Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. …No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

                                                                  — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1)

If other more advanced forms of planetary life were observing life on this planet and our calamitous effect on it, I wonder what they would think of the various beliefs which influence our behaviour. How might they communicate with us? Perhaps with the magnificent crop circles that have appeared in our summer fields for many years now, suggesting that there is more to be understood about our universe than we know.
            If it were to be accepted beyond a shadow of a doubt that these complex, beautiful and mathematically coded patterns were made by an intelligence other than our own, it might produce the biggest change in our thinking since Copernicus’ discovery that the sun rather than the earth was the centre of our solar system. Some might recoil in fear; others might be excited and thrilled to know that there was something utterly unexpected that could break the spell of our beliefs and shock us into awareness of a different concept of reality.

            There is a moment in a book called A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey, where he records the words of a Tibetan monk, Nawang Tsering. Referring to this present time as Kali Yuga - the Age of Darkness and Destruction - Nawang says that the great danger for the world now is the loss of spiritual vision and that our task is to keep that vision alive, to see that it lives through these dark times. He speaks of the powers of love, healing and clarity that lie latent within us and asks that we should strive to develop these, both for our own sakes and for that of others and says that we will need to attune ourselves to the deepest levels of spirit if we are to have a hope of surviving this era. (2)
            For millions of people in the West, Nawang’s message may not seem to apply. But for those traumatized millions living in the Congo and Zimbabwe, in Tibet, Afghanistan, Darfur and Chechnya, the Palestinian Territories or any place where conflict, cruelty, persecution and destitution prevail, it does. Looking at the state of the world and the helpless suffering of so many, it seems obvious that our current moral and spiritual immaturity threatens our very survival as a species. In the midst of this present darkness, how can we invoke the powers of love, of healing, of clear vision? How can we become aware of the origin of many of our beliefs and assess their value to us?
           Certain deeply held ideas or belief systems grow into meta-narratives, worldviews or paradigms of reality which can inspire, structure and influence a culture for thousands of years. But they can also block our further development by subtle methods of control that may not at first seem obvious. There are religious meta-narratives such as the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic one, and secular ones, such as the belief in material progress and scientific and technological advance. At present, we seem to be influenced by two primary meta-narratives: the religious belief in a remote creator God who is transcendent to us and life on this planet and the secular one which believes that we live in an inanimate universe which is without consciousness, purpose or meaning.

The Secular Worldview of Our Age
           Early in the 20th century the French artist Odilon Redon painted a picture of the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops. Its single eye gazes down on the flower-strewn expanse where a naked woman lies in a brilliantly luminous landscape. To me, the image of the Cyclops reflects the constriction as well as the inflation of the modern mind which, ignorant of the vast dimensions of planetary and cosmic life on which it rests and out of which it has evolved, believes itself to be in control of nature and its own nature. It evokes the much-quoted words of Blake — “May God us keep from the single vision and Newton’s sleep.”(3)
           Yet the painting also communicates a tremendous sadness, the sadness of a one-eyed consciousness that is cut off from its ground, that has no relationship with soul and with nature—personified in this painting by the woman lying on the flower-strewn ground. The rational or literal secular eye stands lonely and supreme, cut off from the landscape of the soul.
           Over the last few centuries but more pervasively during the last fifty years, a secular worldview or paradigm has slowly infiltrated every aspect of the modern world, dominating the media, the arts, science and philosophy as well as economic, political and educational agendas. It views life through an increasingly utilitarian and materialistic mind-set, seeing no goal for humanity beyond the improvement of material conditions through the growth of each nation’s GDP and scientific, medical and technological advance. By excluding, rejecting and deriding so much, particularly in relation to the great spiritual and cultural achievements of the past and the unanswered questions of the human condition, it drastically limits our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Above all, it has turned its back on anything it designates as non-rational.
           It is true that science has opened up an immense and thrilling panorama: geologists and biologists have pieced together the story of the earth’s evolution; cosmologists have defined the incredible story of the birth, expansion and extent of the visible universe, although this is continually being revised in the light of new discoveries; particle physicists are penetrating the mysteries of the sub-atomic world; geneticists are applying the discoveries of the genetic code to healing the terrible diseases which still afflict us. Neuro-scientists are making phenomenal discoveries about the human brain. But there is as yet no unifying vision of our purpose on this planet which could take us beyond the single vision of Newton’s sleep. As Matthew Arnold put it in his poem Dover Beach,

We are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

           Modern secular culture has exalted man as the supreme agent of his own triumphant scientific and technological progress but it has also reduced him to the level of a biological mechanism, subject to the programming of his genetic inheritance. It has created a society that believes in nothing beyond its own technological prowess and the omnipotent power of the human mind. It has done away with any ethical foundation for values. It does not question the premises which direct its conclusions nor does it look at the effects of its beliefs on people living in this culture. In summary, we live in an unconscious civilization, as the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul describes it in his book of that title. (4)
           The dominant belief of secular culture is the Neo-Darwinian one that life on this planet has evolved by natural selection and that we are simply the product of our biological genes and our interaction with our environment. Life has come into being by chance; its biological evolution is controlled by chance. It has neither meaning nor purpose. Matter is primary and gives rise to mind as a secondary phenomenon. Consciousness is therefore a by-product of the brain. This belief system tells us that we are the products of mindless forces operating on inanimate matter; atoms are lifeless particles, floating in a dead universe. There is no such thing as free will because we are nothing more than a vast assembly of nerve cells, as Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, described us. The body is a mechanism that can be manipulated and controlled by the mind. We exist to improve the material conditions of our lives, to work, consume and enjoy what we can accumulate in the way of wealth or material things. When we die, that is the end of us. Is it surprising that governments have come to define us as units of consumption rather than living, sensate beings?
           The most vociferous promoter of this theory is the biologist Richard Dawkins, whose “selfish gene” hypothesis suggests that the human being is no more than a gene-replicating machine. This reductionist hypothesis developing from a Newtonian/Cartesian/Darwinian foundation and presented as “truth” empties the entire human endeavour of transcendent meaning, purpose and significance. There is no vertical axis, nothing that might connect us to a field of consciousness that is beyond our immediate sensory experience, nothing that could provide an ethical framework for our values and our behaviour. While I think it is true to say that this secular ideology and the reductionist science that has developed out of it has freed large sections of humanity from the absolute control of religious institutions, it would also seem to have replaced one rigid belief system by another. By a conviction of omnipotent self-righteousness, it suppresses a mass of data that could be of immense interest, relevance and value to our culture. One example of this is the repeated attempts to disparage and invalidate alternative approaches to healing, such as homeopathy or acupuncture, saying that because their efficacy cannot be scientifically proven, they are worthless.
           So are we the random creation of a mechanical, mindless universe as Dawkins and scientific materialism proclaim, or do we participate in the life of a living universe that animates and orchestrates its evolution from within its own cosmic and planetary processes? How can we answer this question until we understand what consciousness is and the whole evolutionary development of the kind of consciousness we now have? We can only truly comprehend our history and ourselves through the lens of human consciousness. This lens may not yet be capable of giving us the full picture, however much empirical scientific knowledge we may have. It may be that our vision is clouded by something comparable to a giant cataract or restricted to single vision in the manner of Redon’s Cyclops. Neuroscientists can map the brain and connect different functions with specific areas of it, even the different areas which may give rise to what we call wisdom. Surprisingly, they are finding that the more primitive “emotional” parts of the brain play a role in developing the qualities of empathy, compassion, insight and tolerance - all of which might be said to be involved in developing wisdom. But they cannot tell us exactly how the incredibly complex neurochemistry of the brain gives rise to our imagination, our specific thoughts and feelings and the collaboration between them which might bring the quality of wisdom into being. Scientists cannot yet answer the question of how consciousness arises out of matter; how, when and, above all, why apparently “dead” matter can give rise to life and, ultimately, to consciousness. And they cannot yet answer the question: What exactly is life or, for that matter, what is consciousness?

The Great Adventure of Our Time
           Nevertheless, for a cosmologist, as for the neuroscientist, this is an intoxicating time to be alive, participating in the immense adventure of exploring the mystery of the universe as well as the mystery of ourselves. The night sky has become numinous, as enthralling as it was to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, watching and noting the movement of the planets and constellations from the rooftops of their houses. One of the things that is changing our view of reality is the discovery of the immensity and age of the universe as well as the incredible beauty of the galaxies recorded by the Hubble telescope which is able to look back eleven billion years—two billion after the initial explosion of the universe and is finding layer upon layer of galaxies as far as its eye can see. Now the new Herschel telescope (launched in May 2009) is going even beyond the limits reached by Hubble. All this is a marvel and it has been brought to us by science. Who in this vast universe might be looking at us as we gaze into where we have come from in that dazzlingly distant past?
           According to the prevailing theory of the Big Bang, thirteen to fourteen billion years ago as we understand time in our three-dimensional world, a stupendous explosion of cosmic energy took place, expanding instantaneously from a fireball smaller than an atom. The first second held the inconceivable energy that fuelled not only the creation of a hundred billion galaxies through billion-year paths of expansion, but also the evolution of life on this planet. Aeons later, out of this planetary life, the human species evolved and, ultimately, human consciousness—our consciousness.
           The story of the evolution of our own species streams like the tail of a comet through the darkness of ages now inaccessible to us. The life of our species is embedded in the unimaginably old life of the universe but, closer to us, in the four billion-year-old life of this planet. Complex life has evolved here through a truly extraordinary series of fortuitous developments which are only now revealing themselves to scientists. The Milky Way galaxy that we belong to with its hundreds of billions of stars is part of an immense cluster of galaxies—the Virgo supercluster—that is fifty-three million light years away from us.
           One of the questions that most fascinates cosmologists is whether there could be life on other planets. Are there people like us “out there” with whom we could communicate? Would they have developed a more advanced intelligence than our own? Are there planets with life on them that have developed a more complex kind of intelligence, a more advanced technology? Scientists think there could be up to 40,000 planets in our galaxy alone that could support life and out of these a minimum of some 350 could have the cosmic and planetary conditions which could allow complex life to emerge. Nasa has just launched a new telescope called Kepler, sent off into space in order to find planets in the Milky Way that might be capable of sustaining life (March 2009). The search will be concentrated in the area of the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra which are between 600 and 3,000 light years away. Yet the life of our planet is so extraordinary that it is thought unlikely that there could be other planets whose formation is exactly like ours. Where the conditions exist for some kind of life there could be entities like ourselves with abilities and thoughts like ours or with a consciousness so different from ours that we cannot even conceive of what it might be like. Incredibly, Kepler's lenses are so powerful that from space they are able to detect one of us turning on an outside light at night.
           Vast and still relatively unmapped as it is, our visible universe is thought to be ninety-three billion light years across, but as yet there is no way of ascertaining how far it may extend beyond the reach of the vision of our instruments. It may be only an island in something resembling a cosmic archipelago of universes. (5) Inside every collapsing black hole may lie another expanding universe that we know nothing about. String theorists hypothesize that there may be other universes parallel to our own as well as other hidden dimensions to this universe. Of the portion of the universe we actually can observe, approximately four percent is visible to the eye. So what and where is the other ninety-six percent?
           Cosmologists thought that the universe would be slowing down after its billions of years of expansion. From supernova explosions that took place ten billion years ago they have been able to calculate how fast the universe has been expanding since that time. But they found that, far from slowing down, the universe was expanding. So they wondered whether there was a force that could oppose and counter-act gravity? They discovered something which they named “dark energy”—a force that was strong enough to counteract and overcome all the gravity in the entire cosmos and impel it to expand faster and faster. They don’t yet know what it is or how it works but they do know that it is active on an inter-galactic scale and does not apparently affect our earth or solar system. Yet, with the equally mysterious “dark matter,” it has played an central role in how we came to exist. Dark matter seems to hold things together; dark energy pushes them apart. It seems that as long as these forces are held in balance, the universe survives. All this is far beyond the reach of my understanding and I am immensely grateful to the television programmes presided over by the Astronomer-Royal, Sir Martin Rees and others which have offered this information to the public.
           It is extraordinary to realize that our human consciousness is the infinitesimal spark of cosmic light that is enabling the universe to reveal itself to us. Without our capacity to imagine, observe, measure, deduce and reflect, we could not know that everything we are, everything on our planet and in our solar system, has been formed from elements of the stars that have been seeded here from great galaxies millions of light years away from us. It seems nothing less than incredible that we are the agents through which the universe is coming to know itself on this planet and that we are, in our essence, literally cosmic fire, cosmic light, cosmic energy in every cell of our being. The universe that we see and the life that we are arises from an invisible sea of being which is the deep cosmic ground of the phenomenal world and our own consciousness. The world we know is like a minute excitation on the surface of this cosmic sea.
           All this is awe-inspiring, yet one of the most amazing discoveries is that although we are between thirteen and fifteen billion years away from the apparent beginning of our universe, nevertheless we exist at the very heart of it. Every cell of our bodies as well as every star, every galaxy, is the place where the universe is continuously flaring forth into existence from the great sea of being. We do not see the source-ground—only its manifestations. Listen to these words of cosmologist Brian Swimme from his book, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: “Even in the darkest region beyond the Great Wall of galaxies, even in the void between the superclusters, even in the gaps between the synapses of the neurons in the brain, there occurs an incessant foaming, a flashing flame, a shining-forth-from and a dissolving-back-into.”(6)
           We are not just in the universe; at the very core of our being we are an ongoing creation of the universe, participating, however unconsciously, in this continuous creation. That is surely enough to set the imagination on fire even if we feel insignificant in relation to the unimaginable vastness of the visible universe. It astonishes me to think that it took billions of years for life on this planet to evolve to the point where it could provide the atmosphere and environment that could sustain our physical organism and, ultimately, facilitate the development of the kind of consciousness we now have.            The fiery magma of the earth's core and the ninety-two types of atoms derived from the furnaces of the stars live within us. The chemical compounds that constitute all forms of life, from the simplest bacteria and molecules, live within the complex organism that we are. This organism, or the physical aspect of it evolved from animal and plant, rock and sea and the fiery magma of the earth’s core. Each human body consists of 10,000 trillion atoms, connected to each other in ways we do not yet fully understand. Whether we are aware of it or not we carry all this cosmic and planetary evolution in the cells of our physical organism. In every cell of our being, we are star-life, star-energy. And we are the only species on this planet to have conscious awareness of this.

Our Planetary Roots
           It is very moving to reflect on the immense age of this planet where, taking an hour's walk, every large step represents 10 million years. Our human species appears in the last second of this walk—the final two inches of earth or grass under our feet. And human consciousness as we know it today? In perhaps the last millimetre or even less—the width of a hair’s breadth. Our physical brain, the vehicle of consciousness, has apparently arisen out of the evolutionary experience of the earth and all species to which it has given life. But consciousness itself may be an expression of cosmic consciousness, something of which we are just beginning to become aware. Could the consciousness of our species evolve further? It is conceivable that, as the great sages of India have long taught, our species as a whole is still at a pre-conscious or semi-conscious state, with its further development unrealized because it is not envisaged. All the immense repository of knowledge we have now accumulated serves the aims of a human mind that is still not fully developed and is unrelated to a deeper cosmic ground. Thanks to the discoveries of science, we now know a great deal about the evolution of the physical aspect of life, but almost nothing about the inner aspect of both the universe and ourselves—that is to say, the consciousness aspect, only that our species and our capacity for self-awareness have come into being very recently in relation to the time span of the earth’s evolution. Yet this capacity is in itself utterly extraordinary, for without it, the life of nature and of ourselves would have gone unnoticed - extending from an unimagined past into an unimagined future.
           The planet itself has survived five giant catastrophes which threatened to destroy all life on earth, the best known one being the devastating impact of a huge meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. But two hundred and fifty million years ago for reasons not yet fully understood, the deep ocean conveyor currents stopped moving, causing a lack of oxygen which nearly extinguished all life on earth. The oceans turned stagnant and gave out a poisonous gas called hydrogen sulphide—as deadly as cyanide. Almost every living thing died on land as well as in the sea. This was the greatest extinction in the earth’s history. Over ninety percent of all life on earth died. Yet incredibly, life survived these and other catastrophes and regenerated itself. It is truly astonishing that out of these successive extinctions and regenerations, human consciousness eventually came into being. But it is a sobering thought that, according to the biologist Sir David Attenborough, our species, if it continues on its present course, could be responsible for the sixth great extinction which could include ourselves.

The Evolution of Human Consciousness
           Exactly how our species – homo sapiens sapiens - evolved from earlier hominids is not yet completely understood. But scientists and anthropologists seem to have arrived at a consensus that our species appeared around 500,000 years ago. In order for this to happen, it was necessary for the hominid brain to triple in size and for the female pelvis to expand to allow the birth of infants with a larger skull, although there seems as yet to be no adequate explanation of what caused this enormous change. Approximately a million years ago an extra pound of neural tissue increased the size of the brain, leading to the differentiation of the functions of the two brain hemispheres—a differentiation that is unique to humans. Although animals also have bi-polar brains they do not have the corpus callosum—the dense bridge of 300 million nerve fibres which connects the two hemispheres or lobes of our neo-cortical brain. Women today have between 10 and 33 percent more of these neuronal fibres than men. This may make it easier for them to develop lateral thinking and to be able to move between the left and right hemispheres, between rational and intuitive or imaginative thinking.
           During this million years the frontal lobes of the neo-cortex developed, making possible the development of our capacity to think and to reflect on our thoughts and feelings. A vastly expanded nervous system enabled speech to develop. The left hemisphere of the neo-cortex was a crucial new sense organ that facilitated the development of speech and could perceive time, sequence and duration. The human brain only weighs three to four pounds but contains a hundred billion neurons—about the same number as the stars in the Milky Way. The anatomical development of the human brain is thought to have been complete between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. We know from the recent discovery of the Chauvet cave in the Vaucluse area of France that the people of that time were superb artists but we don't know how or when this ability developed, only that it had reached the level of genius by 32,000 BC.
           We know today that the right frontal lobe, which governs the left side of the body, is the oldest of the two hemispheres and the first to develop out of the actual heart of the embryo. It is fairly mature before the left lobe even comes into being. It seems that the close relationship between the heart and the right hemisphere is maintained throughout life and that this hemisphere functions through image cognition, visual-spatial perception and mediating feeling states rather than through the verbal, analytical, sequential cognition of the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere, tied in to millions of years of the evolution of the earth and of our species, is the image-making, holistic, non-verbal connective system to the older mammalian brain (see below). This brain, which is undoubtedly the one that shamans can access, gives us a different perspective on life, grounded in empathic relationship with it. It is apparently through the right brain that poets, mystics, musicians and scientific geniuses receive their inspiration, their intuitive flashes of insight. Einstein's theory of relativity came to him when he was sitting on a hill imagining that he was riding a sunbeam to the edge of the universe and returning towards the sun. The image came first, the theory later. Einstein himself said “Imagination is more important than knowledge: knowledge points to all that is; Imagination points to all that will be.”(7) It may be that the imagination, focused through the right hemisphere, is the illuminator of reality, the faculty which Coleridge held to be the very ground of our consciousness, of our capacity to think, to discover and to create.
           The left hemisphere governs the right side of the body and does not have the same primordial connection to our distant planetary past because it evolved relatively recently. The left hemisphere gives us focus, direction, and the power to analyse, assemble facts, and direct our intentions towards a goal. But it poses a problem for us because it creates the illusion of time, taking us out of a state of “being” into a linear awareness of past, present and future. When this hemisphere is too dominant and controlling, it can shut out the perceptions of the right hemisphere and with it, the imagination and the vital connection to the heart, causing us to regress into the literal-mindedness and single vision of Newton’s sleep.
           Given how extraordinary all this is, it invites us to understand the evolutionary structure of our consciousness in greater depth. It may be a surprise to discover that we have not one but three brains: the great frontal dome of the neo-cortex—our most recently developed brain, rests on the primordial root of two older brain systems which continuously interact with each other and also with the far more recently developed neo-cortical brain.

The Triune Brain
           Paul MacLean, who advanced this theory in 1974 in his book, The Triune Brain explains:

A comparison of the brains of existing vertebrates, together with an examination of the fossil record, indicates that the human forebrain [neo-cortex] has evolved and expanded to its great size while retaining the features of three basic evolutionary formations that reflect an ancestral relationship to reptiles, early mammals, and recent mammals. Radically different in chemistry and structure and in an evolutionary sense countless generations apart, the three neural assemblies constitute a hierarchy of three-brains-in-one, a triune brain…Stated in popular terms, the three evolutionary formations might be imagined as three interconnected biological computers, with each having its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space, and its own memory, motor, and other functions. (8)

           So we carry within us the evolutionary structure of three different brain systems: the reptilian, the paleo-mammalian and the neo-mammalian or neo-cortical brain. The incredible complexity of how these three brains interact with each other and yet function as a single unit is still one of the great mysteries of neuro-science. With great conscious effort and practise, we can become aware of which is predominant in a specific situation. We know, for instance, that the fight/flight reflexes of the oldest reptilian brain spring into action when we are faced with a threat. And we know that the older brain systems have a far greater influence on the more recently evolved neo-cortical brain than the latter has on the former. Powerful primal emotions like fear, anxiety and rage—mediated through a part of the brain called the amygdala—can easily influence and even overwhelm the neo-cortical “rational” mind. We also know that adverse conditions in childhood can negatively imprint the nervous system (the older brain) and interfere with and even inhibit the development of the neo-cortical brain. A child so affected may remain fixated in the purely instinctive older brain, unable to develop the capacity for thought and reflection and the ability to contain and control emotions.
           All the knowledge we have gained about the evolution of our physical bodymind organism, as well as its consciousness aspect, does not acknowledge the presence and influence of the unconscious part of the psyche—what Jung called the “root and rhizome of the soul” — all the multi-layered memories of the entire evolutionary experience that we carry within us: memories of cellular life, plant life, reptilian, mammalian and, finally, human life. (9) This complex patterning of species memory as well as species form, incrementally expanding and increasing over thousands of millennia has contributed to the evolution of planetary life, the evolution of our species and, finally, the evolution of human consciousness itself. We are the only species on this planet that can speak, write, reflect, discover, create and communicate with each other in words and gestures and give expression to our imagination and our skills in beautiful artefacts, exquisite musical forms and brilliant technological inventions such as the Hubble telescope. How and why has this come about if the universe has no purpose or meaning?

What is Consciousness?
           Consciousness is the ability to observe and connect with the visible world through the five senses and simultaneously to hold awareness of an invisible inner world of images, thoughts, feelings and ideas. It is also the capacity to evaluate these, to make a distinction between what is meaningful and what is not, what is safe and agreeable and what is not. The triune brain gives rise to many integrated layers or levels of consciousness that have arisen out of very archaic instincts. Over millennia, as the triune brain developed, adding in the neo-cortical frontal lobes, the amplification of primordial instincts gave rise to the possibility of cognition and self-awareness and the extraordinary creative power of the imagination as well as to specific emotions, empathic feelings, and intuitive “flashes” of insight or associations. Beneath the “superstructure” of consciousness, the subconscious workings of the autonomic nervous system maintain the balance or homeostasis of our total physical organism, supporting the relationship between the heart and the head. What we call our “rational mind” is only one part of our total consciousness which must also include the dreaming mind. Our understanding of what comprises consciousness will need to be continually revised as we discover more. For example, Candace Pert's remarkable discovery of the “molecules of emotion” (1998) which connect every part of our organism to every other part has revolutionised our understanding of the interaction between mind and body and done away with the arbitrary separation that had been established between them. As she explains in an article that followed the publication of her book Molecules of Emotion:

In the end, I find I can't separate brain from body. Consciousness isn't just in the head. Nor is it a question of mind over body. If one takes into account the DNA directing the dance of the peptides, the body is the outward manifestation of the mind. The new science of psycho-neuro-immunology is redefining the connection between mind and body. We can no longer speak of body and mind as separate systems or entities. Bodymind - one word, no hyphen. Bodymind is a single organism pulsing with neuropeptide messengers that flow in a continuous loop from the brain to every cell in our body, giving rise to emotions and responding to emotions. (10)

           Are these extraordinary creative abilities no more than random expressions of the neurons in our brain or is the brain a vehicle for the greater “mind” of the cosmos? Neurobiologists assume that the ability to imagine, invent and discover, to appreciate beauty and to wonder has its origin in certain areas of the physical brain and they are trying to pin-point these areas and measure the neural correlates of specific subjective states. But our highly developed physical bodymind organism could also act as a vehicle or transmitter of a greater cosmic mind. And what of the heart that we can now recognise as a “feeling” brain connected to the “thinking” one by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system? What does the extraordinary electro-magnetic field of the heart, extending between 15 and 25 feet beyond the body connect us to? (www.heartmath.org) What gives rise in us to the longing to understand ourselves and the life around us? Is it only a random neural cause giving rise to a random neural effect? Or do our longings originate with the soul of the cosmos itself so that these — a further development of our primordial instincts — actually embody and carry the evolutionary intention of the cosmos?

The Separation from Nature and the Longing for Reunion
           For countless millennia the potential for human consciousness was hidden within planetary life—like a seed buried in the earth. Then, very slowly, our species began to differentiate itself from the matrix of nature and develop the capacity for self-awareness. We can understand this evolutionary step of separation more easily when we observe the life of a child who, as it separates at birth from its mother, recapitulates the immense evolutionary advance of emerging from the matrix of nature, slowly becoming aware of itself as an individual, distinct from its mother.
           Our evolutionary separation from nature means that although we may have nearly the same DNA as many other mammals we have evolved a different kind of consciousness, since we are able to communicate our thoughts and feelings through complex language and complex physical actions such as learning to play a musical instrument.
           Yet, the more our mental and technological skills have developed, giving us ever greater power to control our lives and our environment, the more estranged we have become from a sense of relationship and communion with the life around us. We seem to have forgotten the fact, summed up in James Lovelock’s words that “So closely coupled is the evolution of living organisms with the evolution of their environment that together they constitute a single evolutionary process.”(11)
           Indigenous cultures have always known that life is not a competitive struggle for survival but a sacred organism of connection and cooperation. In the much-quoted words of Chief Seattle, “The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it.”
           No-one has written more eloquently about the earth and our lost relationship with it than Thomas Berry in his book The Dream of the Earth. No-one has evoked in such compelling language the need for human sensitivity, compassion and intelligence in our relationship with the earth and its living systems. He asks that we wake up from our mythic dream of progress and the dominance of nature and take on the role of becoming responsible custodians of the dwindling species and resources of the planet. For, as he observes, “Suddenly we awaken to the devastation that has resulted from the entire modern process…In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries.”(12)
           The competitive and exhausting industrial and technological culture we have created, where so many millions of people live in enormous, ugly and amorphous cities, stands like a tyrant over and against nature, over and against the earth and whatever threatens our supremacy as a species. Our human species as a part has become detached from planetary life as the whole. There is an abysmal ignorance that, as Berry points out, the earth is primary and our survival is dependent on the continued integrity and balance of the earth’s inter-related systems:

If the supreme disaster in the comprehensive story of the earth is our present closing down of the major life systems of the planet, then the supreme need of our times is to bring about a healing of the earth through this mutually enhancing human presence to the earth community. To achieve this mode of pressure, a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural world, a sensitivity that comprehends the larger patterns of nature, its severe demands as well as its delightful aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish so that other lifeforms might flourish. (13)

           Precisely because of the long experience of separation from nature, we carry a deep and unrecognised wound. Our very being has been fragmented by the way we have interpreted reality and by the values that direct our culture and, in particular, our science. Our conscious, rational mind has become disconnected from the part of us that, at an unconscious, instinctive level, is still bound in close relationship to the greater organism of planetary life. This inevitably creates conflict within us. The end result of this long process of separation is that in our technologically advanced culture we have lost something absolutely vital that earlier cultures still had—a sense of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos. While indigenous shamanic cultures have somehow retained this ancient participatory awareness, the modern industrialised world has totally lost it.
            The English artist the late Cecil Collins commented in despair, “Our civilisation is the only one in the whole history of mankind not to be based on a metaphysical reality… a metaphysical reality which is unknowable, absolute, and yet a reality which can have a relationship with us, and we with it. Our civilisation therefore can be considered abnormal.” (14) Yet, he could also see that “Beneath our technological civilisation, there still flows the living river of human consciousness within which is concentrated in continuity the life of the kingdoms of animals, plants, stars, the earth and the sea, and the life of our ancestors, the flowing generations of men and women as they flower in their brief and often tragic beauty: the sensitive and the solitary ones, the secret inarticulate longing before the mystery of life.” (15)

Astronauts of the Soul
           In a secular culture, attention has been focused exclusively on the daylight world of physical reality. There is no awareness, as there was in earlier cultures, of the existence of a dimension of reality which might be compared to the starry night sky—a dimension which can only reveal its presence when the sun's bright radiance is dimmed. But questions are beginning to be asked which could open our minds to a different concept of reality. Does consciousness originate within or beyond the brain? If within the brain, how does the brain create consciousness? If beyond the brain, is the universe conscious? And if so, can we enter into relationship and dialogue with that greater consciousness of which our own may be a still incompletely developed expression. If we could open our mind to a different concept of reality, perhaps we could play a more enlightened role in relation to the extraordinary cosmic drama in which we are involved.
            There are brilliant pioneers now exploring the sub-atomic world as well as the immensities of the visible universe revealed by the Hubble telescope and there are others whom I call astronauts of the soul who are exploring an invisible universe whose existence is not recognized or even imagined by mainstream science. Just as we have the capacity to imagine, to think and to feel — an “inside”dimension of thoughts and feelings within our physical form — so the universe may also have an “inside” to its visible form, an intelligence and a soul. As the shamanic cultures knew millennia ago, we can develop the capacity to communicate with this intelligence, to align ourselves with it and to be guided by it. In the words of Christopher Bache, one of these astronauts of the soul, it comes down to this:

Thinking we are the most intelligent, the most evolved life form thrown up by a foaming, mechanical univeerse, we commune only with ourselves and keep the cold world at bay. But if we were to open to a world in which we recognized the blazing intelligence of the cosmic womb that birthed us and everything we see around us, if we began to glimpse the scale and scope of her project and the depth of love that underwrites it, we would turn and face this mysterious world... We would build up commerce with it until contact deepened into communion, and communion is a sacramental exchange that transforms both parties. With this pivot, history would turn. We would begin to value and cultivate the skills of alignment. We would begin to recognize the symptoms of misalignment in individuals, in institutions and ideologies. (16)

Notes:
1. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans. Green and Co. London, New York 1929, p. 388
2. Andrew Harvey, A Journey in Ladakh, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1983, p. 167
3. William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November, 1802, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, p. 862
4. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, House of Anansi Press, Canada, 1995 and Penguin Books, London, 1998
5. Sir Martin Rees, Before the Beginning, Simon & Schuster 1997, p.
6 . Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Orbis Books, New York, 1996, p. 101
7. Einstein,
8 . Paul MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution, Plenum Press, New York, 1990, p. 9
9. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 4
10. Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion, Simon and Schuster, London 1998, passim
11. James Lovelock, Healing Gaia, Harmony Books, New York 1991, p. 222.
12. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Books, San Francisco, 1988, p. 215
13. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Books, San Francisco, 1988, p. 212
14. Cecil Collins, Angels, p. 38
15. Cecil Collins, Tate Gallery Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, p. 37
16. Mind Before Matter, O Books, Ropley, Hampshire, 2009, p. 279

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