When we pursue and inquiry beyond a certain depth we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life.
Bruno Schulz
The modern Western worldview assumes the natural world and human life are in principle fully comprehensible through the lens of a secular scientific-materialist paradigm. However, many kinds of human experience are impervious to reductive analysis. Creativity, inspiration, transcendent experience, anomalous psychological phenomena, and a host of other quintessentially human occurrences are evidence of lives deeper, richer, and more enigmatic than conventional belief systems allow. A far broader and more inclusive worldview incorporating notions long familiar to esoteric and wisdom traditions is better able to address the full range of human experience and behaviour.
Transcendental Deprivation
Humankind has paid a high price for the benefits science bestowed. Among its most damaging legacies has been insidious disenchantment of the human and natural worlds. Triumph of a scientific-materialist worldview effectively put an end to the primal experience of human beings at home and secure in the whole of creation.
Elimination from the Western worldview of a vertical dimension (Chapter Four) spurred a collective sense of metaphysical homelessness and spiritual vacancy, exacerbated by demise of traditional religious conviction and secularisation of consciousness.
Unsurprisingly, many now feel alone, left to wander through life with no clear purpose or ultimate goal.
From time to time every thinking person contemplates the meaning and purpose of their life. Many have come to expect science to answer all their questions. But, while it has made great progress clarifying the physical mechanisms responsible for organic life, science is of no help with the greatest of human mysteries: Why are we here? Nor is it able to address questions of a more personal nature, such as: Who am I? Why do I exist? How should I live? What happens when I die?
Soul’s Eclipse
The most incisive thinkers of the ancient Greek world and Judaeo-Christian tradition were in no doubt human beings were endowed with an inherently spiritual nature, our immortal soul being the subjective manifestation of the divinity within.
“The soul of man, which more than all else that is human partakes of the divine, reigns manifestly within us”, declared Socrates.
Such notions became increasingly tenuous with the decline of Christianity and ascendance of secular materialism. In the profane and desacralised atmosphere that emerged in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, nature and humankind were stripped of the sacred character accorded them by ancient wisdom and religious tradition.
Psychology Desouled
“Psychology” literally means “study of the psyche”, the word psyche derived from an ancient Greek term referring to the human soul or spirit.
The human soul is often symbolically depicted as a butterfly, testament to its beauty, delicacy, and capriciousness. Greek philosophers described the soul as “iridescent”, “hard to understand”, acknowledging “you cannot capture it.”
Could the relatively crude methodology and tools of a materialistic science hope to comprehend such an elusive and ethereal entity?
Academic psychology’s abandonment of traditional metaphysical beliefs was symptomatic of a momentous sea-change which saw a decisive turn away from earlier spiritual understandings of human nature to embrace the decidedly more prosaic stance of secular materialism. A great deal was lost as a result.
Confronted with a phenomenon incompatible with its materialist paradigm and not amenable to scrutiny with laboratory procedures, psychology chose to simply ignore it. This flagrant omission contributed to deepening impoverishment of the human inner world and accelerated Western culture’s collective loss of soul.
In adopting a “scientific” stance psychology spurned many of the features that make us human. “What immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by our most approved psychological authorities”, cried a despairing William James.
Unholy Maps
Contemporary Western culture is founded on a view of the natural world and human life devoid of any sense of a sacred dimension. Living in environments that have largely cut us off from experiences that nourish and replenish the human spirit and imagination, many succumb to scepticism or even outright disbelief in anything beyond the sensory and material realm. Mired in technology, we are left to find our own way through an increasingly disenchanted world with no reliable chart or compass to guide us.
Nor are GPS and Google Maps of any help in the formidable task of orienting ourselves in life and navigating the labyrinthine passages of our inner world.
Other Ways of Knowing
Scientific materialism comprises but one strand in a complex tapestry. In their ageless quest for knowledge and understanding, human beings have devised a remarkable variety of philosophies and beliefs, many founded on notions vastly different to those underlying the modern Western worldview, or entailing ideas it has for various reasons chosen to neglect or ignore.
Little recognised by the academic mainstream, these influences have arguably played as great a role in shaping Western civilisation as the views of intellectual and scientific orthodoxy.
While they held science in high regard, Goethe, James, Jung, Schumacher and countless other pioneers cherished ways of understanding ourselves and life as a whole that are not mediated by the rational intellect and whose insights come via altogether different channels, often ones we little understand and cannot control.
Mythopoeic Mind
The wildly popular Harry Potter books of the late ‘90s, soon followed by the equally successful Lord of the Rings movie series, triggered a wave of cultish enthusiasm which quickly became an unprecedented social phenomenon of which the never-ending Game of Thrones saga is a recent iteration.
Our popular cultural fascination with heroic adventures of larger-than-life characters in mythic, other-worldly realms appears to have no end. It is worth reflecting on the roots of this contemporary Western phenomenon.
Desacralisation and disenchantment of the modern Western world spurred instinctive longing for reconnection with our highest potentials and deepest human roots. Contemporary infatuation with fabulous tales involving superhuman characters appears to be an attempted compensation for our collective lack of unifying myths, legends, and inspirational cultural heroes.
The human mind possesses an autonomous mythopoeic (“myth-making”) propensity many artists and writers have drawn upon to concoct their contrived mythologies. Long before modern artists began tapping it for creative purposes, spontaneously generated myths served a vital purpose in human life. “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation,” explained revered mythologist Joseph Campbell.
“The old teachers knew what they were saying”. Clothed in ornate imagery, their cumulative wisdom was conveyed in the myths, legends and folk tales found in every corner of the world and which together comprise “a vast and amazingly constant statement of the basic truths by which man has lived through the millenniums of his residence on the planet.”
Myths speak from and to levels of mind transcending the sensory and intellectual. Since time immemorial myths have served to encapsulate and preserve the most vital metaphysical and spiritual insights accumulated through human history.
Here Are My Masters
Poets and writers long preceded psychologists in detailing the fundamental facts and foibles of human behaviour. “Freud’s predecessors in the study of man were not the neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists, from whom he borrowed some of his terms, but rather the great intuitive teachers of mankind.”
Ushering visitors into his library, Freud would point to works of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians and declare “Here are my masters” in recognition of the fact he was guided by their intuitive insights in clarifying some of his key ideas.
A resolute critic of religion, Freud was enthralled by sacred and magical objects.
Whilst writing he habitually gazed at an eclectic variety of statues and other sacred artefacts scattered throughout his study and assembled on his desk.
“The gods bear witness as divine counsellors, providing inspiration, cultural tradition, historical context, and aesthetic stimulus for Freud’s investigations.”
Strong Imagination
Intuition and creativity continue to defy explanation. Freud acknowledged being mystified by the creative process itself: “Before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”
Shakespeare attributed the poet’s creative abilities to an exceptionally vivid imagination: “As imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination.”
Creativity is a mystery, the gift of an invisible benefactor. So otherworldly and beguiling do such abilities appear they were traditionally considered to have a divine origin.
Intuition was the root of genuine creativity, claimed Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, since it was what enabled the artist to transcend the limits of the rational intellect: “Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain.”
Sanctified Reality
Like the fabled alchemists of old, when acting under inspiration the truly creative often appear to have acquired the ability to transform base metal into gold. The seemingly “magical” power their works possess to move and enthral is testimony to the genius animating such rare talent.
Truly inspired works have a quality which transcends any obvious aesthetic appeal they have and raises them to a sublimely elevated plane. What is this mysterious power? Why do we find it so captivating?
Reflecting on the enduring appeal of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, Graham Collier suggests the answer lies in the unique ability of such works to reveal aspects of reality in ways that touch the human spirit and imagination.
The perceptual awakening described by Blake, van Gogh and De Chirico is akin to what an escapee from the shadowy gloom of Plato’s allegorical cave would likely experience upon stepping forth to behold the wonder of an open, sunlit world.
Alchemical Marriage
In a culture increasingly dominated by science and technology, the artistic sensibility has come to epitomise an alternate way of experiencing life and apprehending reality.
Rather than perceiving it as nothing more than a complex arrangement of physical matter, the creative artist is capable of seeing the world as “a live vessel of spirit, a translucent source of mystery and revelation.”
By bringing the disenchanted world vibrantly back to life art can open our eyes to aspects of reality that transcend the mundane and impersonal, thereby reminding us of our natural heritage and allowing us to re-experience soulful connection to realms of imagination and spirit erased from the industrialised Western world.
In an era disillusioned with orthodox religion, the creative artist assumes exalted status: “In the modern world, the artist took over the role of the shaman.” Art has become a kind of surrogate religion and vital spiritual outlet in our increasingly profane world. Thus have theatres, concert halls, museums and galleries replaced churches as sites of contemplation and revelation for ever-growing numbers of contemporary Westerners.
Eureka/Serendipity
Scientists are often portrayed as serious, unsentimental types striving to remain as objective as humanly possible. This image is far from complete, however. Numerous eminent scientists attribute key insights, discoveries, inventions, and theoretical breakthroughs at least in part to non-rational influences such as hunches, educated guesses, chance, coincidence, intuition, and other factors of similarly enigmatic nature.
That scientific breakthroughs often begin with a flash of insight or inspiration (commonly known as a “eureka moment” after Archimedes) is borne out by the testimony of many of science’s most illustrious figures. Some of the foremost pioneers of physics acknowledge being guided by their imaginations in deriving their world-changing concepts.
Nobel prize-winning physicist Max Planck, one of the key architects of quantum theory, was adamant truly forward-thinking scientists required “a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination”.
“The role of strictly rational thought-processes in scientific discovery has been vastly overestimated since the Age of Enlightenment”, concluded Arthur Koestler.
Scientism: Curse of Genius
Mainstream science has in many respects devolved into scientism, an outlook characterised by dogmatic insistence only objective materialism is capable of providing an accurate account of reality. Absent from its purview are a host of insights and perspectives only living human experience can be privy to.
“Scientism recognises nothing other than ‘objective’ standards of acceptability and truth; it is estranged from and therefore denies standards of acceptability and truth that derive from deeply reflective personal experience.”
The shortcomings of such an approach were perfectly clear to William James: “The vigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be.”
Abraham Maslow considered any approach that confined itself to the study of physical phenomena a “cripple science” severely limited in depth and scope: “It is obviously not an organisation of everything that is real. It doesn’t integrate all the data.”
Einstein’s Space, Van Gogh’s Sky
Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionised the scientific picture of the universe and ushered in the modern era of quantum theory.
Van Gogh looked up at the shining night sky and painted what he saw. His work, The Starry Night, became one of the most revered works in modern art.
To some, Einstein’s worldview, being scientific, is an accurate and factual representation of the way things really are, while van Gogh’s images, though appealing, supply no more than a highly subjective aesthetic overlay.
However, while science can explain a great deal, it is unable to account for everything and is especially ill-equipped regarding many things most important to human beings. The scientific picture of the world “is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us”, declared pioneer quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger.
Many things invisible to “eyes of flesh” may be perfectly obvious to “eyes of soul”.
Partly in reaction to the excessive rationality, materialism, and secularism of modern science, a movement sprang up in Europe in the early 1800s which had a profound and lasting influence on Western culture. Attending to aspects of nature and human experience neglected by science, Romanticism focused on inner, subjective aspects of human life and embraced a holistic vision of the universe.
Nature to the Romantic was not something to be held at a distance and studied with the cold glare of objective analysis. In fact, the Romantically-oriented student of nature had a decidedly more personal goal: “The revelation he sought was not of mechanical law but spiritual essence.”
Romantic Science
To the Romantic, the essential truths of nature were only evident to those capable of a suitably reverential demeanour. Understanding nature demanded “an attitude of admiration, love and worship”, declared English chemist Humphry Davy, one of the most influential figures in the history of modern science.
In contrast to the objectivising stance prized by orthodox science, Romanticism stressed the participatory nature of investigation: Science focuses on explaining through rational inquiry and intellectual analysis, whereas true knowing comes about through engaging phenomena with one’s entire being.
One of Western culture’s truly great innovators, German poet, novelist and natural philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rejected the conventional scientific method of analytic dissection of natural phenomena in favour of a more holistic approach uniting empirical observation and spiritual intuition. He endeavoured to devise a science which combined the systematic inquiry of the empirical observer with the mystic’s vision.
Rather than any technical apparatus he might choose to employ, the observer’s own consciousness was deemed the most subtle and incisive tool available for comprehending the mysteries of life.
“The human being himself,” Goethe insisted, “to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist.”
Nature’s deepest secrets, Goethe declared, would only be revealed to those who transcend sensory experience and open themselves to spiritual beholding.
A Motion and A Spirit
Though it was eclipsed by the triumph of science, the Romantic vision remains a potent force in Western culture. While secular materialism has prevailed in the outer world, Romanticism’s timeless ethos abides in the inner world of subjective experience – the quintessentially human realm of feeling, imagination, intuition, art, inspiration, creativity, myth, dream and spirituality.
Keenly aware of the eternal spirit Wordsworth felt “rolls through all things”, in their quest for an integration of scientific, philosophical, and spiritual knowledge, metaphysically inclined scholars from a wide variety of fields have promoted views compatible with Romanticism.
German philosopher Georg Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit incorporated notions from classical Greek philosophy, Christian mysticism, and German Romanticism into a worldview in which every dimension of existence – man and nature, spirit and matter, human and divine, time and eternity – was understood as a facet of a unitary, integrated whole.
Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner devoted his life to a scientific approach to spirituality founded on Western philosophical and esoteric traditions, especially the ideas of Goethe. With his “spiritual science” he sought to counter scientific materialism’s one-sidedness.
In Steiner’s view, “A science of spirit, based on the example and ideal of natural science, must take its place alongside natural science, working in the same way as natural science, but from different sources.”
While their respective schemes employed scientific methodology, Romanticism’s profound influence on Gustav Fechner, William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and other pioneers of depth psychology was incontestable.
Cosmic Religious Feeling
For many scientists, feelings evoked by the order, harmony and awesome beauty of the natural world have an innately religious character. Such sympathies are evident in the reflections of the architects of quantum physics whose insights laid the foundations of the modern scientific worldview.
Einstein claimed the scientific and religious geniuses of all ages were imbued with a “cosmic religious feeling” that rejected dogma and worshipped no God in the image of a human being.
“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty. It is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”
Far from being incompatible, science and religion in their true sense complement one another, just as Einstein intimated: “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
To See Again The Stars
Sigmund Freud was planning a career in law until he happened to attend a lecture outlining Goethe’s novel perspective. So powerful was its impact it persuaded him to switch to medicine, a decision that set him on the path he followed the rest of his life.
Shortly after graduating from Harvard Medical School, William James underwent a profound personal crisis that radically altered his outlook.
“It was a revelation”, James said; “After this, the universe was changed for me forever.” The episode, which he felt had a strong “religious bearing”, galvanised his curiosity about the relationship of psychology and spirituality.
Abandoning a medical career, James pursued these interests intensively his entire life, eventually reaching an arresting conclusion: “In psychology, physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the scientifics has been once for all decided, it is the mystics who have usually proved to be right about the facts.”
Recommended Reading
- Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
- Theodore Roszak Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society
- Arthur Koestler The Act of Creation
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