Community, Consciousness and the Road to Freedom

An excerpt from Prisoners of the Real, an intellectual odyssey from ancient knowledge to planetary consciousness

By Greg Guma

We must reconcile two realms of experience that have long been viewed as separate — the political and spiritual. The keys to a synthesis have been found in ecological consciousness and the post-modern politics of Gaia.

Community begins when its members see their common purpose and relation to the whole, a living togetherness that is the essence of sister and brotherhood. In that sense, few true communities currently exist in our post-modern world. 

            Most of our cities and towns have no real centers, and we devote little time to defining what holds us together. That work has mostly been turned over to elected representatives and appointed bureaucrats. Their "rational collectives" leave little space for warmth or friendship in the press of political and economic reality. Visions of togetherness are usually viewed as romantic fantasy, conceivable at all only in terms of their concrete effects.        

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            Dionysian collectives, in contrast, are the seeds of an organic commonwealth that place true solidarity at the center of social experience. Every act of true friendship, every moment of selfless aid in our rationalized "post-industrial" world, brings social transformation a step closer. This is true community building, and it occurs whenever autonomous actions create dynamic unity.    

            The Dionysian path is known by many names — metaphysical reconstruction, holistic epistemology and deep ecology, among others. Critics rightly note that attacks on rationalism and "instrumental reason" often go too far, ending in rejection of all forms of purposeful activity and a retreat into the mystical haze of nature worship and “magical thinking.” Wary of the cult of technique, cultural revolutionaries sometimes confuse technology with practice and reject all human inventiveness as wanton dominance. In truth, however, it is possible to make peace with nature even while acknowledging the separation created by our consciousness. As Christopher Lasch explained, "Nature sets limits to human freedom, but it does not define freedom."

            Ecological and systems thinking provide a theoretical foundation for the Dionysian approach. The former encompasses the realization that structures that may appear rigid in nature are actually manifestations of processes in continual flux; the latter has moved beyond analysis of complex machines to an understanding of relationships and integration in living systems. After 2000 years of reducing the world to smaller and smaller building blocks, science has finally turned its attention to principles of organization. Every organism is an integrated whole, a living system. Families and communities exhibit the same characteristics of wholeness as cells and ecosystems.

            Yet this metaphysical reconstruction also involves reconciliation of two realms of experience that have long been viewed as separate — the political and spiritual. Marx's claim that religion is the "opiate of the people" has been as debilitating as the notion that enlightenment is a purely personal pursuit, fundamentally incompatible with the "dirty" world of social action.

            The keys to a synthesis have been found in ecological consciousness and the post-modern politics of Gaia. Together they form a new cultural paradigm — planetary consciousness. With roots in myth, Gaia re-emerged as an hypothesis, out of research on the auto-regulation of the Earth as a living system. According to James Lovelock, originator of the hypothesis, "the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, can be regarded as a single entity." Studying the nature of Earth's atmosphere, he and other researchers discovered that it is not merely a biological product but instead an active system designed to maintain a chosen environment within the biosphere.

            Since this initial research Gaia has developed as a theoretical and artistic context, embraced by social critics, articulated in music, and developed as an eco-social organizing principle. There is talk also of a Gaian mode of consciousness, one acknowledging that science has a myth-making quality. Closely linked to ecological concepts, Gaian consciousness recognizes that opposites can — in fact, must — coexist.

            This emerging form of spirituality is politically consistent with certain strains of Green thinking, in particular deep ecology, holistic feminism, community-based populism, and bioregionalism. All of these incorporate a subtle awareness of the oneness of life, the interdependence of its limitless manifestations, and its cyclical processes of change and transformation. The sense that we are connected to the cosmos as a whole is a spiritual revelation that ties together the disparate expressions of this new consciousness.

            In The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics, Charlene Spretnak argued persuasively that Green concepts of inter-relatedness and sustainability open the way toward what she called postmodern spirituality. Human beings, she wrote, are social and interconnected, and the boundaries between us are more illusory than we normally think. Taking account of the nature reverence buried within most religious traditions, she concluded that a spiritual grounding can not only answer a deep hunger in modern experience, but also mesh comfortably with the Green tendrils that have sprouted around the world. Like others who are attempting to describe the next stage of humanity's journey, she found herself in a region where cosmic consciousness and political analysis meet.

            The key to a new age, says historian William Irwin Thompson, is the acceptance of difference, "the consciousness of the unique that contributes to the understanding of the universal." The main danger is what he has labeled "collectivization through terror," the stamping out of differences. Just as mono-crop agriculture does violence to nature, a mono-crop society — essentially the extreme of an industrial mentality — would be deadly to human nature. Even Green politics, which may yet develop an ecology of consciousness, could instead become a fundamentalist ideology, rejecting flexibility and promoting a Luddite contempt for innovation.

            "The real secret of freedom," Thompson once wrote, "seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild, randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformation."

Power of the Participator: Science and Spirits

“We are now so near the verge of the chasm that divides physical from spiritual science…” 

— Henry Steel Olcott, 1880

By Greg Guma

Scientists were grappling with new theories of space-time possibilities; fundamental energies, self-organizing bio-gravitational fields, the relationship of consciousness to gravity. And the most revolutionary of these: consciousness as the hidden variable in the structure of matter itself.

By early 1975, I was eager to share the impact of these new discoveries, to make the startling possibilities understandable to a broader public. After launching a magazine, Public Occurrence, out of the bookstore run by a group we called the Frayed Page Collective, I explained what I was learning in an essay — along with a unique Vermont connection. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics were returning us to ideas discussed 2,000 years ago by Parmenides,** and later by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who introduced “immaterialism," otherwise known as "subjective idealism,” as well as by astronomer James Jeans and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

The ultimate basis of being “is not sensory material,” I wrote, “but an ideal principle of form. Along with rebuilding the doctrine of harmony, the boundary between the observer and observed has become fuzzy. The theory of relativity ushered in a new understanding of the structure of space and time; quantum theory has revealed that every measurement in the atomic field requires an act of intervention.”

The process of conceiving any experiment is the experience of an observer who is also a participant, whose being is inseparable from the world in which the experiment is happening. Whitehead had explained it, more than a decade before Werner Heisenberg presented the uncertainty principle and turned immutable facts back into possibilities. Each entity begins as a “transcendent universe of other things.”

 In 1974, quantum physicist John A. Wheeler refined this theory of unity and interconnection. The man who had given us terms like “black hole,” “wormhole and “quantum foam” had also discovered that the laws of energy conservation are not immutable, that the point-like events of space-time spontaneously break down, that his “mutability principle” transcends the conventional laws of physics, and that “there may be no such thing as the glittering central mechanism of the universe.”

The quantum principle, a conceptual leap in the exact sciences that  marked a new, emerging synthesis of science, philosophy and religion, involved Mind in an essential way, as both creator and a function of matter. As Wheeler explained:

“May the universe in some strange sense be ‘brought into being’ by the participation of those who participate?… The vital act is the act of participation. “Participator” is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term “observer” of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall, and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says.”

This was a transformative metaphysical idea. Mind — the Participator —formulates the proposition from which matter is derived, it suggested. Energy manifests itself as transient particles, material forms which can’t be isolated from the wholeness of the universe. In other words, individual universe constructions form each other, each connected to all the others in constantly changing patterns. It is a self-organizing process, without beginning or end.

This new approach, incorporating recent scientific discoveries, posited that all possible histories of the universe occur and interfere with each other. Regions of constructive interference, the paths along which we can move with least disturbance, provide the “classical” history of the universe, as we know it in our usual state of consciousness. 

In films and popular culture, the basic concept has since become known as the multiverse, a hypothetical collection of potentially diverse observable universes. But as Einstein realized and Wheeler said, the theory is incomplete. It doesn’t explain why any individual particle jumps into the instantaneous world line at a particular space-time coordinate. 

As Wheeler put it, “No theory of physics that deals only with physics will ever explain physics.”

Wheeler’s illustration of the reflective, metacognitive nature of the universe.

The determining factor is the volition, or choice, of the Participator. Quantum probability involves a creative sub-layer of ideas in the mind. All conscious systems, regardless of their location, contribute to the total quantum potential. The character of each event is a gestalt property of the wholeness of the universe. The volitional activity can be either active or passive. And sets of subjective states are linked, according to psychical research, with changes in patterns of behavior in the body. 

Passive volitional states may even reach outside the body, impressing a coherent pattern on the movement of elementary particles. This is a technical way of describing the concept of astral projection.

Such revelations within the “rational” world of science and western philosophy come as no surprise to students of eastern wisdom, parapsychology, occult phenomena, and so-called “mind control.” Although they disagree about many things, most of those who have sought “altered” states of consciousness understand that humanity’s ability to focus consciousness can illuminate conventional “reality,” what Voltaire called “the lie agreed upon,” reaching into its recesses, and enabling human beings to transform both it and themselves.

Interest in the potential of consciousness began more than 150 years ago in the United States, long before physics began to challenge conventional notions of reality with experimental proof. A new craze swept the country, belief in premonitions, dreams, and messages suggesting a spiritual reality that existed alongside the material world. People were hungry for proof of immortality, and sought it in communication with “the other side.” 

Invisible forces, at first labeled either as demons or spirits of the dead, produced noises, knocked over tables, played musical instruments, made people fly through the air, or even materialized. Most people remained skeptical; some became violent or abusive in reaction. But psychic explorers also began to investigate, to witness strange phenomena in controlled environments and interview the mediums apparently linked to them.

One of these investigators, I learned, was Henry Steel Olcott, who visited Vermont in 1874. He spent weeks in Chittenden, a small community near Rutland, on assignment for a New York newspaper to unravel the mystery surrounding spirits allegedly produced by William Eddy, a medium who had been responsible for “manifestations” since his childhood. While there he met a well-traveled occultist, Helena Blavatsky, who introduced him to fresh explanations based on ancient wisdom, but also consistent with recent — and indeed, future — scientific discoveries. 

For the next 40 years, I conducted research and wrote factual accounts, as well as a novel based on the Vermont mediums and the meeting of Blavatsky and Olcott. Commenting on what he learned, Olcott once predicted, “We are now so near the verge of the chasm that divides physical from spiritual science, that it will not be long before we will bridge it.”

* Parmenides talked about the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, and proposed that they are just appearances of a single eternal reality, giving rise to the principle that “all is one.”

More on Vermont & Spiritualism in the Gilded Age: Chittenden Mysteries

Blavatsky on Occultism, Ghosts and Reincarnation: Theosophy vs. Spiritualism