconscious. It is equally evident that what we term "unconscious" informs our rational so-called consciousness, and is in turn informed by it. As introduced in the last chapter, at least part of what the conventions of psychology regard as our unconscious mind legitimately forms the basis for what is truly a larger consciousness than is now widely accepted as the basis for our actions.

It was only after the scientific psychological "discoveries" discussed in the last Chapter that we began to better understand the human connection between new thoughts and the unconscious. Our direct experience suggests that it is foolhardy to underestimate the potentially disruptive aspects of the unconscious. Jung[32] maintained that it is a naïve view that does a serious disservice to the subtlety of human creativity, inventiveness and understanding. Some of the most respected and successful of rational scientists have understood and used their knowledge of unconscious processes as part of their own processes of scientific investigation. This powerful component of our total being can evidently be both an ally and an enemy in relation to maintaining our sense of perspective and aim.

A most interesting feature of this deliberate use of unconscious processes, which may be as frequent in general thinking as it seems to be in science, lies in the results. The solution to the problem, when it appears in the mind of the puzzle-poser, often follows a period of relaxation or actual physical sleep. Its arising seems to be quite independent of, even external to, the puzzle-poser. That is, it comes from an unknown place in us and is virtually always accompanied by a feeling of surprise. Its contents and implications may not always be clearly understood by the recipient of the "insight". It may, however, be recognized as the "right" answer with a degree of certainty that is accessible only to the bearer of the experience. External scientific or mathematical proof and communication rest on the later, slower, rational "working out" that is not a part of the original process of discovery. Evidently there are important unconscious elements of the thinking process which complement the conscious rational activity. They seem to be responsible for at least some of the new perceptions that are an essential part of all learning.

It is in particular the phenomenon of problem-solving that throws additional important light on the unconscious, creative irrational processes, and helps us appreciate the essential complementarity of the various influences underlying our knowledge. For example, certain peculiarities of the dependence of aspects of thinking on unconscious process were pointed out independently by both Einstein and Bohr. Einstein, in particular, noted that solving a problem in science or mathematics may involve a kind of stuffing of the organism's store of memory with everything that seems even remotely relevant to it, like force-feeding a reluctant goose with energy-rich materials. This stuffing of the thinking apparatus is neither desired nor under the full control of the mind, any more than the excess food is desired by the goose. Nor are the precise results predictable. The practice depends on only the most general intentions and attitudes of a "stuffer" who bases his actions on previous knowledge of the value of a resulting “foie-gras” of ideas. Such a view strongly complements that of Plato expressed in the Timeous, which was briefly reviewed earlier, but is often missing from present day common understanding of science.

Einstein[33] made clear his perception of how the intuitive, creative irrational content of science that is the vehicle of its greatest discoveries is not easy to access and involves the deepest commitment and efforts of the scientist.  It is discussed in this extract from his writing:

"Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and the centuries....It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

            We need to understand the intent of such remarks and learn how to make use of the thoughts and insights to which they point us.  As Einstein points out, the processes involved are not due to our conscious mind.  It must also be made explicit that this is the truly creative part of our nature.  It is why we build the case in this book for the creative irrational as the key to human success.  It clearly arises through the insights afforded by some internal mechanism that permits us to connect with our unconscious irrational. The connection, and its implications are experienced before they are actually worked out rationally to the point that it can be expressed by in the language of our conscious minds.

            To refer to the writings of Einstein again[34]:  

“The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.  Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development…. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has in the social life of man…they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions….They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities.  One does not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.” 

Such statements are not only reminders of our own inner nature as quoted in Chapter 1 from Philo, but demonstrate the fact that the best of scientists are truly human beings, with rational and irrational parts. Considerations of quality of observation and interpretation that, by the beginning of the 21st century we are finally learning to apply in science, are fully applicable here.

One aspect of this phenomenon requires special attention: The end result is not always in accordance with expectations. In the experience of the authors, in following an initial "insight", it may sometimes be necessary to distrust certain of the “workings-out” or "explanations" of the apparent solution, especially when in approaching the new answer a sense of excitement arises. At such times, the new "answer" that has been developed may be flawed or mistaken. Our personal examinations of this situation show that when there is a contradiction or mistake in the working out of a new perception, it may result in a sense of excitement, without an accompanying awareness that the reason for it lies in the contradiction, rather than in the perception. With the help of an internal observer who can recognize memories of past experience, it is possible to heed the warning that something is wrong. That is, when this excitement arises, examination of the development of the new idea has to be especially carefully undertaken. Without attention to the various levels of the process, solutions developed out of it can become the captive of unconscious personal emotions that may be part of our ordinary, daily context. The result will be a blindness to both the error that has been made as well as to its inconsistency with our aims.

Where the practice of separating an observing thinker from the thoughts that have occurred is not available or not utilized, the so-called new answer may be espoused, guarded and defended by its owner with a special vehemence that is particularly difficult to penetrate by logic alone. In some cases the difficulty of establishing a balance may be frustrated by the "partiality" that is created by enthusiasm. The answer may subsequently be recognized as wrong, but only after the entrained emotions have been spent or otherwise dissipated.

It seems that while a part of us that is outside our everyday consciousness is involved in the act of new thinking, without a particular independent attention to what is happening the whole process quickly loses its initial duality. Unless some aspect of the capacity to observe is present or can be recalled, the thinking-through of the insight then becomes a function of that level of ordinary mind and emotion in which we so often exist. This experience shows that when only one level of perception exists in us, our thinking is captured by other functions, including the daydreamer. The results may have little to do with thinking, and lack the perspective that is necessary to assessing the relevance of ideas and actions to our goals.

In our experience, the phenomenon in which the moment of separation of the discoverer from the facts discovered is lost again, seems to be the rule rather than the exception. In extreme cases the loss of perspective may account for that special vehemence, or fanaticism, with which solutions to problems are sometimes invested by the uncritical recipient of "revelations". But in ordinary circumstances, the state of separation between the observed and the observer does not seem to last very long. Thus, direct experience shows that the thinking process, especially in its associated, more rapid, unconscious irrational operations, is closely linked to the much more rapid emotional functions. When they become dominant, prior attitude and reaction colour the reception of the results of any study and have a strong influence on our judgment of what is relevant to a given proposition. If we are to use only rational thought in the study of the subtleties and complexities afforded by human creations, we need to be very aware of the power of pre-judgment that it may represent. The capacity to balance and integrate new perceptions with an old context may be one of the most difficult but important thinking-related functions that we need to employ for the study of ourselves and the search for the level of consciousness that can lead to higher understanding. But in the present world that begins a new century, the practical consequences that can follow from the faith that was developed towards the discovery aspects of science needs to be seen as the other side of an almost automatic equation of faith in the statistical methods for the employment of science. The failure to recognize the important complementary interactions of these two quite different aspects of science has underlain much of the simplistic argument that has inhibited the recognition and free flow of what might be truly called our "common" sense. The view that unknown unconscious processes affect the whole system and are conditioned by our cultural milieu may have been too difficult a concept for a science that during the 19th century was built on such pride and elitism that it claimed and was accorded the right to special treatment. It continued to be represented as the ultimately independent, objective, if not virtually omniscient methodology for discovery and learning – up until the dropping of the atom bombs. It has since become increasingly clear that the imbalance between science and its application has new and large practical consequences in relation to the modern politicization of environmental sciences. In the same way, it has underlain the sad state of the deterioration of control of international fisheries. The disastrous consequences of that failure in the balanced application of scientific understanding may already have led to a situation in which the natural production processes of the sea have been needlessly put at risk. The same situation is incipient in the current controversies over the control of global warming[35]. But this is clearly outside our aim of attempting to understand the significance of the rational and irrational in relation to the history of human development.

Cautions Regarding Bias in Science

The limitations that resulted from the 19th century sense of superiority and have since been imposed on the abilities of generations of both science and art students to examine different routes to truth, have yet to be fully comprehended. For the purposes of this book in relation to the study of the creative irrational, the insistence of archaeology that it interprets facts of early civilizations "scientifically" as the productions of primitive human beings is important here. This overly popular view has seriously inhibited interpretation of past human creations, and slowed interpretation of its own evidence. For example, it was only in the mid-20th Century that it became well-known that acceptance of the reality of the "mythical" Troy depended on Schleimann's ability to "sell" his ideas popularly[36], rather than on the scientific record. In similar vein, the evidence for an ancient Sumerian civilization should surely have been obvious for many years before it became accepted as the basis for archaeological expeditions of discovery. Similarly, the insistence of early translators of Egyptian myths that they were written primarily as texts to accompany funeral ceremonies has severely inhibited the perception of the shamanic elements that have been recognized by later authors such as Naydler[37] and Brind Morrow. The whole proposition of a text addressed to a dead physical body is clearly different than a text intended for a living person in a state of unusually heightened awareness searching for a more-than-merely personal experience. We are indebted to the more modern translations that deal with this material in balanced fashion and understandingly to demonstrate the effects of an enlarged view of the modes of inquiry that have thus been made available.

It seems to have escaped notice that while 19th century science enjoyed the discomfit it caused for its religious professionals, this same "scientific" society considered its religion and its underlying myth of a possible, if one-sided but direct avenue to truth through science, to be superior to any other. One ironic result has been that professionals and public alike had difficulties accepting the possibility that biblical stories, considered in the 19th century as revelations underlying parables belonging to Judaism or Christianity, could have been copied from the tales of earlier, pre-Christian peoples. The story of the flood first appeared in the Gilgamesh legend dating to the 3rd millennium BCE[38]. It shows remarkably detailed parallels with the Hebrew version, which was not written down before about 500 BCE. Many ingenious rational explanations were offered for the similarity before the simple possibility that the Hebrew version was derived from the Sumerian, as adapted through the Babylonian, was accepted. A parallel new interpretation of early Greek thought has recently been offered by Kingsley[39], and in our view calls for careful study and consideration. It is still not clear whether there has been a direct transmission from the Egyptian to basic Greek outlooks; many prejudices about the Greeks still seem to remain unexamined.  It needs to be recognized, however, that the early Greeks obtained their inspiration from Homer, who appears to have known the Troy that modern archaeology places in the 12th century BCE. That is, the time of the epitome of the high civilization of Egypt in the New Kingdom, occurred at the same time that the Troy of Homer was also at its peak. Could they not have had substantial pre-war contacts? Similar phenomena of the insufficient realization of time may underlie delays and arguments that have surrounded the publication of material from the Nag Hamadi or Dead Sea scrolls. Such examples illustrate the difficulties of using thought and reason, in the presence of prior attitude as primary vehicles on the supposed road towards wisdom and consciousness.

These peculiarities of interpretation of archaeological materials are specific examples of difficulties that pervade the scholarly and literary world, giving way only very gradually to the criteria for objectivity advanced by Husserl’s philosophy. They seem all too naturally human versions of what has happened to some of the ideals of scientific objectivity in fields like archaeology and social sciences. These are not naturally “scientific” at their base, dealing as they necessarily do myth and art, with symbolic expression of questions about human values. Such views become of critical importance when they limit access to material, an especial danger when translation of languages is an added issue. In extreme cases they form impassable barriers to the meanings of the symbols and the significance of artifacts.

The determining influence of background and prejudgment on the ability of "explorers" to appreciate and understand the significance of what they have encountered, was drawn with symbolic clarity during the 1992 celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. Columbus insisted that he had found what he was looking for: a new access to the already "discovered" China. To find what we are looking for may be a major peril to all explorers, requiring that we face the difficult task of determining what it is that we can trust in ourselves. We are only gradually coming to recognize that our perceptions are all too prone to limitations such as show up currently in misunderstandings and unconscious discriminations against "aboriginals", women, or little known religions. Columbus could hardly have realized even the possibility that he would find an entirely new continent! Or could he? He certainly had available to him resources, at least in the way of maps and seamen’s lore, that we know little about. 

In relation to understanding the position of science towards the irrational, the outstanding feature of this history lies in the apparent strength of the resistance of accepted science to the countercurrents identified by Kuhn. Science stubbornly distanced itself from traditional questions that stemmed from the longing of humanity for a sense of something higher and more enduring. It maintained its position by insisting that only science fully committed itself to the rational, and that, by definition, only the rational is objective. The foregoing evidences of its irrationality can no longer be dismissed as the actions of aberrant individuals within an otherwise laudable undertaking.

Science has been long in admitting that there are significant effects caused by differences in the quality of its approach to analyses. However, once the importance of a balance between conscious and unconscious/rational and the irrational elements had been recognized, the way to a new evaluation of the significance of science in human affairs has arisen. One of the main results of these revolutionary realizations has been the weight they give to the important challenges involved in the processes of discovery, relative to the better-known scientific activities of testing ideas. The same seems to us to be true of the attempts made to translate and evaluate past human endeavors, especially as we have found it advantageous, even necessary, in the previous Chapters, to utilize archaeological materials other than texts for discerning the nature of some of the understandings recounted in the texts.

It was with this need in mind that we have earlier stated our belief that the field of scientific research and reporting shows signs of the development of a mythology of its own. As an example, we cite here the work of Greene[40]. In the appropriately elegant Preface to this well-written book, the experienced, scientific author points out that the objective of Einstein to “illuminate the workings of the universe with a clarity never before achieved, allowing us to stand in awe of its sheer beauty and elegance” was not realized because there were “still too many unsolved problems facing him”. But Greene goes on to point out that in the half century since, because there have been remarkable developments, and that “physicists of each new generation...have been building steadily on the discoveries of their predecessors to piece together an even fuller understanding of how the universe works.... physicists believe they have finally found a framework for stitching these insights together into a seamless whole – a single theory that, in principle, is capable of describing all phenomena.” He is, of course, referring to what is known formally as “superstring theory[41].” 

This book is not the place to try to raise arguments about specific works or even theories of science.  In fact, as illustrated in Green’s book, description of some of the recent works of science also necessarily resort to images to serve as the most effective base for interpretations of complex physical phenomena. Some of them are equal in drama and vividness to the descriptions of images of the netherworld or the world of the dead, images used in the literature and imagery over the past 5000 years. It is appropriate to point out how this claim by Greene, written in clear and elegant prose, is also accompanied by descriptions of images that help us understand how the geometry of our multi-dimensional world can be used as analogies with the much higher dimensional relations that are required to predict phenomena in the unified super-string theoretical world of modern physics. We need to maintain our critical faculties in the face of this kind of description.

In fact, the validity of the imagery for such imaginings seems to depend on relatively simple-seeming acceptance of similarities between the concepts embodied in various higher dimensions and their equivalent numerical short-hand as exponents in algebraic equations. It is difficult to imagine any better way to speak about the nature of the abstract notions of unfamiliar behaviours in space and time, first drawn to our attention in the work of Einstein, than has been undertaken here by Greene.  Our purpose in pointing to these details is to recognize the necessity for such devices as illustration, metaphor and analogy, if we are to be allowed to follow what can appear to even the best educated non-scientist to be like inherent inconsistencies. But these same problems appear here in these attempts of obviously very competent scholars to communicate complex concepts to a less-educated audience. Ordinary readers, among whom the authors must be included despite careers in science, cannot be expected to understand such special fields. We nevertheless have a need to grasp the gist of the host of facts that inevitably crop up in the persistent attempts of the competent to describe the essence of their understandings. 

Intelligent human beings everywhere wish for a glimpse of the unity questioned by Bohr that encompasses both love and justice. It was represented by the Egyptian goddess Maat from over 5,000 years ago. It must surely lie beyond the infinity of all external, exoteric rational analyses. This promise in relation to science is what we call a symptom of the wish for the new mythology of science, as though there has arisen a situation where only one more fact will help us to move towards the necessary union between the inside and the outside worlds that is presented to us by the very nature of existence in our milieu. We shall always have the need to search for that level of being that provides a sense of the meaning of life in the universe.

An Evaluation of Where We Have Arrived

Science, the falsely perceived bastion of objectivity, has now proved the necessity for including the state of the observer in its studies and results. Quantum mechanics has shown the curious physical facts that it is impossible to know both the position and motion of sub-atomic particles. Such findings in the hard science of physics has proven that what is so strongly felt in the humanities has much wider significance. Perhaps surprising to some, science directly supports our search for the wisdom of consciousness and the suggestions about the necessity for its wider scope that is found in past human creations. It is because of the refreshing breadth of understanding of these thinkers of the 20th century that in the 21st century we dare to approach an exploration of the relation between science and humanities, between the rational and the irrational. 

To finish off, here we relate a personal story by LMD of seeing Einstein in his natural surrounding in Princeton, New Jersey:

“It was the Spring of 1946. I had just been at Yale for a few months until the first months of my first springtime there. I had made friends with a number of fellow students among whom were some like Jim Barrrow, who had been a graduate student in the Department for a year before me.  He had invited me to visit him in Georgia during a Spring break period, and I had been happy to accept.

 Jim had already gone home a few days earlier, so to join him I took advantage of the fact that another friend, “Chuck” Huntingdon (whose Father was a well-known Geographer) was driving to Florida. I joined him in New Haven and we set out on our way.  That first day we got past New York and were slowly making our way south. He wanted to stop with a relative who lived in Princeton and with whom I was invited to spend the night. I happily accepted and it was next morning that the “event” took place.

We were sitting in the sunny front porch of his aunt’s house finishing our breakfasts.  It was beautifully warm and I was able to savour the clear Spring air and chat with Chuck’s Aunt.  She was telling us anecdotes about her life there at Princeton.

And then it happened!  Down the sidewalk on the other side of the lawn from where we were chatting, Albert Einstein walked by!  She said to us, ‘Oh! There’s Professor Einstein!   He usually comes by about now’: and there he was!  Unmistakably Mr. Einstein!  He looked much like a caricature of the man himself.  But there he walked; slowly and actually a little absentmindedly along the side walk, perhaps looking just a little lost over some question, but nevertheless quite recognizable with what I thought were old clothes and a pair of slightly mismatched shoes. Already my unexpected trip to Georgia was paying off in unexpected fashion.  It didn’t stop there but this event was for me a ‘stand-alone’ that made for adventure.”

Seeing the man himself in his oddly paired shoes left a very strong impression of his life outside the regular norms of modern day life. He was lost in his thoughts. While we may not have fully convinced all readers that we have reconciled science and the humanities in all respects, we trust that we have made it clear that there are misunderstandings of both that cloud their necessary balance in our understanding of ourselves and of humans as a species. We are the result of evolution, but we are also much more than just collections of physical particles.

———- Chapter 11: Creative Irrational in Everyone ——————————————-

——————- Table of Contents ————————————

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon

[4] Einstein, A. 1936. Physics and Reality. J. of the Franklin Institute; quoted on p. 290. in Ideas and Opinions. Bonanza Books, New York

[5] West, J.A. 1973. The Case for Astrology. Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. 310 pp.

[6] Irvine, W. 1955. Apes, Angels and Victorians. McGraw-Hill, New York, London, Toronto. 399 pp.

[7] Senge, P., B. Smith, N. Kruschwitx, J. Laur and S. Schlye. 2008. The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. Doubleday, N.Y., 381p.

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

[10] Coplestone, S.J.F. 1993. A History of Philosophy. Volume II, Medieval Philosophy from Augustine to Duns Scotus. Doubleday, New York.

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meister_Eckhart

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity

[13] Irvine, W. 1955. Apes, Angels and Victorians. McGraw-Hill, New York, London, Toronto. 399 pp.

[14] Shaw, G. B. 1931. Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch. London, Constable and Co., 271 pp.

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

[17] Kuhn, T.S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Univ. of Chicago Press. Chicago. 210pp.

[18] Einstein, A. 1954, Ideas and Opinions. Bonanza Books, New York. 377pp.

[19] Bohr, N. 1933. Light and Life. Nature 19: 421-423, 457-459.

[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jochen_Heisenberg

[21] Isaacson, W. 2008. Einstein: His Life and Universe. Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney. 675 pp.

[22] Oppenheimer, R. 1958. The Growth of Science and the Structure of Culture. p. 67-76 in Science and the Modern World View. Daedalus 87(1): 140 pp. 

[23] Holton, G. 1970. The Roots of Complementarity. p. 1015-1055 in The Making of Modern Science:Biographical Studies. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Science 99 (4): 732-1123.

[24] Baggott, J. 2011. The Quantum Story, A History in 40 Moments. Oxford University Press.

[25] Rosen R. 1991. Life Itself; A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. New York, Columbia University Press.

[26] Greene, B. 1999. The Elegant Universe. New York, W.W. Norton & Co.  

[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe

[28] Naydler, J. 1996. Goethe on Science: An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific Writings. Floris Books, Edinburgh. 141pp.

[29] Einstein, A. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. Geometry and Experience. C. Seelig (ed,) based on "Mein Weltbild”. Bonanza Books, New York. pp. 233-234.

[30] Einstein, A. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. Religion and Science. C. Seelig (ed,) based on "Mein Weltbild”. Bonanza Books, New York. pp. 39-40.

[31] Rosen, R.  1991.  Life Itself. A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life.  Columbia University Press.  New York.  285 pp.

[32] Jung, C.G. 1958.   Vol 7, The Bollingen Foundation, New York. pp. 261.

[33] Einstein, A. 1954. Ideas and Opinions. pp. 39-40, “Religion and Science”. C. Seelig (ed.) This book is based on "Mein Weltbild”. Bonanza Books, New York.

[34] Einstein, A. 1954. Ideas and Opinions, “Religion and Science”. C. Seelig (ed.) based on "Mein Weltbild”. Bonanza Books, New York. p. 38

[35] Lomborg, B. 2007. Cool It: The Sceptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 253pp.

[36] Irvine, W. 1955. Apes, Angels and Victorians. McGraw-Hill, New York, London, Toronto. 399 pp.

[37] Naydler, J. 2005. Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt. Inner Traditions. Rochester, Vermont. 466 pp.

[38] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2017. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer. Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT.

[39] Kingsley, P. 2003. Reality. The Golden Sufi Center, Inverness, California. 591 pp.

[40] Greene, B. 2000. The Elegant Universe. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House. New York. 448 pp. 

[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstring_theory

Chapter 9: Love, Comedy and Mystery: Power the Irrational

In approaching the irrational in humans we need to bear in mind the fact that inner or esoteric knowledge at different levels of being may be conveyed in many different forms. We have made reference several times to the knowledge we receive in direct experience at specific times and locations in our lives. In the last chapter several examples of poetry were explored as a means of perceiving the creative irrational in human’s longstanding effort to describe our higher levels of existence. Such examples attempt to provide a straightforward layout of levels. Different styles of presentation may be suited to different times and occasions with different results. Tales from other cultures have adopted other styles or devices for these purposes. A number of Greek fables and legends have been used to point to difficulties that stand in the way of our ability to see situations for what they are. Aesop's fables, such as the well-known story of the fox and the grapes, are among the many that point to the blindness that follows from pride, gluttony, or sloth. At one level of comprehension, these reminders of the "deadly sins" as dangers to personal development, point out how difficult it is to mount any efforts towards the necessary standing apart and objectivity of an observer.

It can sometimes be recognized that in this process of transmission and adoption of stories, we may lose touch with much of what might have been their intended value. They are prone to be taken on the lower level at which we find ourselves in attempts at explanation, such as in the modern weak, if not futile explanations for the conception, let alone the actual construction of the great archaeological remnants.

In this vein of our failures to understand, many of the stories developed from early writings have in modern times been turned into moral lessons, considered important for the guidance of the faulty behaviour of others towards a certain conformity with social norms. Social morality has always been an important motivation of the literal minded, and over the ages it has even been used to justify the commission of atrocities against the non-conforming. Certainly it implies a rather different, more behavioural, concept of wisdom than we are interested in developing here. It continually raises the question of what is required to maintain any desired level of personal comprehension.

The familiar poignant Greek story of the youth, Narcissus, who became so enamored of his reflection in a pool of water that he drowned in it, can at one level be taken as a moral tale of the dangers of pride. At another, closer to the symbolic, it may help us see that the unrecognized egoistic behaviour that underlies virtually all of our activity and attitudes, may contain a compelling but false concept of love and beauty that can cause us to drown in our illusions. In the story of Narcissus, if our sense of “level” is not entirely lost, our sympathy for naïve youth can show us how our early unperceived illusions lead us away from life, rather than, as in his innocence he thought, into closer contact with it.

In this chapter we explore a number of examples of the creative irrational in writings that appeal to more directly to our higher emotional sides through those truly irrational aspects of the human condition: love, comedy and the mysterious.

Love

The power and motivation of an attraction between life forms is ubiquitous. It ensures appropriate care and upbringing of offspring in support of successful procreation. It maintains connections between members of families and family groups in support of safety and security. This is true for many species. But in humans, Love takes on new levels of connection. It is a subject far beyond the ability of this book. But it is necessary to mention it in regards to the creative irrational as a trait unique to humans.

As one well-known example of the power of love in Western Culture we remind the readers of the great works of Shakespeare, in particular the interactions of Romeo and Julliet[1]. This is a story of a love connection that drives the main characters to act totally against their rational needs of food, shelter and procreation. In the end Love drives them to suicide – an act that is truly uniquely human. Nothing could be more irrational than the termination of all of an individual’s possibilities. But this is an extreme example. The power of Love is found in many of our life moments but should never be dismissed as ordinary. 

There are many other literary tales told by Sufis, in very different styles. In generations past, stories told by the Persian poet Omar Khayyám, especially the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám”, were widely known as Sufi “Love” poetry[2]. As Shah points out however, it was less well-recognized that the translation by the Irish poet Fitzgerald, depended much more on the English then it did on the Persian original[3]. From the point of view of Sufism, since Khayyám was not the teacher of a school, but only an individual exemplar of a particular school, his poetry had lesser importance to them than that of a school, hence was hardly worthy of the extensive reviews and evaluations with which western society greeted it.

A much better know and more ancient poem is that of Farīd ud-Dīn, also known as Aṭṭār which means “apothecary” or “chemist”[4].  The poem is known variously as “The Conference of the Birds” or the “Parliament of the Birds”[5]. It is a somewhat lengthy poem, written late in its author’s long life.  He was known as “an illuminate, author and organizer” of the Sufis, and it is highly recommended reading for those interested in the famous Sufi literary traditions. Attar died over a century before the birth of the British poet Chaucer[6], in whose works references to Attar’s Sufism are to be found. It is also pointed out by Shah that there seems little likelihood that strong parallels between Attar’s initiatory Sufism and the rituals of the Order of the Garter, founded over one hundred years later in England, were illustrative of simple coincidence. It is also said that late in his life Attar was visited by the rather more famous Sufi poet, Jalluladin Balkhi, known as Rumi.  It was he who made public more of the initiatory rituals of the Sufi lore pursued by Attar.

We wish to devote further attention in this book to the creative irrational in “Love” poems by looking at the work of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī or simply as Rumi[7]. He is the greatest, and currently best known and widely read of the Sufi poets. Rumi was born in Balkh, a very ancient and famous city of Northern Afghanistan. It is said to have been founded as a settlement by Alexander the Great, but after later becoming a well-know Buddhist center, was conquered by the Moslems in 653 CE, becoming an equally important centre for Moslems. It was known as a major centre for the learning that was passed on to Middle Ages Europe. It was overrun by the Mongols in the early years of the 13th century, leading the father and family of Rumi, to flee to the area of southern Anatolia. Rumi thus developed in the area of Konya, in Southern Turkey, which seems also to be the place of origin or at least dissemination of the stories of the Mullah Nasr Edin. 

Rumi, inherited a school founded by his father, who is known, in parallel with the ancient Parmenides of Phocaean origin, as a great jurist, theologian and mystic, and who was also known as a Sufi. Rumi apparently accepted leadership of the school through the mutual acclaim of its students, among whom he was well-known. He in his turn wrote a large number of Love Poems, apparently as one means of describing his sense of an infinite love, found and lost again through the presence of Shams of Tabriz. The sense of deep love and loss are stunningly conveyed by the translations of one of his chief modern exponents, Coleman Barks[8], to whom we are deeply indebted for conveying the subtlety and beauty of the poems themselves. Rumi was also the founder of the Order of Maglevi  Dervishes, commonly called “The Whirling Dervishes”. A large, beautiful and well-tended tomb at Konya marks the place of his interment.

            We begin here with an extract from one of the visionary poems entitled “The Visions of Daquqi“, in which we feel is portrayed various aspects of the mystic. It highlights a complex non-linear thought that at one level of comprehension can be seen as irrational in nature:

‘Husam, tell about the visions of Daquqi, who said,

“I have travelled East and West not knowing which way I was going, following the moon, lost inside God.”

Someone asked, “Why do you go barefooted over the stones and thorns?”

What?”, he answered.

“What?

A bewildered lover doesn’t walk on feet; He or she walks on love. There are no “long” Or “short” trips for those. No time. 

The body learned from the spirit how to travel. A saint’s body moves in the unconditioned way, though it seems to be in conditionedness.

Daquqi said, 

“One day I was going along looking to see in people the shining of the Friend, so I would recognize the ocean in a drop, the sun as a bright speck. 

I came to the shore at twilight and saw seven candles. I hurried along the beach toward them. The light of each lifted into the sky. I was amazed. My amazement was amazed. Waves of bewilderment break over my head.

What are these candles that no one seems to see?

In the presence of such lights people were looking for lamps to buy!

Then the seven became one in the middle of the sky’s rim.

Then that fanned out to seven again. There were connections between the candles that cannot be said.

I saw, but I cannot say.

I ran closer. I fell. I lay there awhile.

I got up and ran again. I had no head and no feet.

They became seven men, and then seven trees, so dense with leaves and fruit that no limbs were visible.

Flashes of light spurted from each fruit like juice!

And most marvelous of all was that hundreds of thousands of people were passing beside the trees risking their lives, sacrificing everything, to find some scrap of shade.

They made peculiar parasols out of pieces of wool. They tried everything.

And no one saw the trees with their tremendous shade!

The caravans had no food, and yet food was dropping all about them. If anyone had said,

“Look over here!”

They would have thought him insane or drunk.

How can this happen? Or am I dreaming?

I walk up to the trees. I eat the fruit.

I might as well believe.

And I still see people searching so desperately for an unripe grape, with these vineyards all around them, heavy with perfect bunches.

. . .’

We present this extract to highlight the power and impact of love captured in poetry as another example of the creative irrational in our human natures. While many animals show strong bonds between mating pairs, parents and children and within groups of individuals, the role of love in the lives of humans goes far beyond the requirements for sex and procreation to something that is at a much higher level of human experience. 

This much shorter poem is typical of the love literature entitled “Judge a Moth by the Beauty of its Candle”:

‘You are the king’s son,

Why do you close yourself up?

Become a lover.

Don’t aspire to be a general

or a minister of State.

One is a boredom for you,

the other a disgrace.

You’ve been a picture on the bathhouse wall

long enough. No one recognizes you here, do they?

God’s lion disguised as a human being!’

I say that and put down the book

I was studying, Hariri’s Maqumat.

There is no early and late for us.

The only way to measure a lover

is by the grandeur of the beloved.

Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.

Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.

He is the intelligent essence

of what is everywhere at once, seeing.

This short poem connects the lover and the loved. It is not laid out as a logical relationship. In fact its power is in its irrationality. How would one analytically measure a moth by its attraction to a flame?  Of course for the intent moth such love leads to his ultimate death by fire. In regards to the theme of the book, actions resulting in death is the ultimate in the creative irrational.

We also believe that it is worth noting the following piece entitled “This We Have Now”:

This we have now

is not imagination.

This is not

grief or joy.

Not a judging state,

or an elation,

or sadness.

Those come

and go

This is the presence

that doesn’t.

It’s dawn Husam,

here in the splendor of coral

inside the Friend, the simple truth

of what Hallaj said.

What else could human beings want?

When grapes turn to wine,

they’re wanting

this.

When the night sky pours by,

it’s really a crowd of beggars,

and they want some of this!

This

that we have now

created the body, cell by cell,

like bees building a honeycomb,

The human body and the universe

grew from this, not this

from the universe and the human body.

            One final example of Sufi poetry that has come to our notice, although not from Rumi but from his possibly even better known successor, the great Sufi master Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known as “Hafiz”[9], who lived and worked about one century later than Rumi.  He too seems to have taken on the accouterments of the earlier Masters, writing poetry that intrigued as had Rumi’s.  Hafiz was said to have written many thousands of poems of which we wish to quote one that we found especially intriguing:

                                    Lifts Beyond Conception:

                                                Independent

                                      Of this body is my mind

                                    When the Call from the Golden Nightingale

                                    Lifts and Pours my Being thoughout  

                                                The Sky.

                                    Independent of this mind is my

                                                Heart.

                        When God unfurls even a shadow of His tress

                                    Upon my bare shoulder.

                                    Soverign of my illumined heart.

                                    Is the indivisible knowledge

                        In the gaze of my spirit’s wings climbing to

                                    Such a sublime height they each 

                                                Become the Sun

                                                      Itself

                                    And reside-perched upon every throne

                                                Known to Man.

                                                       Hafiz,

                                    The Sufi path of Love is so astoundingly 

                                                            Glorius

                                                            That

                                                    One day each

                                                Wayfarer upon it will become

                                                     The Inconceivable-

                                                     The Creator of God

                                                            Himself.  [10]      

            Any selection of particular poems from an anthology, is itself necessarily subjective. It has already passed through the hands of a modern translator as well as, in this case, the tastes of authors with a scientific background. The beauty and also the remarkable visions of the poet, certainly in the last of the poems quoted, seem to equal the finest perceptions of present day physics and mathematics in what is known as “system theory”[11]. It is difficult for us to place such poetry in the perspective of being the product of a 13th or 14th  century writer of mystical religious tracts, without vastly broadening the scope of what modern points of view attribute to such early writers, let alone the even more ancient composers of myth. And yet we find here one of the clearest envisionings that we have encountered, referring to the movement beyond space and time required in appreciation of the perception of a new vision on dimensions in models of modern physics. Is there a hint here of our questions about how, with knowable states of being, it is possible to experience the universal guide to models of reality?

Comedy

In our culture, ideas that are important enough to be accompanied by a persistent belief that their subject matter, particularly of what constitutes the higher, must also be a serious business, it follows as almost a habit that the serious is represented as needing to be accorded a certain solemnity; an attitude that is socially sanctioned by the more conservative among us as evidence of right attitude. But this popular modern view is sometimes thrown into question by ancient parables and myths. We need to examine the usefulness of different models, which emerge in quotes such as these from Schopenhauer:

            “A sense of humor is the only divine quality of man.”[12]

            and

“the only divine quality in man is humour because humour is a consciousness behind consciousness, an ego behind ego, an observer on a different level."[13]

For readers who have spent time in the directed solemnity of a church, synagogue or mosque these statements may come as a bit of a shock. An appreciation of the challenges of understanding attitudes that are “appropriate” and important are illustrated in the different ways in which the tales of different traditions are told. From what is said in the foregoing quotes, the telling of a joke holds the power of exposing the reader to an unexpected change in level[14].  This change in levels of appreciation is the main feature of making jokes, as indeed it is of any joke telling, no matter what the origin of the culture from which it is told.  The culture gives us the setting of the factual material and can be recognized by the background used. For example the most common basis of modern Western joke telling such as encountered in sitcoms depend on the misfortunes and foibles of the characters. In contrast, the Mullah Nasr Edin stories of the mid-eastern mode present a way of thinking and presenting ideas that doesn’t rely on weakness and misfortune but highlights “the fool” as a person who has limited awareness of his situation – and begging the question in the reader of how to be “less of a fool”[15].

One popular bearer of wise observations in the humorous is Mullah Nasr Edin, or simply Nasreddin, in the tales of the Sufi traditions originating from the Middle East [16]. These stories have their own particular comedic style that is virtually the opposite of the seriousness used in the much older pedagogical lessons contained in the Hebrew stories such as those of King Solomon. The Mullah and his associates repeatedly expose us to paradoxical situations in which the customary logic of our rational ways of thinking contrives to end us up in some kind of trouble. That is, the stories build upon the habitual associations of ordinary “thinking” to create a given expectation that is then turned on its figurative head. It is the technique of any good jokester. The fact that what ought to be a perfectly sensible idea is found to have an inappropriate result may show us something of the assumptions we make without seeing them. It may also remind us of the essential need for the “sly man”, one whose senses are so alert that they are constantly watching out for the possibility of being tricked or tricking others into any one of our unrecognized but frequent deviations from the strait path.

One of the best known examples of Mullah stories, that has been copied from its original setting into that of many other cultures, is that of a man who, one night came upon the Mullah, down on hands and knees carefully searching the ground under a street light. He had lost his key. What seemed a long time after joining the unsuccessful search, the man enquired just where the Mullah thought he had lost his key, to which the Mullah replied, "Oh! I lost it in my house, but there is no light in there so I came out here to look."

Another favorite story tells of the Mullah travelling to a neighbouring town to attend the bazaar with his friend Abdullah, who was something of a trickster. After the two friends had spent a long and tiring day slowly making their way through the dense crowds in the market, they secured a bed to rest for the night in a huge hall with many other weary travellers. The Mullah was so hesitant and procrastinating about choosing a place to sleep that Abdullah enquired of him what the trouble was. The Mullah confided that he was so confused by all the new things and the crowds that he was afraid that if he went to sleep he would even forget his own name! At which Abdullah replied,

"Don't worry, old friend. You see these balloons? Well, all you have to do is tie one on your toe, and when you wake up you will see the balloon and know that you are the one with the balloon tied to your toe!"

The Mullah's mind was somewhat put at ease and so after tying on the balloon, he went to sleep. However, while he was asleep his friend jokingly removed the balloon and tied it on his own toe. In the morning Abdullah was awakened by the loud lamentations from the Mullah.

"What's the Matter?" he enquired innocently.

"Oh, woe is me", moaned the Mullah. "I knew something terrible was bound to happen. I can see by the balloon on your toe that you are me. But who, then, am I?"

            Though this ingenious short story the reader is exposed to one of the greatest questions every encountered by humans: “Who am I?” Just as we recognize that a picture “paints a thousand words”[17], this joke raises questions on which thousands of books have been written.

Among other characteristics to be emphasized in the comedy of the Sufi tradition is the notion of the ultimate unity of all things, to which attention is drawn through humorous vignettes, illustrating the essential circularity of reality.

“The Mullah was walking alone on a deserted road. Night was approaching, when a troop of horsemen approached. In a sudden burst of imagination, fear brought to mind how they might try to rob him, or impress him into the army. In this fear he jumped over a nearby low rock wall and found himself in a graveyard, where he threw himself down.

Of course the travelers, innocent of any such motives, were curious at his observed behaviour and so followed him around the fence, and came upon him lying perfectly still in the graveyard on his back on the ground. Out of curiosity, one of them said,

“What is the matter - can we help? Why are you here?”

The Mullah realizing his mistake, said, “It’s more complicated than you think! You see, I am here because of you, and you, you are here because of me!”

A final example illustrates the fact that we often pay lip service to our consideration for telling the “truth” to others, when it does not necessarily turn out that way. This tale at the same time serves to illustrate the importance given by the Sufis to actions rather than words.

One day, the Mullah was up repairing the shingles on his roof when a man called him to come down into the street. The Mullah did as asked, and when he approached the fellow on street level he asked him, “What do you want?”

“I need money,” was the reply.

“Why didn’t you tell me that when I was up on the roof?” asked the Mullah.

“ I was ashamed to beg,” answered the man.

“Come up on my roof” said the Mullah and the man followed him up.

When they got there the Mullah proceeded to continue fixing his roof, saying nothing. After a few moments, the man coughed. Without looking up the Mullah said,

“I have no money to give you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that when we were down below?” exclaimed the man.

“Well, if I had done that, how could you have recompensed me for bringing me

down?” asked the Mullah.

In the extensive exposition of the beliefs and practices of the Sufis, Shah recounts many more tales of Nasrudin[18]. The humour of the ridiculous that is used by both these stories adds to a directness that is such a significant part of learning. Jokes are a widely appreciated currency. The special subtlety that conveys the contradictions can be perceived at various levels of meaning without any particular special preparation of the auditor, see as evidence the receptiveness of young children for a good joke. In general, the telling of the message always has the element of surprise that attracts the discoverer in us, whereas explanation would require enough words and complexity to test the patience of the most avid puzzle-solver. Cultural context also helps prepare a listener for special, more difficult interpretations. But as is the case with many ancient myths and stories, some of the intended sense may come simply in the course of repeated hearings of the original; it is a technique we have earlier noted as an aspect of the age-old art of story-telling.

The Mystery of Time and Space

In the foregoing Sufi literature in particular we are introduced gently to some of the more difficult, what are often described as esoteric, problems of our personal and internal views of time and space. Especially in the scientific period of Western society, through which we have just come, if phenomena were not externally tangible or measurable or explicitly rational, they were clearly suspect as “subjective,” hence by definition were in the field of the internal which Science defines before-hand as suspect, or simply “illusory.” While our belief is that this age of literality needs to be challenged, it is not clear to what extent we are comfortable with others in finding the limits of perception between reality and illusion. We need to clarify our necessarily personal questions about this. Without at least explicit recognition of some of the uncertainties, we cannot be confident with development of what is represented in the metaphors of myth.

The problem was clearly laid out in Rumi’s poem, “The Vision of Daquqi.” There he especially clearly portrayed the use of memories in our personal search for reality through what may only be imaginary, mechanical or automatic internal mental associations. The images that emerge from the poems of Rumi and Hafiz are as sensitive as are images conveyed by a modern van Gogh painting. Can this imagery be understood as their authors intended and communicated it to us? And if so, how do we know that our own delicate impressions are received and understood comparably by other human beings? We need to examine questions of sensation that arise during mental and emotional responses to our esoteric and exoteric worlds.

In this respect, of course, the power of the irrational has been remarkably strongly conveyed by the great masters of art in the form of the images of the Ancient Egyptians.  We add here an image that contains much symbolic content that speaks of the dependence of humans on their concepts and worldview (Figure 33). Much of the understanding of our lives is based on our unquestioned concepts whether irrational or not. In the example in the figure, the source of all life is portrayed as not just the physical nourishment of the body, but of the very irrational concept of the quality of life itself.  A poignant reminder is given in the image of the goddess, Mut, allowing the Pharaoh in the form of a young man, to breath the influence of the ankh, symbol of life itself, into his nostrils.

Figure 33. Pharaoh breathes in life in the form of the ankh. Abydos, Egypt.

 There is a vast literature related to this more than physical worldview. We cannot review it all in a single Chapter. Much of it appears to result from particular psychological phenomena that, if not abnormal, are at least outside what we need for our usual purposes. Nor can we venture into fields as foreign to our natures as those once popularly invoked by séances, or other approaches to necromancy and equally questionable magical practices that were called “spiritualizations.”  These generally appear to us today to have represented the influence of isolated, perhaps abnormal, personal psychologies, which we now feel justified to dismiss as “special” to the point of being aberrant. We make no attempt to evaluate them further here. We have in mind for study instead the imagery that is within the normal lines of artistic inquiry, hence more readily defined as “natural”. It is still seen as difficult to anticipate or explain experiences of life that are beyond normal life. We have already provided one example of these rare occasions in Chapter 1 with the quote from Philo[19].  Saint Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus continues to have world-wide influence in the perpetuation of the Christian beliefs. While such “mysterious” events are perceived as transient and rare, they are accepted as normal-enough to be part of the human condition.

We believe that there are at least two classes of such phenomena that arise in us, often unintentionally, but which seem to come from genuinely mysterious relations between our customary view of our external world, and what appear to us as esoteric phenomena. The first of these phenomena is usually referred to as “predictive dreams” that give rise to questions about the accepted orderly sequence of time events that are customary for us. The second, is a more general relationship between events observed in our personal lives that we usually call “coincidences.” Their significance appears important to us but cannot be “explained” by appeal to accepted ideas about either space or time. In general they are experienced as incidents of almost extra dimensional extension such as was dramatically described by Philo who had no prior examples to help him with understanding. His experiences even preceded the experience which affected St. Paul so dramatically on his journey along the road to Damascus, an experience that changed the nature of his whole outlook on life.

For predictive dreams, the written evidence is very limited. They have not been well documented, aside from the principal reference written by Dunne[20]. In our personal experience, tests of these dreams may be made using a simple technique suggested by Dunne. He suggested that by using it, observations made in the dream are verifiable later according to externally established criteria. The process does not explain them.

While predictive dreams are rarely mentioned in our adult world, we found that once the possibility of having predictive dreams was accepted and mentioned by us, many others told us that they had experienced them as well. In fact, we found that occurrences were much more common than we had first believed, apparently because there is a general reluctance to mention them. The recipients recognized that they were so inexplicable that telling them risked exposing themselves to accusations of some kind of mental imbalance. Such is often the power of “public opinion” over expressions of our personal, but unusual experiences.

The method of study suggested by Dunne, was regarded at the time as far from ordinary. He described a simple procedure for first recording and later recalling the details of such dreams. Since it was originally published in 1927, the book has become widely known as a credible attempt to understand what the author refers to as the “multidimensionality of time,” using statistically and mathematically valid principles of mathematical analysis. He proposed an explanation related to what he called “the infinite regress.” While these special dreams are now much better known than when he first wrote about them, and the infinite regress is much less well recognized or even accepted for describing aspects of the real world, the idea of predictive dreams is still not commonly accepted in scholarly circles, and is generally questioned by others unless instances are verified by personal experience.

For our immediate purposes the importance of this early work lies in the fact that it casts light on the problem of how readily, in the absence of experiences verified by us personally, we may reject or restrict acceptance of observations of even relatively common phenomena unless they seem to be in full accord with prior expectations. A successful application of Dunne’s technique to one of our own dreams, showed us how our apparently embedded personal beliefs of the uni-directionality of time, are at variance with our own direct experience. The reason for such common rejection is not well understood, but seems related to the fact that we see no “reasonable” explanation for what we know happened with us.  However, acceptance of the possibility is of major importance in relation to problems raised in the structuring of myths and their significance. The science that we have been taught can influence us to be strongly suspicious of any inner experiences that are not strictly within external limits that are accepted by our peers.

A second example concerns a problem of communication raised and reviewed in some detail by Jung in a number of his essays. The evidence for what are commonly called “meaningful coincidences,” was known and studied extensively by him in relation to his psychiatric practice. He named the instances cases of “Synchronicity,[21]” which he defined as an “acausal connecting principle.” As a major source of his ideas about the importance of simultaneity between events, he made sincere acknowledgement to his friend Richard Wilhelm, in a tribute published in Wilhelm’s book, “The Secret of the Golden Flower.[22]” He pointed out that Wilhelm’s book actually originated in the East in writings and traditions established by the Chinese poet and philosopher, Lao-tzu, and his commentaries on the traditional Tao-Te-Ching.  Its findings correspond with the central ideas of the Tao[23].

Jung described his investigations of these phenomena in his psychological studies of patients, in which he often found evidence for the occurrence of acausal connections. As he pointed out, they are views of events in our external world that are in essential agreement with what can be understood from Eastern philosophies, but are little studied and generally not accepted in Western cultural circles. This changed after Jung’s exposé and careful observations and studies of them were published. The phenomena appeared in the minds of many of the patients he interviewed. That is, while the occurrence of predictive dreams was noted for many individuals, hence are properly called esoteric phenomena, they seem to relate directly to events or influences outside us, or between ourselves and others, hence become phenomena that appear in our exoteric world, where we try to judge them.

Here again it seems necessary to point out that while the occurrence of “coincidences” is frequently noticed in the ordinary world, its significance is usually dismissed with a shrug as unusual but of no lasting significance. This may be because of the lack of a context for it in Western experience, literature or traditions. This deficiency has however, now been more than adequately overcome in a book by Peat[24], a professionally qualified physicist who originally worked and published with Bohm[25]. His work places the Ideas of Synchronicity in perspective in the physical principles of variation that arise in characteristics of motion. But one of his most original contributions arises in his perceptions of Synchronicity and principles of Divination that have dominated the thinking of some of the lesser known societies that make up what we term “civilization.” As he puts it, “scientific explanations sometimes fail to capture the essence of actual experience....” which he exemplifies in characteristics of social organization and beliefs of the Naskapi Indians of Labrador and the Neolithic Shang people of the Yellow River of China.

In more modern times these early beginnings have been shown to be related to the formulations of Information Theory and the experimental understanding made clear by the work on dissipative structures by Prigogine[26]. His work focused on energetic systems such as fast flowing streams that produce chaotic, yet stable and somewhat reproducible structures such as whirlpools and eddies. Through such studies the relation of this scientific work to the understanding that has emerged in the I Ching becomes a part of a more comprehensive view of the whole of our Universe. They represent an upsetting of our sometimes almost naive expectations of the stability of both space and time in relation to what we accept as reality.

We do not propose here to try to study either of these two phenomena in further detail. However, it will be obvious to our readers that they are phenomena that need to be acknowledged and taken into account in our studies of the subject matter of myths and the uses that myths make of metaphor. That is, we have before us evidence that the worlds to which humankind is exposed have characteristics that seem foreign to our ordinary experience, but must, at the very least, be a reflection of the operation of levels of laws that are above or below those recognized in our personal hierarchies of ideas. What we have termed higher levels of perception in relation to some of the phenomena described in myth, may well have a quality of reality that we cannot judge without sufficient preparation of our own powers of perception and discrimination.

These relations require that we make the effort to question widely accepted yet superficial views of both space and time. Conventional science has already investigated them and finds convincing evidence to support serious consideration of another generality, perhaps expressible through the addition of other “dimensions.”[27] This stands out in the fact that our intellectual faculties cannot readily explain such well-known phenomena as love and justice using modern science. We can personally observe phenomena related to them, but they require a fundamental change in perceptions to find a point of view in accord with any testable scientific methodology. These two enigmatic phenomena do, however, require examination of our own preconceptions. Do they provoke unexpected perceptions of what we might call different “levels of being?”

A Summary Evaluation

We can gradually come to realize that the world in which we live, when sensed in our fullest capacity for comprehension, communication and mutual interaction, can lead to an appreciation of levels of a reality that are beyond our customary expectations and experiences. Taking them together we begin to comprehend the necessity for the voluntary undertaking of a “preparation’ that has been understood by the myth makers, but bears little relation to what we, in our present western world know as “education.” In the process we may begin to develop a taste for what is meant by the phrase “levels of understanding”[28].

The extent to which this depends on a coming together of new facts, unexpected experiences, and on the guidance available from others whose experience transcends ours, depends on a number of intangibles of which we can learn with time.  But whatever transpires, we need to have help from outside ourselves in order to appreciate them.  It should by now be clear that all this embodies  a wisdom beyond our present conscious rational comprehension. 

Perhaps there is no other route through which meanings that have been attributed to this expression by the intelligence of our minds alone can with patience be extended to what is real.  Gradually the examples of unknown and unrecognized aspects of our experience help us appreciate that our personal development cannot take place without the leaven of questions arising from an intelligence that balances the understanding of our minds with our inner emotional and physical sensitivities, which we sometimes simply call “the heart”.

            We believe that the foregoing examples can help us appreciate the strong creative irrational forces of love, comedy and mystery in the life of modern day humans.

———- Chapter 10: Science versus Humanities; Rational versus Irrational - The Irreconcilable? ——-

———————- Table of Contents ——————————-

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam

[3] Shah, I. 1964. The Sufis. Doubleday, New York. 404 pp.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attar_of_Nishapur

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi

[8] Barks, C. (translator). 2004. The Essential Rumi. Harper One. New York.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez

[10] Hafiz, Shams-ud-din Muhammed. 1999. The great “Sufi Master”.  The Gift: Poems.  Translated by Daniel Ladinsky.  Penguin Compass. 333 pp.

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory

[12] Schopenhauer, A. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/196118-a-sense-of-humour-is-the-only-divine-quality-of

[13] Schopenhauer, A. https://carljungdepthpsychologysite.blog/2017/03/08/carl-jung-people-always-have-some-scapegoat/

[14] Arthur Koestler. 1967.  The Ghost in the Machine. Hutchins of London.384 pp.

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin

[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin

[17] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_picture_paints_a_thousand_words

[18] Shah, I. 1964. The Sufis. Doubleday, New York. 404 pp.

[19] Sandmel, S. 1979. Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press. Oxford.  204 pp.

[20] Dunne, J. W. 1939 (original 1927). An Experiment with Time. Faber and Faber, London. 256 pp.

[21] Jung, C.G. 1969. “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” pp 417-531, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Volume 8. The Bollingen Series, XX.Pantheon Books. New York.588pp.

[22] Wilhelm, R. and C.G. Jung. 1999 . The Secret of the Golden Flower. Routledge London. pp 137.

[23] Fung Yu-LAN. 1989  (original edition 1931). Chuang-Tzu; A Taoist Classic. Foreign Languages Press, Beijing. 150 pp.  See also: Merton, Thomas. 2010. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New Directions, New York. 159 pp.

[24] Peat, F.D. 1987/88. Synchronicity; The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. Bantam New Age Books, New York. 245pp.

[25] Bohm, D. and F.D. Peat. 1987. Science, Order and Creativity. Bantam Books, New York.

[26] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system

[27] Greene, B. 1999. The Elegant Universe. New York, W.W. Norton & Co.  

[28] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2015. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer. Inner Traditions.