For something so vital to humanity, imagination too often gets a bad rap. “It’s just your imagination” is the common expression when a person wants to dispel another’s perception of some aspect of reality.
I watched a TV show this week where an Australian comedian investigated the phenomenon of UFOs, travelling to Roswell, New Mexico, to a kind of festival of UFO believers. In many ways it was fascinating and funny to hear people’s stories of space ship sightings, alien abductions and weird encounters with otherworldly beings intent on bodily probing their victims.
These kinds of shows, humorous or not, inevitably come to the position that people who believe in UFOs are deluded or mad and that it’s “just their imagination”. Ironically, such a black-and-white position is the mirror opposite of the wide-eyed credulity of many UFO believers. Fundamentalist rationalism meets fundamentalist supernaturalism.
I wonder if in the 21st century we can come up with understandings that are a bit more sophisticated, a little more nuanced. Imagination doesn’t have to be synonymous with unreality, nor should it be taken as some kind of hard, absolute truth. Imagination is vital – we couldn’t live without a mental ability to broaden the horizon of our everyday world. Nothing new would be created by humans without it. Everything would be immensely dull and lonely.
Imagination is a bridge between the known and the unknown, between the outer, concrete world and the inner world of the human psyche, between consciousness and the unconscious. Carl Jung, in Man and His Symbols, says: “Even when our senses react to real phenomena, sights, and sounds, they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind ... thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors.”
So when someone investigates a phenomenon like UFOs that goes beyond the boundaries of the known accepted reality, inevitably imagination comes into play. The proper attitude of the investigator should be humility. Why would a person believe they had encountered an alien? What does it say potentially about them, their psychology and their life? They may be barking mad, but they may not. Even in madness certain truths about them and the kind of society they live in will be revealed if questions are asked. And the widespread occurrence of something like UFO sightings points to fascinating, broader patterns in the collective psyche.
Inevitably, such an investigation comes up against a battery of unknowns and factors that cannot be fully answered by the rational mind. That’s OK. Humans are more than one-dimensional rational beings. We ought to be celebrating ourselves in our full roundedness and the role the imagination plays in making us who we are.
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Rationality and the Unknown
A while back I was stirred to write a poem after hearing atheists like Christopher Hitchens a lot in the media. It's more a response to the tone of arrogance in their views, rather than to their views per se, though I think the subject of death would present a pretty stiff emotional challenge to a staunch atheist.
A Militant Atheist on His Death Bed
When they speak at my grave
they will say that I died
in a reasonable manner
They will say I was disciplined in dying
as in the fullness of life,
demanding answers and proofs.
The candle flame by my bed
was fed by oxygen,
not the draught of superstition.
Among them there will be no voodoo
of the imagination.
They will say I went into the void
in a reasonable manner.
A Militant Atheist on His Death Bed
When they speak at my grave
they will say that I died
in a reasonable manner
They will say I was disciplined in dying
as in the fullness of life,
demanding answers and proofs.
The candle flame by my bed
was fed by oxygen,
not the draught of superstition.
Among them there will be no voodoo
of the imagination.
They will say I went into the void
in a reasonable manner.
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Life's Grand Cathedral
Most lunch times I find myself lured into St Patrick’s Cathedral, a short walk from where I work in Little Collins Street in downtown Melbourne. I ford streams of office workers, scramble through the noise and turbulence of the city and enter through St Pat’s large and impressive wooden doors.
It’s the silence that draws me there, a deep and magnetic emptiness that satisfies my need to find a place of quiet reflection in the midst of the city crowds and the feverishness of my own thoughts. It’s a giant cavern and I welcome the opportunity to just sit with myself and be enveloped in its heavy, reverential air.
I don’t belong to any organised religion, so it’s fascinating and novel to be in such an impressive spiritual place. I come from a family of non-observant Ukrainian Jews and as I sit in the cathedral I perform a simple Zen meditation of observing the flow of my breath. Despite my heathenness, I carry the same respect for the divinity of the place that I see in the faces of the few people worshipping there.
Everything about St Pat’s – its massive stone pillars, its lofty roof, the altars and stained glass windows - speaks of the immensity of God and the spiritual calling. Everything is pointing upwards, from the material world to the transcendent and everlasting beyond. The individual is made small and humbled, submitting the ego in the all-powerful womb of the divine. From the windows streams a yellow light that germinates the dark interior, a soft grace that falls into a deep well of silence.
Entering the cathedral I am compelled to answer the call of Spirit, and everything around me is telling me that is what I should do, is designed for that purpose. There is something deeply attractive about the silence in this place. It is like the sense of awe one feels staring at a mountain or looking down into a forested valley from the top of an escarpment. Like dropping into a well and being held by the nothingness that is there.
After my little meditation sessions in St Pat’s, as I walk the short way back to work, I’m always struck by the contrast with the outside world. I wonder how the experience of the sacred can make its way out of the wooden doors and into everyday life; not clothed in the old and outworn forms of religion, but in some shape that is alive and relevant.
Religion built a vessel for the Spirit, allowing people a conscious relationship to the transcendental forces at work in their lives and in the world. In modern society we have not eliminated the spiritual journey, but simply driven it into the unconscious. As the Jungian critic David Tacey says in Gods and Diseases (HarperCollins, 2011): “The spirit still pushes us from one state to another, and nothing can stand in its way, not even a materialist society that has no belief in the sacred.”
There is hope. It comes in the form of the quiet moments when we connect with the deep silence beyond life’s myriad distractions; the moments in which we can simply be. It happens in nature and in loving relationships; in times of celebration and sharing with others; in music and dance; and, though we usually don’t seek it in this way, in times of suffering.
Sacred ritual doesn’t belong solely inside a place of worship. Outside the cathedral is where the challenge, and the fun, begins.
It’s the silence that draws me there, a deep and magnetic emptiness that satisfies my need to find a place of quiet reflection in the midst of the city crowds and the feverishness of my own thoughts. It’s a giant cavern and I welcome the opportunity to just sit with myself and be enveloped in its heavy, reverential air.
I don’t belong to any organised religion, so it’s fascinating and novel to be in such an impressive spiritual place. I come from a family of non-observant Ukrainian Jews and as I sit in the cathedral I perform a simple Zen meditation of observing the flow of my breath. Despite my heathenness, I carry the same respect for the divinity of the place that I see in the faces of the few people worshipping there.
Everything about St Pat’s – its massive stone pillars, its lofty roof, the altars and stained glass windows - speaks of the immensity of God and the spiritual calling. Everything is pointing upwards, from the material world to the transcendent and everlasting beyond. The individual is made small and humbled, submitting the ego in the all-powerful womb of the divine. From the windows streams a yellow light that germinates the dark interior, a soft grace that falls into a deep well of silence.
Entering the cathedral I am compelled to answer the call of Spirit, and everything around me is telling me that is what I should do, is designed for that purpose. There is something deeply attractive about the silence in this place. It is like the sense of awe one feels staring at a mountain or looking down into a forested valley from the top of an escarpment. Like dropping into a well and being held by the nothingness that is there.
After my little meditation sessions in St Pat’s, as I walk the short way back to work, I’m always struck by the contrast with the outside world. I wonder how the experience of the sacred can make its way out of the wooden doors and into everyday life; not clothed in the old and outworn forms of religion, but in some shape that is alive and relevant.
Religion built a vessel for the Spirit, allowing people a conscious relationship to the transcendental forces at work in their lives and in the world. In modern society we have not eliminated the spiritual journey, but simply driven it into the unconscious. As the Jungian critic David Tacey says in Gods and Diseases (HarperCollins, 2011): “The spirit still pushes us from one state to another, and nothing can stand in its way, not even a materialist society that has no belief in the sacred.”
There is hope. It comes in the form of the quiet moments when we connect with the deep silence beyond life’s myriad distractions; the moments in which we can simply be. It happens in nature and in loving relationships; in times of celebration and sharing with others; in music and dance; and, though we usually don’t seek it in this way, in times of suffering.
Sacred ritual doesn’t belong solely inside a place of worship. Outside the cathedral is where the challenge, and the fun, begins.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Beyond the Obama-Osama Duality
The death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of US commandos last week brought into sharp focus something I’d been thinking about off and on for a while.
I broadly agree with the people criticial of the way bin Laden was targeted for killing rather than being brought in like other criminals to face a proper system of justice. And the equivocation of the US Government over what went on in the moments before he was killed and the way his body was swiftly disposed at sea adds to the moral shoddiness of the whole operation.
My chief interest, though, is how the affair demonstrates the principle of duality that is a constant in human affairs. It was fascinating how Barack Obama, in his speech after the death of bin Laden, described it as “justice”. America, he said, was the place of “liberty and justice”. Effectively an extrajudicial killing, probably a summary execution, was “justice” meted out by the military of a country that stood for justice and freedom.
In the early ‘90s, about the time of the first Gulf War, I saw a documentary based on a book by the American author Sam Keen called Faces of the Enemy. In it Keen pointed out that an individual or country that has a one-sided picture of itself, as being pure or on some kind of holy mission, creates a psychology of opposites in which there has to be a demonic adversary. Good incarnates evil, and the defenders of liberty and justice will inevitably find terrorists bent on their destruction. As the ancient Greeks said – hubris invites nemesis.
But duality is not simply about absolutes, not simply freedom versus al Qaeda. It exists as an inner fabric of temporal life. Indeed all life can be seen as a relationship of opposites: day-night, black-white, man-woman, mind-body, subject-object, rich-poor, left-right, earth-heaven, positive-negative, life-death, good-evil, being-nothingness, and so on.
In my work for a not-for-profit community organisation in Melbourne, I am aware of one such element of duality – progress. By that I mean how the aims of the organisation, which is to spread the benefits of renewable energy and environmental sustainability, translate into change in the community. At the moment there is a new state government that shows little interest in sustainability and the progressive agenda in mainstream discourse is under fire from conservative critics and seems stalled.
I can only see it as a process of moving forward and back. Inevitably and inexorably as some challenge is met, some synthesis made, some enlightenment gained, there will be a dark and regressive element that will seek to undo that which is achieved. It applies to the psychology of groups and whole cultures as much as to individuals. It’s true the regressive element will tend to thrive in certain conditions – particularly where there is fear, ignorance and uncertainty – but it is a constant companion no matter what circumstance.
It’s also true that dark material will tend to surface just after a point of enlightenment. A beam of light inevitably exposes that which has been festering in the darkness. This can be seen, for instance, in the way countries that embrace democracy and greater openness after long periods of dictatorship find themselves initially torn by divisions and strife. Old conflicts that lay dormant break into the open. Criminal gangs, ethnic violence and economic chaos came in the wake of the demise of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The current upsurge in violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt could also be an example of this process.
There is a lot to be learnt in the way that Eastern philosophy tackles the problems of duality. Broadly speaking, it counsels not to identify with any single element of a pair of opposites but to embrace and integrate them as a whole. The West’s tendency has been to split one opposite away from the other. For many centuries Western religions told their followers to identify with goodness, creating a monstrous shadow of evil that ran amok in various ways including wars and genocide.
Duality menaces because of our limited vision and lack of preparedness to bring the opposites together in a meaningful way. There is wholeness beyond the opposites, a point of harmony most of us are aware of at different times, if briefly, in our lives.
In this context the US President might want to consider the following excerpt from the Taoist classic Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu:
If one does not know the Constant,
One runs blindly into disasters.
If one knows the Constant,
One can understand and embrace all.
If one understands and embraces all,
One is capable of doing justice.
I broadly agree with the people criticial of the way bin Laden was targeted for killing rather than being brought in like other criminals to face a proper system of justice. And the equivocation of the US Government over what went on in the moments before he was killed and the way his body was swiftly disposed at sea adds to the moral shoddiness of the whole operation.
My chief interest, though, is how the affair demonstrates the principle of duality that is a constant in human affairs. It was fascinating how Barack Obama, in his speech after the death of bin Laden, described it as “justice”. America, he said, was the place of “liberty and justice”. Effectively an extrajudicial killing, probably a summary execution, was “justice” meted out by the military of a country that stood for justice and freedom.
In the early ‘90s, about the time of the first Gulf War, I saw a documentary based on a book by the American author Sam Keen called Faces of the Enemy. In it Keen pointed out that an individual or country that has a one-sided picture of itself, as being pure or on some kind of holy mission, creates a psychology of opposites in which there has to be a demonic adversary. Good incarnates evil, and the defenders of liberty and justice will inevitably find terrorists bent on their destruction. As the ancient Greeks said – hubris invites nemesis.
But duality is not simply about absolutes, not simply freedom versus al Qaeda. It exists as an inner fabric of temporal life. Indeed all life can be seen as a relationship of opposites: day-night, black-white, man-woman, mind-body, subject-object, rich-poor, left-right, earth-heaven, positive-negative, life-death, good-evil, being-nothingness, and so on.
In my work for a not-for-profit community organisation in Melbourne, I am aware of one such element of duality – progress. By that I mean how the aims of the organisation, which is to spread the benefits of renewable energy and environmental sustainability, translate into change in the community. At the moment there is a new state government that shows little interest in sustainability and the progressive agenda in mainstream discourse is under fire from conservative critics and seems stalled.
I can only see it as a process of moving forward and back. Inevitably and inexorably as some challenge is met, some synthesis made, some enlightenment gained, there will be a dark and regressive element that will seek to undo that which is achieved. It applies to the psychology of groups and whole cultures as much as to individuals. It’s true the regressive element will tend to thrive in certain conditions – particularly where there is fear, ignorance and uncertainty – but it is a constant companion no matter what circumstance.
It’s also true that dark material will tend to surface just after a point of enlightenment. A beam of light inevitably exposes that which has been festering in the darkness. This can be seen, for instance, in the way countries that embrace democracy and greater openness after long periods of dictatorship find themselves initially torn by divisions and strife. Old conflicts that lay dormant break into the open. Criminal gangs, ethnic violence and economic chaos came in the wake of the demise of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The current upsurge in violence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt could also be an example of this process.
There is a lot to be learnt in the way that Eastern philosophy tackles the problems of duality. Broadly speaking, it counsels not to identify with any single element of a pair of opposites but to embrace and integrate them as a whole. The West’s tendency has been to split one opposite away from the other. For many centuries Western religions told their followers to identify with goodness, creating a monstrous shadow of evil that ran amok in various ways including wars and genocide.
Duality menaces because of our limited vision and lack of preparedness to bring the opposites together in a meaningful way. There is wholeness beyond the opposites, a point of harmony most of us are aware of at different times, if briefly, in our lives.
In this context the US President might want to consider the following excerpt from the Taoist classic Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu:
If one does not know the Constant,
One runs blindly into disasters.
If one knows the Constant,
One can understand and embrace all.
If one understands and embraces all,
One is capable of doing justice.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
When William Married Kate
At heart, I’m a Bolshevik. For me royalty is not just an anachronism that serves no obvious purpose in the 21st century, but an institution that continues to represent elitism, colonialism and class privilege.
So at first I tried to quarantine myself from the media hype about The Wedding. I knew the wave of adulation and hyperbole was rising and I tried to skip news services in the days before Friday’s nuptials between Prince William and Kate.
Alas, on the day (or night over here) I couldn’t help myself. Any phenomenon that carries broad public appeal should at least be investigated and its force understood.
One reason why so many people seemed to care about the whole thing in Britain
I think the real heart of why something like a royal wedding has timeless mass appeal is its enormous symbolic content. The media, which taps into the heart of mass consciousness, continually gushed during Friday’s live coverage about the “fairytale” nature of the event. Television commentators described it as “a fairytale comes true” and “the stuff of dreams”. Indeed one commentator described the occasion as a “mixture of magnificence and the ordinary – that’s why they (ordinary people) identify with it.” Another said it was “everyone’s party”.
The power of a symbol is that it is ultimately mysterious and not real in the conventional material sense. The members of royalty – kings, queens, princes, dukes etc – carry a kind of symbolic aura that has nothing to do with them as real people. It’s what Carl Jung described as “mana”, a projection of an archetypal image from the mass unconscious.
Why are fairytales important to people? Why would someone camp overnight to get an ecstatic glimpse of the newlywed royal couple? Fairytales are essentially dreams, and dreams emerge from the unconscious. There is a non-rational side to the psyche that is an important component of what it means to be human, and this has not been banished despite the dominance in our times of rationalism and secularism.
A royal wedding is an ancient and powerful symbol of wholeness. It is a representation of the sublimeness of oneness, the union of opposites. Love unites and binds that which is separate. By watching the wedding, people participate vicariously in a magical process that relates deeply to their own lives.
Strangely enough, modern technology and media has assisted this magical connection. Through the internet and media coverage of the royals we get some sense of them as human beings – in many ways they are shown to be just like us – and that keeps the link to the mass public alive that allows the “mana” process to occur.
As always, however, a projection is just a projection. A symbol can have no lasting effect unless it leads to concrete action and transformation in a person's life. After the sleeping bags near Buckingham Palace
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Gods and Diseases: Review
There is a story in David Tacey’s latest book, Gods and Diseases, which captures in a neat set of images the sense of what the author is trying to say. In ancient Greece, he tells us, people wanting relief from ailments of one kind or another would come to the temple of the god of medicine, Asclepius, and be led into a “dream chamber”. They would be asked to sleep for a while and their dreams then analysed by the priests of the temple to form the basis for their remedy.
This picture is emblematic of Tacey’s outlook in the book. Physical and mental wellbeing, he says, has a hidden, psychological-spiritual component. There are stories and meanings behind why we feel unwell and these must be understood to help us properly face our situation.
Thursday, 3 March 2011
The Girl with the Redback Tattoo
I was fascinated by a woman on a tram not long ago. It wasn’t the woman’s long, black hair that attracted my attention or her sullen and somewhat ashen expression. Nor was it the book she was reading, which I couldn’t properly see. It was the large, redback spider that was tattooed on her left arm.
Discounting the possibility that she merely liked spiders, I guessed the tattoo was a reference to the venom and aggression of the redback, that if attacked physically or emotionally she, like the spider, would bite hard. I was reminded of a friend who once told me he was going to get a tattoo on one arm of a playful cat and on the other a tiger. He wanted to give the world a simple map of his inner life.
Symbols such as these provide insights into a person’s psychology, but they also point to broader trends that run counter to the recognised and simple version of our collective identity. It’s accepted that Australia is a rational and rationally organised country. As individuals, we are driven by materialistic goals of prosperity and happiness through work, family, consumption of goods and services and property ownership.
The long decline of religion as a social force has left the field of spirituality undefined or vacant for most people. This territory is about the sacred, about all the ways of understanding and experiencing meaning and depth in our lives and the world around us. Abandoning the rituals and explanations of religion, we are left with a rational, outward-looking, materialist and largely shallow picture.
Despite this, we continue to seek meaning beyond the surface reality of our day-to-day lives and continue to act, often without knowing, from the depths of the psyche – a murky world best understood through myths and symbols, dreams and the artistic imagination.
Looking at the woman with the redback tattoo, my mind wandered to all the other ways we behave that are on the borderline of rationality, if not beyond. According to Carl Jung in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “Day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us.” The American mythologist Joseph Campbell told a humorous story about going ten-pin bowling with a university professor, a man ordinarily steeped in reason, who kept waving his arms after releasing each ball to direct it to the right spot.
Some of the clearest ways in which we express our non-rational impulses happen in response to death – at funerals and other rituals. Deep down, as Jung observed, most of us just can’t accept a life simply stops and is no more. Some people speak to their loved ones in their minds or at graves for years after their death. It is common for people delivering eulogies at funerals to directly address the deceased with something like, “I miss you and will always love you.” Likewise, messages left at roadside memorials are often addressed to the dead: “You were taken away too early from us. We’ll always remember you.” From a strictly rational perspective these are all nonsense – the dead cannot hear or respond to anything said to them. Yet it is clearly important and a balm to the grief of the living to act in these non-rational ways.
Other death rituals happen on a grander scale, such as can be seen on Anzac Day or Remembrance Day. The dawn services, the shrines of remembrance, the pilgrimages to Gallipoli, the minute of silence, the haunting sound of the bugle, the intoning of “They grow not old as we grow old”, all have a strongly religious quality. They allow people to reach beyond the limits of time and space and unite them with the dead Anzacs. In effect, the dead soldiers come to life through myths and rituals, much like in other cultures where the spirits of ancestors are alive and revered and worshipped.
Sport is another area where non-rational impulses are expressed. AFL football is, for some people, a lightning rod for emotions driven from the inner depths of the psyche. A supporter whose team loses can be depressed for days, while another whose team wins is filled with a radiant and lasting joy. Through the force of psychological attachment and emotional participation, the spectacle of football becomes a mythic hyper-reality of heroes and battles.
Football games are modern-day re-enactments of timeless archetypes, motifs and stories. The best players are invested with the quality of supreme warriors, gods (Gary Ablett snr was literally “God” on some Geelong banners) or kings (Wayne Carey was nicknamed “the king” before his fall from grace at North Melbourne). There are those who are reviled and others who are saintly, those who sacrifice themselves and are crucified (injured) and fallen idols like Carey or Brendan Fevola. There are the stories of David and Goliath, of winning in adversity, amazing escapes and tragic losses. And above it all there is an elemental and deeply tribal clash of opposites – us and them, your team against theirs.
Jung and Campbell believed the impulse towards myth arises out of the dynamics of the psyche, the inner growth of the individual dependent on bringing unconscious elements to consciousness. Where once religion directed the energies of the psyche through frameworks of belief, now there are no collective maps for the inner life. A modern, Western society supposedly no longer needed the hocus-pocus of religion, yet the shadow of non-rationality remains.
To admit the presence of depth beyond the surface of the material world does not mean abandoning reason. It is not a recipe for adopting a particular spiritual belief or practice. To accept the non-rational is to acknowledge the deep mystery that cloaks the human mind and our lives generally. Gentle exploration can start to peel back the unknown. A redback spider tattoo on a young woman may be just a pretty – if somewhat menacing – symbol, but it’s also a reminder that our lives are much more than what they seem.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)