Among the Sarmouni

Excerpts from O.M. Burke's Among the Dervishes (published in 1973)


Kafiristan has never been properly explored. Until Victorian times it was a no-man’s land, unclaimed by anyone at all because it was so inaccessible. Extending through a mountainous area as wild as any on Earth’s surface, it was the home of the oldest people in Afghanistan; both in terms of years and history. It was thought, and it seems likely, that these people were there long before the Graeco-Buddhists who were displaced by the Moslem invasion. When the Arabs over-ran Afghanistan, some of the Buddhists and others fled into the truly inaccessible north-east, and settled among the Kafirs—the ‘infidels’.

The King of Kabul (Afghanistan was not a united state then) at the end of the last century invaded Kafiristan and brought the ‘light of Islam to the heathen’, after an incredibly hard winter campaign. And so it was renamed the Country of Light. Although some accessible parts of the country are open to visitors, the main part of it is almost never visited except by pilgrims and others who have business there. To the modern Afghan it is something of an enigma: and also, of course, a disgrace that such a ‘primitive’ people should exist within the borders of their progressive state.

My interest in Kafiristan was specific. I knew that Afghanistan had been a centre of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage long before there was such a thing as a Dalai or a Panchen Lama in Tibet. Indeed, Tibet took the place of Afghanistan after the latter country was Islamised and the huge sanctuary of Bamian was overwhelmed in the seventh century. According to tradition, the monks of Afghanistan fled to Kafiristan. Some took the road to Tibet, others remained and started their schools of meditation anew in the land of the infidels. The Buddhism of China and Japan today is derived from the Afghan Bamian monastery-complex as evidenced by sculptures still extant.


Some of this information I had obtained from Sufi mystics and others in India, where there were any number of Tibetan refugees. One could not go to Tibet to seek refugee Buddhists from the Kafir area—or their descendants. The country was under the Chinese communists. In any case there would be little left in the monasteries to study; and few lamas would be found there now. Before Kafiristan became Westernised, there was a chance that something might be found.

A friend in a Government department put me in touch with some of the Dalai Lama’s satellites, and after that the picture became a little clearer. Tibet, according to these experts, was not actually cut off from the ‘West’, even if only because refugees continued to arrive. There were Moslems living in Tibet, and had been for a great many years… These Buddhist gentlemen, with gratifying little sectarianism in their make-up, told me something about the Sufi practices which they had heard of in Tibet: but they told me nothing new. Jalu Kambo was my man, it seemed, for he was a ‘very mystical Momatan’ (Mohammedan) who knew Lhasa and other parts of Tibet.

… When I had to some extent convinced him that I was after Sufis, and studying practical mysticism of this particular school, [he said], “You do not want Tibet at all… the mother-house of the Soo-fee-aaa is not in Tibet. You find the mother-house because they will only send you to the mother-house if you go to Llhasa.” And where was the mother-house?


‘Hindu-killer mountains, eastwards, past the Khajakhel, in Afghanistan.’ Afghanistan was, if anything, as tricky as Tibet. Or perhaps it was because I now new something about the Afghans, and very little about the Tibetans.


Jalul’s geography might have been sketchy, but what he said did undoubtedly mean Kafiristan. So I headed for Pakistan again, to collect information as to how a one-man expedition might penetrate through two main screens: the official and non-official curiosity, and the mountains of Kafiristan itself. Not to mention the Kafirs, a completely unknown quantity….


Through my Sufi sources, I heard a great deal… There was not only a way into and out of Afghanistan—there were many ways. This system was called the rahi-gurez (escape route), used by smugglers of men and material of all kinds, including arms.

Kafiristan, according to the Sufis, was the home of the esoteric school called the Sarmoon, the occult branch of the Nakshibandi Order of Bokhara. This was a school which formerly had branches all over the Moslem world. Even today they are quite widespread, but the yoga-like practices which are the core of the teaching are known only to a few in the ‘foreign branches’. My friend… had been as far as the Paghman Range of the Hindu-Kush mountains, and had been present at the meetings of the secret Sarmoon, but could tell me little about their secrets. Fifty or so years ago, a party of Yunanis (this means ‘Ionians’) had been received by the Sheikh of the Azimia who lived in feudal splendour in Paghman; this was the only story of Western contact with the Azimia.


I looked up Kafiristan in the best map I could find. The place was virtually unmapped… Kafiristan might almost not have existed, though some glaciers and heights of the order of fourteen and twenty thousand feet were marked.

What about the people? And the language? My previous trips had started in a different way. At least one had had introductions for one stage of the journey. It was when I was pondering thus that I suddenly realised how very much early encouragement means. A little more traveling, more talking with people who knew Afghanistan, and I realised that I must have contacts of there were to be any real chance of success.

In talks with Sufi mystics in Pakistan, India and other countries, I had come to realise one curious fact about the way in which they were thinking.

 In the first place, your average Sufi who was not a mere imitator of mystics, was deeply concerned about humanity as a whole. Those who were higher up than the average in the invisible hierarchy seemed to have another basic bent of thought. This was that it was necessary for the Sufis, and the Sufis alone could do it, to bridge the gap between the developing cultures of the East and West. Since I had joined their ranks, I, too, had a similar sensation. The reason seems clear enough: there was no other meeting-ground. All the cooperation in politics, in education and economics, between the Orient and Occident, was not bringing the two together at all. And deep down inside of us, most people knew this. We had accepted that there was no meeting-ground in religion: this had been established as early as the time of the Crusades. That there was no deep co-operation in material fields was clear to those who had seen the downfall of one attempt after another to bridge the gap.


Nationalism and independence in the East had not brought about widespread harmony between the firmer ruling countries and the formerly ruled. People had claimed that the granting of independence to the East would be a sort of panacea. All would be well and cordial relations would be bound to return when people were ruled by their own nationals. This had not happened. In some cases the reverse had taken place.


In orthodox philosophy the East and West had taken leave of one another centuries ago. There was no basic unity of ideas at all, partly because, deep down, there was disharmony between peoples of different cultures, different nations. We had diagnosed the problem as due to one disease. When the remedy fot he diagnosed ailment was applied, the illness did not cease, was not even ameliorated. The people who thought that the cure lay in granting independence, economic help and so on, refused to look at the instances of the countries in which these measures had not worked. Why? They were too busy looking for other countries to grant independence to. They had no time to see whether they were curing what they though they were curing.

I was no opponent of independence for anyone. But I could see that independence was not enough. As with many other things, the reformation had to start with the individual, had to start from within. The materialists continued to reassure us and themselves that ‘things would shake down’, that as soon as the first wave of patriotic fervour had passed, the East and the West would respect one another, and all would be well. But my travels and talks with people at all levels showed me that people in the Asian countries which had been independent for generations were still not reconciled with the West. What did this mean?

It meant the world was still waiting for a development within humanity which would make humanity one, one body, one heart. Plenty of people said that they had the answer. Nobody, as far as I could see, was applying it.

I had traveled and lived among the Sufis in Asia and Europe, in Africa and India. Sharing their lives and talking to them, becoming a member of their fraternities, I had found a group of people who were as worried about the future of the human race as I was. The difference between this group and those who talked a great deal about it in mass-communications media was, that the Sufis were trying to live that kind of life.

Their trusting me, as a member of another type of community, was to them a practical expression of that actual living of human unity. None of them, I am sure, thought that I wanted to associate with them for cheap sensationalism: although they were strongly resistant to the approaches of Western occultists and even anthropologists. They got to know me, decided that I wanted to be like them, and accepted me, in an amazingly short space of time.

… Did the Sufis as a whole want to project their message in the West as well as in the East? How did they think it would be done, if it were done? How could they avoid making themselves into just another ‘cult’ followed—for a time—by every crank intellectual and occultist at any given time or place?

Yunus [a Pakistani merchant who had been Abbot of a Sufi monastery in Iraq] understood me at once. ‘Your question is not as simple as it seems it might be. We can put a question, but we cannot always find the answer in a couple of words.


‘You will find out, I think, if you spend more time among the Sufis, for you have to absorb their characteristic "flavour". Once you have been with the Sufis, really of the Sufis, you cannot believe that their Way will ever become degenerated as you describe.’


**************




Sufi Abdul-Hamid Khan, Master of the Royal Afghan Mint and something of a polymath—military engineer, calligraphist, sage and expert on rhythmic exercises—must have been over ninety years of age. A follower of the Mir of Gazarga, he could remember in considerable detail the events which had taken place eighty or more years ago.

A frequent visitor to Kunji Zagh, he had spent many years in Bokhara, and it was there that he had come across the redoubtable Gurdjieff, whose studies of Eastern metaphysical systems were introduced into Europe about the time of the First World War.

Although the people of Kunji Zagh called Gurdjieff ‘The Russian Tatar’, Sufi Abdul-Hamid said that he was in reality partly Mongolian, part-Russian, part-Greek. According to the Sufi, this Jurjizada (Son of George) had once been a Theosophist, had also studied in an Orthodox seminary, and ‘was responsive’ to the Sufic ‘waves’—could, in other words, contact the mental activity which emanated from the ‘work’ of the dervishes. This, together with a curiosity about the occult, led him to the shrine of Bahauddin, the Naqshbandi teacher in Bokhara.


Here another Bahauddin, known as Dervish Baha, had taught him certain ‘secrets’. Among them were the ‘sacred dances’ or movements made by dervishes, the rules of the Order and the ‘inner interpretation’ of the Sufi texts. Then he sent him on a tour of the centres of the Sufis, some in Egypt, some in Syria, some in India.

Seeing the strange effects of the Sufi practices, Gurdjieff decided that he would find out how they worked. In order to do this, he and a number of friends collected as much of the material used by the Order as they could, and fled with it ‘to the West’.

Unfortunately, continued Abdul-Hamid, Jurjizada was at too early a stage to do anything final with the material. He had not yet learned, for instance, that the exercises and the music had to be carried out with special people at certain times in a special order of events. As a result he propounded the theory of the Complete Man without being able to take it into practice.

Further, Gurdjieff tried to make the method work by trying out the exercises on a large number of people. The result?

‘Here in Afghanistan we still receive, like faint radio messages, the influence of the minds of the pupils of Gurdjieff, coming from far away. They must still be carrying on the exercises, but they don’t know how, when or with whom to do them.’

As soon as I got back to Europe, I found that some at least of this information might be true. After the first War, the Russian and a disciple of his, the philosopher Ouspensky, settled in France and England respectively. They set up teaching groups, and – I was told—several of these still existed. But they remained fully secret. Probably, like the custodians of any secret knowledge which had become reduced in quality, they would continue to operate, perhaps for generations.


*************

Amu Daria is, of course, the name of the immense river which forms four hundred miles of the northern frontier of Afghanistan. Beyond it lies the Soviet Union and the lost territories of Turkestan, once the site of ancient Sufi strongholds.

Russian penetration into the Central Asian khanates is no new thing, and faced with the encroachment of the ‘West’ in the form of Czarist advance, and the need to develop Sufi teachings further in order to coincide in some way with modern technology—the Sufis started to move into the hinterland of Afghanistan during the early part of [the 20th] century. Some of the oldest foundations were already established in the Hindu Kush area. Those who migrated into Afghanistan began to use the name of Amu Daria, run into one word, as the designation of their teaching. Thus they perpetuated the crossing of the river and the tradition of their trans-Oxus origins in their name.

The River Amu (Amu Daria in Persian) appears on most maps as the Oxus. It will be convenient to refer to the émigré Sufi groups as Amudaria ones, because such a phrase as ‘the Oxus Sufis’ does not sound anything like as felicitous. They are also known as the Sarmoon (a code-word for ‘bee’, a reference to one of their exercises).

Although the Sufis do not like to engage in historical or geographical discussions of their cult, there seems little doubt that the Amudaria elements concentrate upon practices and ideas which differ from those found elsewhere, with the exception of the old Afghan Orders. In some ways their rituals and methods are quite like those of other Sufi Orders, but more organised. As an example, the habit of compiling multiple words taken from the syllables of other words is a fine art with them. The concentration upon the belief that the Sufi way is the only suitable one for propagation throughout the world is another characteristic. Then there is the teaching that it is from here that the Sufi message must be diffused, and that it will have to be naturalised in each community.


I spent one week in each of four Amudaria communities. The organisation of the monastery, according to this group, is ultimately a spiritual entity : the building or the location is secondary. Thus two of the ‘monasteries’ actually had no premises of their own. Meetings were held in the open, or in houses. In one village when the gun which marks noon was fired, virtually the whole population started repeating formulae under their breaths. This was a ‘meeting’ of the Amurdarists: no monastery, not even a physical meeting.


This principle is carried even further in Afghanistan. Although monasteries exist and halka meetings are held, and discipleship as I had seen it elsewhere was carried on, the whole community is considered to be in a special kind of rapport. This means that constant spiritual communication between the members is thought to continue, especially at designated times.

The four leaders of the trans-Oxus communities, Shiekh Jalal, Ahmad Baba, Ishan Ali and Pir Turki, all accepted the authority of the Naqshbandi chief of the Hindu Kush Sufis. This is the representative of the Studious King, who is the overall leader, and who may be ‘found in disguise, in almost any country in the world.’

Ahmad Baba showed me the method of sewing the patchwork cloak which some Sufis wear, and which was until quite recently the uniform of those who were going through a period of retreat from the world. It is not known when this custom started, but I was reminded of the ‘coat of many colours’ and wondered whether the robe originated in Syria. Ahmad was about seventy years of age, but might have been older. He was in astonishing health for a man who could clearly remember pre-Revolution Russia, and attributed this to his carrying out the longevity exercises which are a part of the Sufi training. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘would get feeble if he carried them out regularly. Certainly they would live, as the Sheikhs of our Order do, up to a hundred or twice as many years of age.’


In addition to most of the usual Sufi exercises, the Baba’s community practiced healing, and Sufis came from various places to receive this part of their ‘enlightenment’. ‘Of course,’ said the sage, ‘we can also send it out to those who are ready to receive it. You see, we only have a portion. It is like having a … (underground water channel) connected to the source. But we cannot transmit to those who are not ready. If they are only slightly developed in the requisite ways, then they must come here.’


I was interested to know what these Sufis felt about the possibility of making their cult known in the West. Ahmad was not to be drawn. ‘That is a matter for the Studious King.’


Ishan Ali was a Turk, and half the age of the Baba. His ministry extended through the wild north-east of Afghanistan, right up to the Chinese border in the thin tongue of land which sits astride the Pamir mountains. He was forthright, greatly loved, and yet difficult to approach. He received me in a Western-type suit, with a small karakul lambskin hat on his shaven head, something like a kalpak cap, but more stylish. ‘You must not force the pace,’ he told me so many times. ‘You are anxious to learn a great deal of things about us. But you must remember that if you allow yourself to be blinded by curiosity, by the collecting of facts and little snippets of information—you may write a good book, but you will slow down your spiritual progress. ‘


I saw him apply this teaching to a party of young men, not long out of the Army, who had come on a pilgrimage to meet him. ‘Remember what I say, ‘ he admonished them, ‘for you will not be told again but sent home. What you have learned in the Army will be of inestimable value to you, although you are still cursing the day the pishk (conscription) caught you, and blessing the day you were discharged. Both are wrong: but I cannot expect you to understand this yet. Pay attention to everything that you are told, and no not take an interest in things that you are not told or shown. At your stage your so-called human abilities can often be a curse to you. Plenty of time for changing back when you get to the outside world again.’


Pir Turki, who in spite of his name was not a Turk but of Indian extraction, ran the strangest school of all. Everything was based upon gymnastics. Pits had been dug in the circle which had been marked around his miniature castle. In these depressions, some twelve feet deep, disciples had to wield heavy clubs, often to music, sometimes accompanied by the voice of the teacher. They were reputed to develop occult powers; and I heard many tales about how they could make things float on water, see at a vast distance, and so on.

I was said by local villagers that one of Pir turki’s teachers had, by the power of his glance, held up an army for three days in the passes of the Khyber. Be that as it may, Pir turki the ascetic was a martinet. Shunning over-eating or loose talk like the plague, he provided plenty of food for his disciples, though nobody knew where the money came from. He did not make collections. There must have been a source of his income, of course, but it was never visible. One of the first things that he said to me was: ‘If you revere any man, forget him, for all that matters is the Work.’

I have never seen anyone who impressed me so much. When I told this, he took hold of a beautiful lamp which stood on his desk-table and smashed it. ‘I have destroyed a thing of beauty. Do you respect me less now? I hope so.’

Then he called a disciple, accused him of theft, and sent him to wash out the assembly-room. “Must he suffer so that I can see that you have defects?’ I asked him.

‘I hope that you think that I have been unjust in making him suffer, ‘ was the answer.

Unfortunately for the lesson’s permanency in my case, I learned later that the disciple who had been unjustly treated had committed some grave breach of regulations and merited punishment in any case. ‘You don’t understand, ‘ said a disciple, when I mentioned this; ‘the lesson has sunk in where it counts. That is all that counts.’


Yet punishment was something which seemed to happen very rarely among the Sufis. I would not say that they were immune to it, but as they had been taught that personal dignity was sometimes a grave disadvantage, they were not able to suffer much through being made fun of in front of each other. Manual labor on the three farms which the community owned gave many opportunities for exercises in self-development. All the income from the farms was collected by an administrator and sent to the women’s welfare association, for some reason, so the Sufis did not benefit directly. And yet the Sheikh, as I have said, did not seem short of cash.

Sheikh Jalal was a feudal-type chief, a man of towering personality within a slight and delicate frame. He lived in considerable style from the income of vast inherited flocks of some of the best sheep in the country. He smoked a little, but did not seem to eat much. He always wore similar clothes, the robbers and turban which old-fashioned judges assumed in Afghanistan.

He was about sixty-five years old. Although surrounded by servants and a great deal of luxury, he personally partook of it little. When, for instance, we went out shooting and brought down several hundred wild duck and grey geese, none was served at his table. The birds went as gifts to the surrounding villages.

Jalal, it was rumoured, could neither read nor write. This idea must have gained currency because he was never seen with a book or a pen. His teaching was done in the normal Sufi way: through short addresses, exercises, meditations. Going with him several times on long walks, which he embarked upon without any prior notice whatever, I realised that he spent a great deal of his time in silent communion and commemoration (called Zikr) and that this had become almost second nature to him. He had several sons, all of them, I believe, in the Army.


He often showed small signs of a sense of perception which is repeatedly mentioned in Sufi writings as a sign of ‘saintship’, but which would hot have been noted except by an attentive disiciple or someone else very close to him. One day, for instance, he picked up a cooking-pot and took it on a walk on which I accompanied him. Stopping at a poor small house he saluted the occupant and handed in the pot. The old woman was amazed. She said that she had just broken the earthen dish in which she cooked. Again, he handed me a box of matches when I had come out without any, in spite of the fact that I could not be sure he realised that I had left them at home. It should be mentioned that he could not have observed that I brought none with me, for I had met him in his garden, on the way from my quarters to his.


I mentioned these small indications to him. But he would not discuss them, merely saying: “Would you make me a saint, and rob me of the power of becoming?”
There were many of these little instances. Some were observed by me, others reported by disciples. It was interesting to note that among the disciples stories were never exaggerated; they would often hinge upon the smallest event. This indicated to me that many of the wilder tales current among the country-folk and others outside Sufism were elaborations of actual happenings.

It was Sheikh Jalal that I questioned on this subject in a more general way, when I referred to the tales my mother had told me about Scottish highland and country folk being ‘fey’ and having insights which others did not have.


‘These are normal, not abnormal developments,’ he said. ‘they are of no value in themselves, partly proved by the fact that the experiences seldom have practical value. For every happening of this kind that is a warning or can be turned to practical use, there are a hundred which are not of any use. Why is this? Materialists would say that it merely proves that the power is fitful, partial, something of little account. What they do not know is that these are signs. They are encouragements, they show that the recipient has a real chance of developing his ‘gifts’. They are signs that the time has come for self-work. Most people cannot use them, because they do not know that this is the alif (letter A) and that the be (letter B) follows, until there is a iaa (last letter of the alphabet).’

I entertained all the four Amu Daria sheikhs at one time or another by describing to them something of the life and thinking of Europe, even going back as far as I could to the days of the Middle Ages, when the East and the West had been closer together in so many ways.


Pir Turki’s reaction to this information was interesting, because it showed me that there was something in his mind on this subject. ‘A century and a quarter has passed,’ he said, ‘since the message of the Great Khan about this subject, but the work has gone on uninterruptedly.’ The Great Khan was Jan-Fishan, the chief of the Hindu Kush, who was a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, and in whose family the leadership of the Sufis is believed to reside.

‘The Great Khan was the first to be in touch with the West since the time of Sultan Yusef Saladin. He actually went to India and settled there for a time. His message, which was given out just before the War of Shah Shuja (1838) was concerned with the West. From what I have heard from you and otherwise, it is still as fresh today.’

He did not revert to the message of the Great Khan for some time, and we discussed other topics. Then he told me that the Khan had said that the West was material, had lost the force of religion. This materialism was not the materialism which we understood, but was acquisitiveness pure and simple. There would be a growth in sceptical philosophy. There would have to be a great deal of suffering in the West. ‘And the rule of logic and intellect will have to become so severe that there is almost nobody who will listen to truth.’

When that happened, he said, people would start to look for truth. Then the message of the Sufis would be heard.

‘But the people in the West are Christians,’ I objected.
‘So are we!’ He turned sharply to me. ‘In the West there are materialists, but of the worst possible kind. They are free, free to destroy themselves; but they should not be allowed to destroy themselves, any more than a child is allowed to do so. If I insult Jesus in a Moslem country I shall be punished by law and by the people. But you have told me that people use the name of Jesus lightly, even in swear-words in the West. Is it true?’

‘It is true. But I still think that there are good people, and well-meaning ones.’

‘No doubt. They will probably be considered stupid by the others. And many of them will be stupid; they will follow anyone and think that he is a prophet, because they will not be able to discriminate as to what a prophet is.’

‘They are very self-critical,’ I hazarded.

‘Self-criticism is useless without self-work. And who is to reach them?’

I tried to turn the conversation into more illuminating channels. ‘Can you apply the concentration to the problem, in the way which you were telling us yesterday,’ I said, ‘ and tell me, as one who has come from the West to learn, whether there will be a growth of a community of Sufis in Europe, strong enough to have any effect on the evolution of man?”

He did not seem to concentrate at all. ‘There will.’

‘And will it be led by anyone?’

‘It will.’

‘And will this be a Westerner?’

‘It will not. It will be one who is of the East, but he will make the teaching a part of the teaching of the West, as it once was, in ancient times.’

‘When will the activity start?’

‘It has started, slowly. Some will come and try to force another teaching into the shape of the original one, and many will follow.’

He cut the conversation short. ‘Only the Sheikhs can influence this development; it cannot be discussed. It is a matter of the contact of minds. Some who have fixed ideas may have to die to make way for someone who is younger by many years.’


In many ways my time with the Amudaria was the most interesting of all my life. There was something un-oriental about them; and they were so obviously intent upon some activity which was not the rarefied nature which characterises Indian and Far Eastern thought and makes it unacceptable to any but a small minority of Westerners. There was a very great deal that one could get hold of, as it were, and very obviously no attempt at mystification.

Legends

Do These Supermen Exist?
by Eddie Campbell (1969)


For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in a hidden centre-- perhaps in the highlands of Central Asia-- there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world. Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated last century with variations by Mademoiselle Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacolliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.


In the mysterious Shangri-La of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regent of powers beyond the planet.



Mysterious



Through lower echelons-- who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both West and East-- they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the Earth in step with events in the solar system. If in the West this seems like a very tall tale indeed, it is nevertheless one which has engaged serious thinkers behind the European scene for centuries.



In 1614, for example, when a mysterious document called the Fama appeared in Europe, some of the best intellects of the day spent a generation chasing clues to its origin and trying to get themselves enlisted. There is no historical record of anyone succeeding. A hoax? Maybe, but in 1961, an article appeared in a small magazine which to the ordinary reader seemed like a simple travel-documentary.



Influence



To others who knew-- or believed they knew-- how such things are arranged, it produced much the same effect as did the Fama on their forebears 350 years ago; though perhaps attempts to enlist were not this time quite so disastrously negative.



Since 1961, a further stream of hints seemingly connected with the same tradition have been appearing regularly. Among them are some privately circulated papers and The Sufis by Idries Shah; The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort; Reflections; Special Problems (Society For Understanding Fundamental Ideas) and possibly some of the writings of Robert Graves. This list is by no means complete.



The latest publications to which it seems possible to detect the same influence are Wisdom of the Idiots and New Research on Current Philosophical Systems.



New Source



The former is a collection of Eastern tales, each pointing a fairly obvious moral but containing also the hint of a multi-IQ system by which the reader may profit-- and be prepared-- according to his understanding. The idea is not perhaps dissimilar to the structure which Dr. Maurice Nicoll claimed 20 years ago to have discovered in the Gospels.



New Research ... makes perhaps more appeal to modern attitudes. It consists of 13 brief articles by people with experience of Eastern metaphysical techniques and includes first-hand accounts of exercises from Sinkiang, Persian, Indian, and Afghan sources. Almost all of these will be new, even to students of such matters in the West.



Traditions



The tradition of which all this seems to be a part has been linked with such diverse phenomena as the restoration of culture after Ghengis Khan, Arabian poetry, the Joker in our playing cards, Freemasonry, the Templars, the Renaissance, the Saracen culture of Spain, and the Franciscan order of the Roman church. It has also been noted that some of the latest ideas in Freudian and Jungian psychology were outlined by members of this same tradition as long ago as the 11th century, when there was no western vocabulary capable of dealing with the ideas. In view of the extent of the claims which are implict in some of the literature now appearing in the West, it is remarkable that orthodox scholarship has not yet apparently responded with the interest which this material would seem to justify.



Evening News, 10th of February, 1969

The Human Race

WE ARE IN A RACE WITH OURSELVES

from The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge

A brochure entitled "We Are in a Race With Ourselves" in the 1970s laid out some of the problems and issues facing the world today. Are the solutions to these problem issues within our grasp, or are we still in a race with ourselves?

Human beings are unique animals: all other animals live inside their original habitat, and they are adapted "by design" to it. We have created an unprecedented world for ourselves: the space age, computers and rockets, yet we remain biologically the same as we were in the stone age.

Solutions to modern crises are proposed constantly; they are political, social, administrative. They are each useful, but only to a point. There can be no complete solution or anything close to it, until enough people understand that most of the diverse problems facing us are of our own making and are so because of a lack of understanding of who we are, how we react, and what we might be able to accomplish, and to become. Therefore, an important part of the uniqueness of being human is that we must continually adapt to our own creations.

The most important thing we inherit is the ability to go beyond our inheritance.

The past few decades have witnessed on the one hand, a population explosion, but on the other, an explosion of new information about human nature: where we came from and why, how we develop, what we might become. There has been such a ferment in this area that this new and extraordinary "Human Knowledge" is still scattered: in different departments of different academic disciplines all over the world, in biological studies of molecular evolution, in neuroscience and cognitive science, in the writings of novelists and works of artists, in the experiences of journalists, filmmakers, and politicians. What is urgently needed, and now, is to assemble these pieces of the puzzle into a comprehensive picture of human nature and to apply this conception to current life.

For this we need a multi-university, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach. This is what The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge does--it works with educators, brain scientists, biologists, ecologists, physicians, sociologists, novelists and others to communicate and coordinate new insights, faster than would otherwise be possible. It tries to broaden the base of information available to our society: to our decision-makers, to our scientists...to our students.

Solutions to the significant problems facing modern society demand a widespread, qualitative improvement in thinking and understanding. We are slowly and painfully becoming aware that contemporary challenges such as the use of energy, the unchecked increases in population, problems of environment, employment, the health and psychological well-being of individuals and the meaningful education of our youth are not being met by the mere accumulation of more data or the expenditure of more time, energy, or money. In view of the increasing pressures imposed on our society by these problems, many responsible thinkers have realized that we cannot sit back and hope for some technological invention to cure our social ills. We need a breakthrough in the quality of thinking employed by both decision-makers at all levels of society and by each of us in our daily affairs.


The purpose of The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge is to engage in research, public education, and the collection and dissemination of information related to:

- the nature, function and evolution of the human mind, consciousness, and learning capacity

- functional specialization of the human brain

- integrative approaches to medicine and

- human ecology



PSYCHOLOGY

There is a re-awakening of a concern with the mind within psychology: how it develops in the infant; how it can be educated; its capabilities in adulthood.

This concern has revolutionized psychology: cognition and consciousness are part of the course of study of many students. The Institute has encouraged this trend and may be in part responsible for it: its publications and symposia on consciousness, mind and brain, have stimulated researchers and teachers in this new field.


Now, there is a new recognition: many of the boldest insights of modern psychology--the stages of mental development, the errors we are prone to make--have been described in writings published about 1,000 years ago! The Institute is mounting a new program to discover and publish such anticipations of modern thought, because new insights on human development and capabilities may be available.



EDUCATION


Our education, science, and medicine do not deal with the whole mind and person--the full range of our capacities.


Observations such as this have often been made in the past, yet we are rarely informed: which of our capacities lie undeveloped? Are they useless or meaningful? What might be the methods for educating the whole mind? What might such increased mental ability mean, for individuals, for our society, and even for the future of civilization? Some of this information is available in contemporary research, some in the past, but it needs to be brought together.


When we attempt to educate our students, we are limited by the "lowest common denominator" concept of our mind and our capacities--"Reading, Writing and Arithmetic." The varieties of human intelligence are scarcely to be recognized in the standard range of "intelligence" tests. What has been considered "basic" in our schooling is but a small segment of our capacity.

We, our student, patients, and colleagues are not being prepared to understand the complex nature of the world we live in. Thus, the "environmental" problems, those of overpopulation, are related to the lack of an education of our ability to perceive things whole, to develop a comprehensive intelligence.

We are "designed" to analyze things only as they relate to ourselves. This analytic, sequential capacity is only one aspect of the mind. We also have the ability to consider whole systems simultaneously and perceive each element as it affects the others. This ability to "see things whole," to comprehend relationships between parts, to understand personally such concepts as "the welfare of all" can itself be trained as part of a more comprehensive education.



THE ENVIRONMENT


There is a saying in Greek philosophy, "You cannot step into the same river twice." We would propose a change to, "You cannot step into the same river once," for entering alters the flow, level, and perhaps temperature immediately. We must be able to perceive the effects of our actions in the world, immediately, perhaps "intuitively," for both our ability to intervene and our numbers exist on a scale unprecedented in human history. There are billions of people now in a world that, not too long ago, held a few millions. It is this rise in our numbers, coupled with the increased ability to manipulate the environment, that makes our situation so dangerous. The hand that was designed to hold a few spears now controls thousands of nuclear weapons.

So, what many people often consider purely "environmental" problems--the smog over many of the world's cities, the chemical pollution of the waters of industrial nations, the over-crowding and increasing growth of population--are problems of human choices and understanding. Since we are training to focus on splintered pieces of a whole situation, we have often take quite inappropriate actions: the increased safety and security of reproduction in the most recent 100 years has suddenly made large families unnecessary, yet we have been too slow to perceive this, and the explosive exponential growth of human population has been the result. Our increasingly brilliant analyses of the relation of mass to energy has brought with it the possibility of nuclear holocaust. On these important matters, human understanding and judgment has not developed to balance and evaluate the technical progress.

We are in a race with ourselves.


MEDICINE AND HEALTH

There is a new understanding the Health Sciences that the brain is a healthcare "system" in each person. The brain regulates every movement, every heartbeat, every gland's secretion and millions more microevents. All of them are to the purpose of keeping the organism healthy, some of which have only recently been discovered, such as the endorphin system.

Many of the mysteries of how social and emotional events influence health are found in the complex brain mechanisms which interpret the outside world, and direct the body to take appropriate action. Grief can affect he immune system; increased social support can influence health (friends can be good medicine); mental attitudes strongly affect health: those who think they are healthier live longer than the "objective record" would have it. This new understanding will, in the next decade, radically influence our idea of health and healing. It is founded on recent developments in brain sciences and increased cooperation between brain scientists, physicians, psychologists and sociologists.


The Institute invited you to help in developing this new and comprehensive understanding about being human: where we come from, what we might, in our own lives, become. The Institute supports the publication of books, public lectures and public information which will contribute to a permanent improvement in human abilities and comprehension. Your help is needed for its programs of research and communication in medicine, education, psychology and human ecology. In the end, we have to rely on our own resources as human beings. For the first time we may be able to know what they are.

Evolution of Consciousness & the Human Givens 1

Evolution of Consciousness & the Human Givens 2

Why Do We Exist?

from Godhead: The brain's big bang by Joe Griffin & Ivan Tyrrell


A DEFINING moment came in the prehistory of our humanity when we ceased to be purely animal. Often called the ‘brain’s big bang’, it occurred in the Stone Age about 40,000 years ago. This powerful psychic explosion enabled our ancestors to experience and exploit a newfound questing spirit to understand and manipulate the world: complex languages developed and refined tools appeared, as did exquisite drawings, carvings, paintings, decoration and musical instruments. From that moment on, all these accomplishments were apparent in Europe – and more besides.


We had changed, become quickened by an original evolutionary advance: self-reflective consciousness. Suddenly our forebears found that they could see the world in an entirely new way and respond creatively to it. They could daydream, imagine the future, consciously review memories, deliberately think about the world as it appeared to them and more effectively manipulate what they saw for their own advantage. ‘Intellect’ and ‘soul’ became apparent for the first time: they became aware of being aware. A few of them, perhaps the first shamans, discovered that it was possible to directly experience a
profound feeling of connection to everything else and they set about uncovering ever deeper and more subtle connections to reality. This adaptation, however, came at a high price – a much-increased vulnerability to a range of mental illnesses. How and why this happened, and what it means for us today, is partly what this book is about.


Undoubtedly the brain’s big bang was a spectacular natural event. We are still riding the crest of the creative wave it unleashed – not unlike the way innumerable billions of galaxies still appear to resound from the celestial Big Bang which, 13.7 billion years ago, set in motion, as most scientists believe, the expansion of the Universe. The surviving art and artefacts of prehistoric humans are the well-known indications of this dramatic mental transformation. They place it in time, but they don’t give us direct evidence of the precise nature of the psychological changes that occurred – and those who might have told us are, of course, long since dead.


So big questions remain: what was it like to wake up to a new way of seeing? What survival value did it have? Did it carry new burdens with it, ones that animals and their predecessors did not carry? What exactly happened in their brains in order to make them so creative? How must their thinking and behaviour have changed as a result? And, perhaps above all, do implications arising from this event have relevance today?

Just as physicists examine the properties of physical matter, and from that vantage point peer back through time to unravel the processes involved in the development of the Universe, it is also possible, by using recent discoveries and insights about the evolution of life and the brain in particular, for psychologists to unravel some of these mysteries using the very same mental tools – reason and imagination – that first made their appearance in the Upper Palaeolithic period. In Godhead: The brain’s big bang we look back through historical and prehistorical time to unpick the origins of creativity, mysticism and mental illness, and connect what we find with an analysis of the current state of mind of modern humans to see what it reveals.


In writing it we found ourselves making interesting new inferences about current human behaviour. During its gestation, for instance, a new way of looking at mental illness arose which may carry radical implications for diagnosis and treatment – namely, a previously unrecognised link between mood disorders, psychosis and autism.


A fresh approach to mental health is certainly needed. Many psychiatrists have admitted to us over the years that psychiatry has lost its way. By allying itself too closely to the medical model that focuses on the physical and biological aspects of mental distress and favours chemical treatment over psychotherapy (despite a lack of evidence for biological drivers of the common mental illnesses), it is failing dismally to reduce the sum of human misery. The World Health Organization shows that depression, for instance, is currently among the top four contributors to the global disease burden.1 Psychiatry has always suffered in comparison with other areas of medicine because mental states are, on the whole, less well understood than bodily ones.


A debate over psychiatry has simmered, largely under the public radar, for some 200 years.2 It concerns whether the medical profession should have any special role in managing people who were considered to be ‘mad’. As one participant, University College London consultant psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, recently put it, “Psychiatric problems are not fundamentally medical problems and I think that a lot of the difficulties and contradictions that psychiatry throws up are to do with its claim that they are.”3 Conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, Asperger’s syndrome and personality disorders have proven difficult to diagnose with precision. In a 2009 New Scientist article, science writer Peter Aldhous notes: “Doctors can only question people about their state of mind, observe their behaviour and then classify their distress according to the most obvious symptoms.”4



The title of that article, ‘Psychiatry’s civil war’, is one way of summing up this situation.5 The current battleground is the psychiatrist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short, and the influence of drug companies on research and diagnosis. The DSM is what psychiatrists turn to when diagnosing distressed people. It is currently in the midst of a major rewrite, a process that has highlighted just how vulnerable psychiatry is to exploitation by vested interests. Aldhous reports one eminent psychiatrist as going so far as to warn that the rewrite “will extend definitions of mental illnesses so broadly that tens of millions of people will be given unnecessary and risky drugs”.6 A particular concern is that the next DSM will include new categories to capture milder forms of illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression and dementia. The result of this, according to the same psychiatrist, “would be a wholesale ... medicalisation of normality that will lead to a deluge of unneeded medication”.7 Not just ‘a pill for every ill’, but a pill for every one of life’s ups and downs.



Psychotherapy generally is in no less a confused state, as Moncrieff also points out:

"In some respects, I think, psychotherapy has filled the same role as drug treatment in being regarded and presented as a panacea for all sorts of problems. Even though psychotherapy obviously involves trying to identify the root of the problem, it is problematic because it focuses on the individual rather than the society. Having said that, psychotherapy at least looks at a person as an individual and seeks to understand their life story, rather than putting them in a box, under a diagnosis, and giving them a treatment according to which box they are placed in. I think, to that extent, it takes the right approach to trying to understand suffering and the problems that are experienced by people who become psychiatric patients."8


In attempting to improve psychological interventions ourselves, we sought to widen the vision of psychotherapists and teachers to include the idea that what causes mental distress is always whatever is stopping someone from getting their innate emotional needs met. We called these innate needs ‘human givens’, and created the human givens approach to psychotherapy to incorporate techniques and skills from the various models that have proved helpful and set them within a larger overarching set of ideas about human functioning.9 By doing this we hoped to address the type of problem raised by Moncrieff with regard to what the psychotherapy available to the public usually offers: a focus on the individual.



The new direction does not offer that focus through analysing past relationships and attempting to dig up forgotten traumas (psychoanalysis), or trying to change the way an individual thinks and behaves (cognitive behavioural therapy). Neither is the human givens approach solely ‘person centred’, in the sense of ignoring the wider context of an individual’s life. Rather, it looks to see what factors are preventing someone from getting their innate needs met and then actively showing them how to use their reasoning power and imagination to get their life working in balance again.


Evidence for the effectiveness of the human givens approach to therapy was recently published in a leading peer-reviewed journal. The results of a 12-month study of 120 patients treated by human givens therapists in a GP’s surgery in Luton in the UK were reported. The results showed that more than three out of four patients were either symptom-free or reliably changed as a result of the therapy. This was accomplished in an average of only 3.6 sessions.10 The data were shown to be significantly better than the recovery rate published for the UK government’s flagship IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) programme. Not only that, unlike the IAPT programme (which uses therapists trained in cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT), the same consistent results have been obtained from outcome measures from multiple sites across the UK for more than 3,000 patients. This later data is being prepared for publication by leading independent researchers.


After observing for many years that our approach was highly effective we were able to delineate the three main reasons that prevent children and adults from getting their innate emotional needs met. Any one of these is sufficient to generate unhealthy levels of stress in an individual, which, if maintained, poses the very real danger that anxiety or anger disorders will develop, depression set in, psychotic symptoms appear or addictive behaviours take hold.11

The three factors are:

One: The environment the person lives or works in is ‘sick’ and prevents them from getting one or more of their emotional needs met (as in having to endure an abusive and dysfunctional family, living in a threatening neighbourhood, not having meaningful work to do, working for a bully or having autonomy restricted).

Two: The person doesn’t know how to operate their internal guidance system to get their needs met (as in learned helplessness when a person is conditioned to have low expectations of themselves, or when they don’t know how to challenge unrealistic expectations with universal reasoning, or when they are misusing their imagination by worrying – which precipitates depression – instead of using it to solve problems).

Three: The person’s innate guidance system is damaged in some way, perhaps through faulty transmission of genetic knowledge (as in caetextia, the inability to read context that’s seen throughout the autistic spectrum), poor diet (not getting proper nutriment to the brain), poisoning (drugs, alcohol, etc), physical accidents to the brain, or psychological trauma (including post-traumatic stress syndrome or PTSD) which is usually easy to treat quickly using psychological methods.


These perceptions, and practice based on them that uses innate human resources, such as imagination, well, are influencing psychiatric practice. As the UK-based consultant psychiatrist Dr Farouk Okhai wrote recently, “Having worked with the human givens approach for several years, I have found it far more useful when face to face with a patient, to set aside any possible diagnosis, ignore categories and clusters and subtypes and appendices, and ask, instead, ‘What does this person need to live a full life?”12


Our effort to improve psychotherapy practice also gave us glimpses of what Nature could require of our species if there is to be any further evolutionary development for it – an understanding of which we suspect is of increasing urgency in this age of tumultuous change. As Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, said, “Things which have to be tackled have to be done at the right time. That time is generally soon.”


It is now widely accepted that we are confronting global problems of such a magnitude that civilised life could soon become untenable.13 Almost all writers and pundits agree that without significant changes in the values that we hold and the way that we organise our societies, disaster will loom. Selfishness, lack of empathy for strangers, consumerism and the piling up of massive financial debts in exchange for shortterm advantages are the powerful forces fuelling the various crises we face. They have become the leitmotif running through almost all modern commentaries analysing the situation.


Without doubt, a more powerful and inspiring motivation than greed has to take hold for the human species to find the will it needs to make the effort to save itself. In this book we hope to offer an approach that could hearten and enthuse enough people to develop a greater capacity for cooperation and service at a level beyond the one that political and religious ideologies have achieved to date.



We strongly believe that for the human race to cooperate more intelligently, a shared vision is needed between individuals, families and organisations – one that draws out of the collective psyche a greater capacity for caring about what reality requires. In the first instance this means a ‘waking-up’ process has to happen so that more people come to think that this might at least be possible. (The tough social, financial and environmental times ahead may well prove to be part of that process.) Certainly, given the bleak alternative, no one has anything to lose by at least considering that this might be so. But where is such a vision to come from?


In looking for inspiration, most people’s instinct is, naturally enough, to turn to one of the three great traditions: religion, spirituality or science. But for this to be a meaningful exercise, we ought to ask ourselves what worthwhile vision emanates from each of these
positions today.


Religions undeniably bring comfort and solace to millions, but we nevertheless see arising from them a growth, on the one hand, of ever more strident fundamentalism, in some instances so extreme as to promote intolerant behaviour and violence, including torture and killings; and on the other, a growing outpouring from some religious intellectuals of arguments attempting to maintain religion’s hold in the world by justifying it in the face of those scientists who argue there is no need for a belief in the supernatural at all.


The preaching and writing of religionists often has a pleading quality to it – “science hasn’t totally eliminated God because there are still mysteries in our world that science hasn’t explained”. This position is known as the ‘God of the Gaps’: whatever we currently cannot explain, the hand of God explains it. The risk proponents of this view take is that as soon as a rational explanation develops for what hitherto had seemed mysterious, their God is again in retreat. It is a less than convincing argument, and far from inspiring.


Then we have those who regard themselves as not being religious per se, but as being ‘spiritual’. This means, one supposes, a lack of commitment to any specific ideology, an open-mindedness to the transcendent dimension of life, and a faith more personalised, less structured, more receptive to new ideas and myriad influences, and more pluralistic than the doctrinal faiths of religions.


But when one looks at what’s been written in the last few decades to rationally justify why the natural basis of spirituality is important, what we almost always find is a strong tendency to limit the effort to reconciling physics with consciousness. Spirituality is concerned with the universal but invisible interconnectedness of everything, but books on the topic invariably cover experiments in extrasensory perception and precognition, and enquiries into various other paranormal areas, which are, for the most part, highly contentious because the effects they cite are so small, or are often not experimentally repeatable. So the study of the topic gets sidelined. Even more soul-destroying is that, because this approach mainly focuses on expanding conscious awareness and exploring the extent that consciousness might survive after death, it doesn’t address what is most significant to us when we are alive: our own individual consciousness, our living relationship with people, ideas, art, our work and the beautiful objects and places we treasure, and our experience of love.

The metaphor that people writing about spirituality come up with again and again is that, when we die, our individual consciousness is lost, like a single grain of salt dissolving in the ocean. In other words, our personal sense of self is reabsorbed … gone forever. There is something hugely unsatisfactory about this position too because the net result is that, in the endlessly convoluted analysis of how physics and consciousness are somehow intertwined, all reference to the real nature of emotions and relationships is ignored. Our humanity disappears. Everything personal, warm-blooded and loving about human relationships is missing. This suggests to us that this approach to spiritual matters is the product of the left-brained type of temperament, those systems thinkers who have difficulty appreciating the deep context of the interrelatedness of personal relationships. It is, in its own way, as unsatisfactory as the God of the Gaps argument.

A further approach to spirituality appears in those of a very ‘right-brained’ temperament. This largely consists of making endless associations between random events and attaching personal ‘spiritual’ significance to them.



What’s left is the third, and youngest, of the major traditions: science, and particularly reductionist science. Many scientists and science advocates hold strong beliefs about the superiority of the approach, as exemplified by British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s famous statement: “Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”14 His imperious and limited view of what is possible discounted all that humankind had discovered by other means over the tens of thousands of years before the scientific method was adopted. When science encompasses a set of rigid practices – hypothesis, experiment, data, evidence, modified hypothesis, theory, prediction, explanation and so on, and excludes other methods of knowing – it can have the tang of fundamentalism about it, leading some to claim that it is itself a religion of sorts, with adherents tending to believe that the Universe is impersonal and has no deep significance, and that, ultimately, all living things are just a chance production of inanimate matter born out of chaos.15


This worldview has left many, such as the American ‘longshoreman philosopher’ and author of The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, aghast. They observe that many intellectuals throughout the 20th century had done all in their power to denude the human entity of its uniqueness.


Reductionists, because of how and where they focus their attention, easily get seduced into the simplistic belief that complex systems can be completely understood in terms of their components; so they try to break everything down into its smallest parts to understand how things work. They are behaving like the little boy who wanted to understand how a fly could fly. He ripped off its six legs, its wings and antennae one by one, then separated the thorax from the abdomen. But he remained puzzled: where had the fly gone? He had yet to learn that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.


Not all scientists are reductionists: the great scientific minds nearly always aren’t. But the methodological reductionist approach to scientific investigation is not just borderline pedestrian; it can be dangerous. The American-born David Bohm, considered one of the best quantum physicists of all time, recognised this. He said:


"The notion that all these fragments [are] separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of Nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it."16



Bohm is spot on. Yet hard-nosed secular scientists still noisily claim that there is nothing exceptional about human life. In his Astonishing Hypothesis, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, put it like this: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”17 In other words, our sense of self is just an epiphenomenon of a cold, mindless Universe.


The trickle-down effect of this miserable worldview is seen all around us, from the largely uninspiring university education young people receive, to tedious science articles spewing out more and more statistics of less and less consequence, to TV’s dumbed-down ‘science as entertainment’ programmes. Self-styled progressive thinkers who cling to the position that humanity is unexceptional as an unquestioned truth contemptuously dismiss those who suggest they might be wrong.


With the ability to reason thus debilitated, they become intellectually impotent, as the journalist Bryan Appleyard described in his book, Understanding the Present: “Unable to create a solidity for himself, liberal man lapses into a form of spiritual fatigue, a state of apathy in which he decides such wider, grander questions are hardly worth addressing. The symptoms of this lethargy are all about us. The pessimism, anguish, skepticism and despair of so much of twentieth-century art and literature are expressions of the fact that there is nothing ‘big’ worth talking about anymore, there is no meaning to be elucidated.”18


Scientism has admittedly generated many significant material benefits, in medicine, engineering and technology. And it has found new ways to entertain us and deluge us with avalanches of fact and opinion – infinitely more so than in any previous age, thanks to the Internet. But the more information we amass, the less relevant it all seems to our lives as we live them.


It is because it attaches no significance to our lives that scientism cannot lift the spirit: it fails completely to address human yearnings for answers to questions about meaning and destiny, and is incapable of leading us to a deeper relationship with reality.


As a result, it doesn’t provide us with worthwhile reasons to ask more of ourselves. This is not, after all, just an issue about meaning. Our physical survival as a species is at stake. It seems clear to us that the three means of enquiring into how humanity fits in to the universal scheme have failed to bring about the appropriate changes in human behaviour that will be necessary for preserving life on this planet. This is one reason why we have attempted to provide a more fulfilling vision, one that acknowledges and recognises the warmth of human affections and the driving need for relationships, and that satisfies the feeling we share with many others that human life is somehow significant.


Such a vision must also offer answers to the fundamental questions that arose in humanity after the brain’s big bang, once enough human beings had sufficiently evolved to access a level of reason and insight to ponder them. The need for answers to the big questions is not delusional, yet any that are offered must be compatible with our best scientific findings and somehow extend them. If human consciousness is significant, it must fit in with how the entire cosmos has evolved, because everything is connected.


Reductionists, by definition, do not attempt the big questions. To them it is pointless asking how consciousness and spirit, the fundamental animating properties of human life, are directly connected to the rest of the Universe because they view humanity as insignificant products of indifferent material processes. And, on the face of it, human life, in comparison with the almost unimaginable vastness of the cosmos, does appear insignificant, which in many people inevitably fosters a sense of unimportance. That thought, however, should be counterbalanced by an awareness that, whatever we have learnt about the immensity of the Universe and its laws, all the discoveries made about its nature, all the knowledge of its vastness and complexity, are contained and occur within the field of human consciousness. As this book unfolds, we hope to show that consciousness has a vital role to play in the existence of everything and that the quality of our relationship with it lies at the heart of physics.


Throughout much of recorded history, it was clearly often risky to investigate such questions openly, especially if the answers gained were deemed heretical by the prevailing religious and scientific orthodoxies. Not surprisingly, such endeavours and the discoveries they produced were communicated with great secrecy so that their brave proponents could avoid what were often painful, or lethal, consequences imposed by the establishment. This inevitably gave rise to the formation of secret societies which carefully transmitted their dangerous ‘occult’ knowledge to a select few who were deemed worthy and reliable.


There are now many excellent books that show the not inconsiderable influence of such clandestine groups throughout the pages of our cultural history right up to modern times.19,20 The Royal Society, for example, which today plays an important role as scientific advisor to the British government and acts as the UK’s science academy, began life as an extension of one such ‘hidden college’, through secret gatherings where the occult sciences were discussed by the intellectual and scientific luminaries of the age. (The word occult itself comes from the Latin word occultus, referring to ‘knowledge of the hidden’.)


“Mysticism,” wrote Evelyn Underhill in Practical Mysticism, “is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”21 Historical study shows us that the nature of our relationship with the Universe and its importance was always understood by an enlightened few, those men and women who managed to tune themselves to it. Some of them, overtly or in secret, looked for other sincere seekers and taught them how to connect up to the greater reality. Genuine mystical groups were not concerned with indoctrinating people or encouraging cult behaviour but in education. There is a golden thread of information about this precious hidden activity that is traceable among historical records and the literature of all cultures as far back as we can go. This esoteric, or ‘inner’, teaching has had many names: Tao, the Way, the Path, ancient wisdom, the Secret Doctrine, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy, the Hidden Tradition, Sufism.

Whatever it was called, it was the inner inspiration that formed the foundation of all major religions, though this was often unsuspected by the exoteric (‘outer’) functionaries who followed in their wake.


The ancient commonality of this perennial wisdom has been pointed out by many writers, including Max Gorman in his recent book, Jesus Was a Sufi: The lost dimension of Christianity, in which he quotes from one of St Augustine’s letters: “That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the beginnings of the human race.” In parallel with this, Gorman also quotes the modern Sufi authority, Idries Shah, as saying that “Sufism has been known under many names, to all peoples, from the beginnings of human times.”22


The beginning of truly human times we take to be when the brain’s big bang occurred and our minds could escape the confines of space and time making direct perception of a massively larger context possible.


Esoteric knowledge, under whatever name, is never an ideology designed to make people believe or act in a certain way, but instead is “an art or science that can exert a beneficial influence on individuals and societies, in accordance with the needs of those individuals and societies”.23 As we shall see, there is reason to believe that when new knowledge is needed, individuals with the ability to access it become available and, sometimes with the help of others, use it to stabilise, benefit and maintain the wider human community. To students of history, the writer Robert Richardson notes, “a pattern of individual names and esoteric movements appears on the canvas of time like a sudden flash of light, then just as quickly vanishes. A group of disparate people – sometimes famous, sometimes obscure, sometimes solitary, sometimes united, but always engaged in some amorphous activity – spontaneously surfaces. Just as suddenly their traces evaporate, their true purpose and the scope of their actions never comprehended. Understanding their reality seems to be beyond our grasp. Further study may grudgingly yield information – but it is inconclusive, incomplete, perplexing.”24


Nevertheless, the result of this often-mysterious activity bears fruit over succeeding generations, as witnessed by the growth of civilisations, religions, social movements or cultural and scientific advances.


The almost mythic founders of the world’s early civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China are one indication that this has always happened, but it is easier to see it in the appearance of Taoism, Buddhism, the Hindu Vedas, Greek philosophy, the Torah, Gnosticism, Christianity, Islam, Catharism, Sikhism, the Baha’i Faith and so on because we have more written information about the actual individuals involved. Those religions for which we have knowledge of their beginnings arose because a person received inspiration – guidance exerted directly on their mind and soul – and went on to project it to others in ways that added deeper knowledge to the collective consciousness.


All the great innovators achieved what they did by reaching for the truth beyond material form. They stretched themselves to produce the great ideas, art, poetry and technological advances, often at the cost of great personal suffering. In medieval Europe, the romances and music of the troubadours, chivalry, courtly love, the Grail legend, the Pagan symbolism coded into the decoration of great Gothic cathedrals, and the work of craft guilds and so on, performed an evolutionary role, influenced by esoteric knowledge from as far away as India, Egypt and North Africa. It was a mingling of cultures that exposed Europe more explicitly to new ideas, art forms and technologies from further afield and, perhaps not surprisingly, to the teachings of the great mystics of non-Christian religions, predominantly Islam.


Ideas always travel well with goods and chattels, and Italy, surrounded by the Islamic lands of Anatolia (present-day Turkey), Palestine, North Africa and Moorish Spain, was at the hub of lively sea traffic in the late Middle Ages. And it was in Italy where a fresh cultural upsurge began: the opportunity was there. With the publication of his Divine Comedy, the poet Dante Alighieri broke the Roman Church’s imposition of Latin as the main means of learning.25 He wrote in the vernacular (the Florentine dialect, which is the origin of modern Italian) and thus started the process of bringing literature and learning to the general public in a way that had not been possible when it was kept within the confines of the Church.


The House of Medici, along with other great families, such as the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, the Este of Ferrara, and the Gonzaga of Mantua, all grew rich through commerce, and from the early 14th century became major patrons of the arts and sciences.26 By supporting the most creative people that appealed to them, they made possible the Italian Renaissance, which reawakened Europe to the profound Greek and Roman Pagan ideas that had their origin in ancient Egypt, and the richness of Moslem poetry, music, crafts, technology, science and philosophy. The great men of the Renaissance, including Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Botticelli, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi – all drew upon the achievements, mythology and Hermetic symbolism prevalent in the dynamic periods of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Islamic culture.


The Golden Age of medieval Islam from the mid-8th century to the mid-13th century spanned a geographical area that stretched from Spain, across North Africa and Southwest Asia and into Central Asia. Its hallmark of a profound love of learning and investigation of the natural world produced not only artists, scholars, poets and philosophers, but also geographers, navigators and traders. Agriculture, architecture, law, science, engineering and all manner of crafts flourished at that time providing a secure ground for those connected to the esoteric stream to serve and teach humanity. But in the 1400s when this period of Islamic cultural greatness began to wane, the esoteric teachings of Islamic mysticism, Sufism, had spread further afield, east to the Far East where it revitalised Buddhism, and west throughout Christian Europe. That the Italian Renaissance flourished, for example, was due in considerable part to the impact of Islamic learning and culture. Science and art were very much intermingled, exemplified by the work of polymaths such as da Vinci. Strange sages like the physician and botanist Paracelsus wandered from one European capital to another spreading new ideas and questioning established beliefs. And inspirational literature woke people up.

In England, Geoffrey Chaucer’s writings, borrowing as they do stories from Rumi, Fariduddin Attar – the Persian poet whose masterwork was the allegorical Conference of the Birds – and others, were a channel for esoteric ideas. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a compilation of chivalric tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table, also contributed to the civilising process. As of course did the work of Shakespeare, whose plays are rich in Sufi tales and aphorisms indicating that he, or whoever wrote his plays, was also connected to a source of knowledge beyond the reach of institutionalised Christian teaching. And John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, incorporated Pagan and classical Greek references within its Christian mythology.

The dynamic impulse that vitalised Europe also stimulated the great minds that founded our scientific outlook: along with Galileo, a group that included Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, William Gilbert, Leibniz and the physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian Isaac Newton. All these scientific luminaries contemplated Hermetic and Sufi concepts, as did the German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, widely considered as one of the most important thinkers in Western culture. Goethe was closely associated with the Enlightenment, a movement that encouraged critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs and morals, and a strong belief in the power of rationality and science. His work spanned the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, and science. He was also a freemason.


Freemasonry, whose mysterious origins are still hotly debated, was a secret brotherhood bound together by ideals of fraternity, equality, tolerance and reason. It undoubtedly played an important role in liberalising thinking in Europe and America. It was a group of freemasons, members of a hidden college, who founded the Royal Society, for example, and many famous leaders of the Enlightenment in Europe and the fledgling United States were also members, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, Pope, Horace Walpole, Christopher Wren, John Locke, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Robert Walpole, Mozart, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.27 Throughout these centuries all these creative, productive and influential people strove to connect to a greater reality and did so by drawing inspiration from the largely hidden river of wisdom that has nourished humanity for thousands of years.


This of course leaves open a question: where did this knowledge come from in the first place? This is essentially the same question as that which is now seen as the major stumbling block that is holding up progress in physics and biology: how did the information for matter to form and life to arise come about? As we shall see, many scientists now realise that it has to be solved before they can make major theoretical advances in their various disciplines.


As this book unfolds, our attempt to solve this issue in a scientifically acceptable way will become apparent.


It is currently unfashionable in the secular political, scientific and educational communities to consider that esoteric wisdom traditions might have something to contribute to human understanding. The remarkable artistic, philosophical, social and technological achievements that stemmed from them, and their ability to raise human aspirations and give meaning to people’s lives, tend to be glossed over or ignored. Nevertheless, like Theseus following the thread out of the dark labyrinth, this book’s journey will hold on to this wisdom theme, for we believe it could help free humanity from the limitations of conditioned thinking – something that is needed now more than ever. Our journey will also allow key human givens organising ideas to unfold in greater depth so that they might shine a revealing new light on the great questions of human and universal existence in a way that is acceptable to scientists as well as the spiritually inclined.


Whatever inspires the next stage of human evolution cannot be impersonal. It must not only make human beings feel truly at home in the physical Universe but also show how our lives are significant in relationship to the whole. For science to have a meaningful place in our lives it should hold out a role for what is most valuable and significant to us all: relationships, serving others and love. If these aspects of life don’t fit into the overall pattern, then science is not properly pursuing the questions it needs to answer.


Among all the sciences, we must give most credit to physicists, who have recognised that to make further progress they have to reconcile human consciousness with the laws of physics. Indeed, some even suspect that the presence of human beings in the Universe may be essential. For instance, Martin Rees, the cosmologist and president of the Royal Society, expressing this view, said: “In the beginning there were only probabilities. The Universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The Universe exists because we are aware of it.”28 If Rees is right, something odd is certainly going on. Freeman Dyson, another physicist, wrote that, “As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together for our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known we were coming.” 29

The world population today has nearly reached 7 billion and continues to rise. That’s about 3,000 times more people than were on Earth just 2,000 years ago. More than half of us live in urban areas: vast cities, many containing tens of millions.30 The undoubted benefits of city life – such as economies of scale, political freedom, and social and technological innovation – come with a heavy toll because supplying these huge conglomerations of people means our beautiful planet is being seriously overgrazed and polluted. The essence of our ecological crisis is that we are rapidly using up Earth’s finite resources.


Whatever form scientific progress takes, and whoever the creative minds are that will inspire it, Nature requires this problem to be addressed. This is a matter of good housekeeping – and we must assume the house is not beyond repair.


The questions arising over our continuing survival are forcing us to resolve the ecological and psychological crisis we have created over the last 8,000 years or so. The pressure will increase until a new evolutionary development occurs that stabilises our species’ consciousness. The pioneering American psychologist Robert Ornstein put this very well: “Our biological evolution is, for all practical purposes, at its end. There will be no further biological evolution without human ‘conscious evolution’. And this may not happen without first we have an understanding of what our consciousness is, what it was originally designed to do, and where the points of possible change may be.”31


In Godhead: The brain’s big bang we cover many topics, but ultimately they boil down to investigating one question: why do we exist? In this curtain-raiser to our exploration of the evolution of creativity, mental illness and our connection to reality, it seems apposite to quote from the end of Stephen Hawking’s bestseller, A Brief History of Time:32 “If we do discover a complete theory it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists, then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we in the Universe exist. If we find the answer to that it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”*









*In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking embraces string theory and says that he no longer sees the need for a ‘God hypothesis’ to account for the Universe. We feel, however, that he has taken a retrograde step and the above quotation was prescient and is apposite for our theme. We can all take part in a meaningful discussion on the question of why it is that we exist without needing to tie ourselves up in knots with ‘string’.









REFERENCES in this article are included in the book.

The New Threshold

excerpt from THE NEW THRESHOLD

by The Executive Committee of The Club of Rome, 1973


The Predicament of Mankind

The initial impulse of the Club was a common concern regarding the deep crisis faced by humanity- a crisis which we feel is different in kind from those of the past and which the societies of today are ill-equipped to face with their present attitudes, values, policies and institutions. Men everywhere are perplexed by a range of elusive problems - deterioration of the environment, the crisis of institutions, bureaucratisation, uncontrolled urban spread, insecurity of employment and loss of satisfaction in work, the alienation of youth, questioning of the values of society, violence and disregard of law and order, educational irrelevance, inflation and monetary disruption in the face of material prosperity, the unabridged gap between rich and poor within and between nations - to mention only a few.

These difficulties appear to be world-wide symptoms of a general but as yet little understood malaise. It is this cluster of intertwined problems which we term the Problematique. Their interactions have become so basic and are so critical that it is ever more difficult to isolate from the tangle of the problematique single major issues and to deal with them separately. To attempt to do so only seems to increase the difficulties in other and often unsuspected parts of the mass. For the same reason no nation, not even the biggest, can hope to solve all its own problems since these involve other nations and interact with the global system as a whole.

Interdependence is not, however, restricted to the political context; it also regards to energy resources, food and industrial raw materials, markets for products, transfer of new technology, even the explosion of violence. Beyond these material concerns, the problematique is all-pervasive, because human aspirations can no longer be bounded by a particular environment of culture. What we term the Predicament of Mankind is our own limited perception of many individual symptoms of a profound illness of society for which we are unable to prescribe an effective remedy in the absence of a reliable diagnosis.

....

Many of the manifestations of the problematique are already causing people, and especially the young, to question the validity of our present socio-economic philosophy. Others, such as Dennis Gabor, remark that our present civilisation is based materially on the solid foundation of scientific technology and 'spiritually on practically nothing'. Over centuries, our society has ostensibly operated, albeit somewhat hypocritically, on the Christian ethic of ‘love thy neighbour’ and the hope of future salvation. This has been tempered, it is true, especially in the Protestant countries, by acceptance of the virtues of hard work and the respectability of success. Nevertheless, it constituted a raison d’être for the individual and society. More recently, socialism raised the standard for the creation of heaven on earth, of equity and human betterment - at times with the fervour of a true religion.

However, as affluence increased and the rationalism of science prevailed, faith in the traditional religions faded and social reform as a result of its own successes has less allure and indeed its cultural and institutional manifestations seem strangely dim. So we are left with our material successes gone sour on us and with little motivation or collective emotional drive towards worthwhile goals for our race. Our rational-material, neo-christian system of values including those of individual freedom and human dignity are questioned, with little in the way of an evolving replacement. Many of those who question our present values most bitterly are merely destructive in their approach.

The Tolstoy reaction of ‘back to nature' becomes ever more unrealistic as population increases and technology dominates. For reasons already explained, the study on limits to growth was unable to include the values problem. However, the debate on the problematique may well generate a new search which the social scientists, including the behaviourists, have hardly dared to tackle. In the meantime, as the crisis mounts, we may have to adopt a supreme ethic of survival for the human race and in our decisions measure the possible effects of alternative actions in the light of their possible positive or negative influences of the probability of survival, and at the same time consider the extent to which the quest for quality of life can pave the way towards a new system of values.


Man and His Destiny

These comments on the need for a new value system lead to questioning of whether we are not indeed facing a deep and basically biological crisis of the human species. Until recently, the average man, fully occupied with his struggle upwards from subsistence, had little time to think.
He was tranquilised by the conventional religions, kept docile by ‘bread and circuses’ and, despite many not able exceptions, left the basic problems to priests and philosophers. Towards the end of the last century, with the rise of the physical sciences, a wave of materialism and rationalismintervened and began to question the traditional tenets.

Freud, Marx and a host of others deepened the questioning, but recognition of the Darwinist principle of natural selection seemed to provide some keys. Survival for the fittest, leading to the evolution or annihilation of species, gave a tangible, if vague, hope for the future. The secularisation of society and of its purpose has now spread, with education and affluences, until in the rich industrialised countries it is now generalised and has become one of the causes of the contemporary questioning of our values.

It is also a cause of present-day violence and crime, of the alienation of individuals from their society and of general aimlessness. On the other hand, it leads the young to seek new forms of religious satisfaction, to experiment with mysticism, to seek new and heightened perception through drug-taking on the part of those who feel alienated and distrust rational scientific approaches.

Organic evolution in fact holds little promise for the further evolution of man; its processes are too slow in the face of man’s potential for self-destruction. His societies will either disrupt or he will design his own betterment long before nature can evolve a higher form for him. In the last 2000 years, man has developed his physical power and increased his information base to an incredible extent, but there is little sign that he has increased his wisdom or spiritual capacity during that period.

He is presumably the only planetary species aware of his own predicament and with the potentiality of self-development, yet the very forces in his nature which have raised him above the animals weigh against deliberate self-evolution. The struggle to survive has cultivated aggressive characteristics, vanity, greed, desire for power, etc., which are not the elements on which to build the wisdom he now requires.

On the other hand, men have learnt to co-operate with one another and live in societies, however fragile, accepting collective values and objectives. Our destiny is in our own hands: how can we learn to achieve it?