Scientific knowledge must become human understanding. That is, I believe, the only way in which humanity can acquire the moral strength to control technology.
Priests suggest that by the grace of God it is the individual at his most mature who survives! Silly stuff—fit only for those whose failure to live here and now makes them require another chance.
The idea of God lessens man. These words will not be forgotten, for they are both true and timely. Every false or confusing belief ultimately does harm to man, and today we are coming to understand this. Moreover, when this is known by any individual, he is on the way to being saved from nihilism, for, uninhibited by false religion, he will then open himself to anything bringing him the experience of perfection, the recovery of the joy of living.
This vision of a unity transcending all our current intellectual categories—physical, organic, mental, and “spiritual”—seized me and long lay quiescent in the depths of my mind awaiting its time. I am still its involuntary servant, doomed to go on cantering around seeking everywhere signs of an emerging unity, a man without a profession but to be a hunter of unity.
The scientific search for order is one specialized expression of an earlier and more general “religious” search for unity. No psychological need for a transcendental harmonizing principle will remain when man has once seen with compelling clarity the actual ordered unity of this natural universe, comprehending all its extraordinary variety and regions of apparent chaos. We are approaching a comprehensive unified view of the totality of experience, and to contribute my bit to it is my struggle and pleasure. We cannot today anticipate its full quality or all its characteristic details, but this unified philosophical view must come, and I have had a glimpse of it, seen from my own standpoint.
There is present on many levels in nature a tendency toward order, form, and symmetry; hence in living systems toward organic coordination; and in man toward personal coordination; this tendency being realized when circumstances are favorable.
This conception of a pervasive order-generating tendency will be seen to be one of the most powerful ideas which the conscious human mind has ever received from its less conscious levels. It is not new; consciously or unconsciously it has haunted many civilizations. But in our context it has a new significance and power. When it has seized the whole person it becomes more than an intellectual idea. It implies a mode of feeling, a style of thinking, and a way of living, a Tao in words. If I am not mistaken it lies behind all past religions and present sciences. It is the aim of these pages to show that this idea is rooted in the character of the entire universe of our experience. The time for this universal principle has arrived, and it must now unfold in the minds of many.
The human subject is more important than anything else. All the greatest doctrines, religious or political, have found their ultimate sanction in the quality of personal experience and aspiration, for in this lies the dignity and uniqueness of man and his ability to transcend himself. This is the treasure we must restore and preserve. Any doctrine which seeks to override or neglect this is the enemy of our humanity.
No science, and no group of sciences, has yet any understanding of the status or role of consciousness in man, in animals, or in the universe as a whole. My view is that until we can interpret mental processes as organized in a hierarchy of levels, each marked by its function, we shall achieve no clarification of this puzzling issue: the status of consciousness in the universe.
I use “nature” to include the mind. I am concerned with the totality of immediate human awareness, and all its expressions: emotional states, intellectual processes, scientific observations, and all that can be inferred from them. To begin by separating the physical universe from human consciousness certainly distorts our thinking. The existence of the self, capable of awareness, must form an integral part of any total world view. The universe within and the universe without are two aspects of one total universe of experience.
I remember the shock I experienced when I first realized that we possess no fundamental knowledge whatever. Like Socrates the only thing we can be certain of is our basic ignorance. I mean this in the most literal sense. Centuries of philosophy and science have left us fundamental ignoramuses. No reliable assertion can be made today on any fundamental problem, except this assertion of ignorance. None of the sciences is unified, not even separately. Gödel has warned us that algebra is impotent to provide a manifestly self-consistent theory including arithmetic. Biology possesses no fully reliable ideas. Psychology stutters. What has gone wrong? Where are we?
We must discover by trying it out whether the ordering tendency in organic nature and in the human organism and mind, properly exploited, is not more helpful than God ever was. If only simple ideas can save the world, here is one that might. It has great power.
The known universe may be arranged in superclusters, or clusters of galaxies, and these in suns or solar systems, and (in our case, the Earth) in geological formations, minerals, crystals, molecules, atoms, nucleons, and whatever ultimate particles may one day be found. That is a quick view of the single inorganic hierarchy of levels of structure from large units to smaller ones. In sharp contrast to this unique hierarchy there is the internal hierarchical structure of every organism, from the organism itself to organs, tissue, cells, micelles, biomolecules, and atoms. This summary statement may not be complete, but it causes one to think. There seems to be one very general type of ordering nearly everywhere in the universe!
The universe is highly structured, both as a whole and in each organism, in a series of levels, each of which is marked by a unit of characteristic form.
The fact which we cannot, it seems, deny is that over vast regions of space and immense periods of time (at least since living systems began to emerge on the Earth) the tendency toward disorder has not been powerful enough to arrest the formation of the great inorganic hierarchy and the myriad organic ones.
The aim is to use the most general features of the known universe to enable us the better to order our thinking. Wherein is nature better ordered than our own minds are today, prejudiced as they are by faulty traditions? What pattern of ideas, or basic world view, can we derive from the universe and thereby understand external nature and our own minds better? What is primary in external nature may also be primary in human thought. If so, we can make a step toward the unification of nature and thought. The ability of mind to understand nature will then no longer be a puzzle.
It is a view of the relation of the human heart, mind, and will to universal factors. It is the germ of a new psychology, one which sees the human mind to be as much a part of the universe as is any other part.
This experience does not pervade the universe. It arises only where and when a member of our species is in the appropriate condition.
The world view asserts that the known universe as a whole, and every organism, including man, contains a graded sequence of units in which each of which a formative tendency has been, or still is, present. Nature is everywhere creating forms when conditions permit, just as there is an order-generating tendency in our own minds, when not pathological, this mental tendency being a particular expression of a universal tendency.
I simply assert that this view represents today the optimal path toward the unity of knowledge, as one aspect of the urgently needed integration of man as individual and community.
The human imagination is incomparable, no other animal possesses it, and all that man possesses comes to him from it. It is more than divine.
“Consciousness,” in the abstract, separated from what it is an awareness of, is as empty and redundant as matter, in the abstract, separated from the spatial pattern it determines.
This is a time of moral nihilism. But this generalization conceals remarkable underlying facts. Man is a thinking animal and cannot be expected to be capable of living in a manner proper to his hereditary nature unless he knows how to think. Fully adapted thought is indispensable. But this is an age when man is scarred by partial sciences which provide no acceptable foundations for thought. “Scientific man” drifts aimlessly without foundation, root, or purpose. Physics has discarded matter, but has supplied no substitute. Biology lacks clear theory, and fully understands neither life nor its evolution, nor the supreme feature which made man: the development of language. Psychology is paralyzed by the weakness of biological theory. Religion, treated as a separate venture, has failed once and for all. Traditional philosophy has proved impotent to bring clarity and strength. Man has lost his way, as in no previous civilization, for even in the darkest ages of the past a few individuals were sustained by the hope given by some religion, however spurious we now know its promises to have been. Man, as never before, is in the dark without map or compass.
Mere Marxist utilitarianism does not express the deepest needs of the human psyche, and every arbitrary use of power for whatever supposed material end merely brings species suicide closer. The silliest error ever made by man was to suppose that material improvement of his condition was his primary motive or need. He is a thinking animal, aspiring to unity, but needing, like every animal, excitation, excitement, stimulation to more intense living. (Did Freud really believe that all pleasure lies in a lowering of tension?) Lacking anything to live by, he turns to violence for the sake of excitement. I do not forgive the politicians, sociologists, and teacher who have failed in this critical time to see the obvious.
“Make love not war” is ancient wisdom spoken with the voice of our time, and it points to the only solution: universal love in a new specific sense, that of love clarified and strengthened by an appropriate world view and a growing consensus.
In organisms the parts appear to be in some sense subordinate to the whole and to cooperate so as to sustain life. How does this apparent cooperation come about?
The functional regions in organisms consist of very accurately and subtly arranged and coordinated parts: the atoms, molecules, polymers, micelles, and so on. Moreover, this internal ordering is to a high degree preserved when changes occur in the relative spatial arrangements of these parts in the course of growth and function.
Even when lying ill in bed, because some organ is disordered, I retain the knowledge that for every process that has gone wrong, millions are still superbly orchestrated. How does this come about? Where is the conductor of the orchestra, or do they do without one? The problem may be to see how a system that is fabulously complex in terms of atomic motions can become astonishingly simple when other more appropriate organic variables are used.
Life is the cooperative interplay of ordering and disordering processes on pairs of levels in the organic hierarchy.
How does a unit at any level know where it is and what it has to do at any particular moment?
Charity (caritas, love) is more than adaptive; it is an expression of the vital surplus in man, passing beyond merely adaptive or utilitarian criteria. The core of the ego cannot be narrow self-love; the vital surplus in man flows into his relation with others.
Man is a gregarious, language-using, unity-seeking organism, the human imagination being the supreme ordering agent in the known universe. But in this century he has to overcome his dissociation.
There is here a clear separation of individual judgment from social action. The community was moving ahead, but the individual despaired. In spite of the continuing social advances, perceptive individuals have been in despair, and with some reason, for the forces driving society were increasingly technical, and the disasters of this century are without precedent.
Violence will increase until either all civilized order collapses or a new generation with a will to live takes over. Consider your world leaders one by one; measure them against this human situation; and ask yourself: Can they possibly lead mankind out of this mess? No; only a new generation can. Meantime the churches do not unite; the West cannot establish a stable currency; only the international technocratic community thinks it knows where it is going; and the privileged are silent. Behind all this is there or is there not in mankind or in the West an authentic will to live? Whether the bombs are used or not, their existence will within decades transform human thought, either by destruction or by forcing man to think anew about himself. He cannot avoid discovering what he feels and thinks in this new situation.
It is part of man’s inborn nature to struggle to overcome whatever limits his actions and his coordination. The vital surplus in him drives him to create, to invent, and to open up new vistas, and brief moments of joy enable him to survive the long hours of darkness.
The vital surplus in man, confronted by his recent failures, will lead him to think how he can overcome these. If there were not this creative spark in man, enabling him at times to find a splendor in human life, its beckoning sense of a latent perfection awaiting him and its flashes of joy, he would never have created the noble, self-enhancing elements in human culture. There is a vital surplus in man, and it is on the side of what man calls “good.”
During the centuries after 500 B.C. a dissociation of the Western psyche developed—which I called the “European dissociation”—the main social function of which was to stabilize family and community life and property against the challenges of the aggressive threat of the male sexual instinct.
At one level man experiences freedom of choice; he feels himself to be a free agent seeking order and harmony. But at a deeper level, aware of more, he knows himself to be less than free, the instrument of forces greater than himself. There is no contradiction here. The old antithesis of free will and necessity vanishes in the hierarchical view of man. The “higher” levels of the mind express more specialized factors, the “lower” more general. At one level he experiences freedom of choice, but when he becomes aware of the deepest level of all, he loses free will and experiences the bliss of enjoying and serving a pervasive unity. For joy is simply vitality without discord.
By achieving this clarity regarding the morphic at all levels, human reason turns a corner, and man sees what he has never seen before. He sees—when he is not pathological—that there is no agency or power in him, no desire, thought, or action, no healthy process of any kind, which is not the expression, direct or indirect, of the tendency toward organic coordination active within himself. His supreme blessing comes not from God, but from the fact that he is an organism seeking coordination. For example, all the operations of his brain express the self-regulatory tendencies of the animal organisms in their most general form. To put the same fact in other terms: no religion, no philosophy, no science, no medicine, could assist man by one jot were his underlying organic tendency not present and active within him. In the most austere, authentic, and objective sense, recognition of the status and power of the morphic processes at all levels in himself carries human awareness beneath the perceptions of the traditional religions and of the special sciences to an aesthetic level hitherto experienced and expressed only by poets, for several poets have said what I am trying to say here. To experience this vision is joy.
Man is a potentially integrated organic being with a sense for perfection.
The astonishing and glorious fact is: Man benefits by discarding God!
A morality sustained by the fear of God, or by belief in rewards and punishment, is rotten at the core: it reveals the dissociation at the root of human nature in that period. We must each find the inner voice for ourselves. Here the official Christian doctrine is a drag on the human spirit, a social scandal which must be stopped, a utilitarian poison measuring virtue by benefit, a sectarian crime. Man must act more from whole-naturedness, less from hope or fear, never from a sense of guilt or sin.
The original source and core of all religions (without which they would be mere systems of ethical precepts and rituals) was the experience of transcendent joy, sometimes called “mystical”—though that term acquires its meaning not from any definition, but from the experience of those relatively few individuals who tried to put it on record. This transcendent experience of joy can come to nonbelievers and can be given a natural interpretation. No task is more urgent. We need to know how widespread this experience is or can be, what role it serves in the life of the individual and the community, and how far it can help us today.
Under the world view one value becomes supreme: joy, for all; an unsought state of grace in which life is enhanced and the imagination surpassed; the unexpected evocation of one’s fullest aesthetic response; the bliss which transcends the personal and the purposeful; the surprising experience of perfection; the awareness of being alive without discord. Some experience joy in great intensity and purity; others, in daily life as it is for most, may know only moments when what is mere pleasure seems for once to surpass itself and to take one by surprise. This capacity for joy is given to man in his heredity, and only a dissociated culture can take it away.
The values which follow from joy are not moral, but aesthetic: openness to experience; respect for the uniqueness of the individual; tolerance toward variety; unification of emotion, idea, and action; immediacy and spontaneity in experience and action; the promotion of a universal human consensus recognizing these values; and perhaps most fundamental of all and primary to all these others, what I have already implied: the cultivation of the joys of the imagination, in the deepest and fullest sense.
We can will to relax our will. It is well known, particularly in the East, that this is possible. The powerful will of the West is destroying us as community and individuals. But it is open to each of us, at a deeper level, to say to the Ego, on its “higher” level, “You are to relax,” and it can, and may, obey. It is much to expect, and the mad will of the West must be overcome not only by mockery, but by revealing to every individual drowned in the current social drift his own utter insanity. He is doing what he does not, at bottom, wish to do. Beneath everything else he longs for a new way to enjoy life. He wants to live freely, to discover once again the joy of whole-natured living.
Think what it would mean if everyone could regularly, say once a day, scan the unconscious levels to collect all the new suggestions awaiting exploitation. Imaginative workers do this. Perhaps in a future culture, there will be a routine procedure of mental hygiene: every morning, after cleaning the body, release the mind. Relax, contemplate, scan the unconscious for its daily harvest, and then allow the conscious intellect to do its necessary task of selection, rejection, arrangement, and so on.
All language is a hint, with luck evoking in the individual receiving the spoken or written word a corresponding state of awareness.
National self-interest no longer exists; it is meaningless in the late twentieth century; it points the way to nowhere.
Since 1914 the unconscious formative processes in countless thousands of sensitive individuals in the West have been developing the necessary elements of a potentially universal consensus, a future effectively worldwide agreement on what it means or should mean to be human today.
The more efficient the intercommunication within a community, the more nearly simultaneous will be the sudden emergence of a new idea from the shared unconscious background.
This consensus will be of heart, mind, and will, and in the intellectual realm it will identify the human imagination as the primary creative capacity in man, the source of religion, art, philosophy, and science. But these terms refer only to particular, mistakenly separated aspects of culture, and they become ambiguous and misleading in a period when mankind is approaching an organic synthesis of emotion, thought, and action. Thus the formulation and implementing of the expected consensus will display some of the characteristics of a world revolution, of a new religion, and of a scientific synthesis.
The structure of the universe at all levels will be known to be less arbitrary than had previously been imagined. A major pattern will be seen to exist in the universe, a hierarchy of morphic processes, a natural plan needing no planner, for at the root it expresses a logical necessity. The human mind will understand its status in the biological realm and in the cosmos, and it will recognize the human imagination as the supreme formative agent in the known universe.
For the first time man would possess a fully authentic image of himself as a unitary being, and this would certainly have important social consequences.