I, on the other hand, venture to set my foot in one direction rather than another only amidst a seizure of self-doubt. I hear no call, and I am alone. I observe with greater and greater precision from a position of greater and greater isolation.
Meaning disappears in the face of narrow certainty, so that I become more and more certain about ever thinner facts that no longer bear their own significance within themselves. The world is the womb of meaning; without it we cannot live. Whatever else we may say about the dream, it connects us meaningfully to the world.
Where the world of our waking experience has become for us inert and dead, the dreamworld remains alive with psyche. It is as if meaning and clear intellectual apprehension stand in a kind of tension, with each existing at the expense of the other.
The more we wake up, the less dreamlike or meaningful our life becomes, which is also to say, the less connection we find to the world. We come to know the world objectively by being cut off from it. This paradox, growing ever more acute, raises the question just how much longer our contracting psychic centers can hold their worlds together.
Poetic references to dreams and the rest are fine, but don't substitute them for knowledge of how the world really works! With this objection we arrive at that modern fascination with the computer as an image of the human mind. The fascination may itself be symptomatic of a further development in the evolution of consciousness.
If we demarcate one end of the spectrum of consciousness by imagining the profound dream of the higher animal, we see something like the opposite end exemplified in the computer. For the computer never dreams, and it does not know meaning. What we meet in the computer is a kind of pure, unblinking wakefulness, an unsurpassed logical clarity with no awareness of content, a consciousness that has contracted to a nullity, so that the only things left to it are the empty logical forms of its own perfect acuity.
Now, without too much difficulty we can imagine a consciousness wholly sunken into dream, possessed of no waking awareness so caught up -- like the entranced Jung -- within an awareness of , that there can be no separation or detachment, no awareness that.
We find it much less easy, however, to imagine a consciousness jolted into an utterly blank wakefulness -- a consciousness so detachedly aware, that it has lost all contact with anything of which to be aware. This may seem like so many empty words. Perhaps our difficulty arises because the former condition, while largely behind us, survives fragmentarily in our nightly dreams, whereas the other still lies ahead, even if we are rapidly approaching it. The computer may allow us to see clearly and in advance a state of mind that otherwise might overcome us by surprise.
It is no accident that the problem of meaning now disturbs those disciplines most vigorously pursuing computer models of the mind. How does a computer really mean anything by its output -- its mechanically generated strings of symbols?
How does it transcend mechanism and arrive at reason? Can a computer truly become aware of anything? Most scholars and engineers within computer-related fields are convinced that, if we can only understand the mechanism of the computer's intelligence sufficiently, questions of meaning will somehow fall into place as a kind of side effect.
After all, we human beings are merely complex mechanisms ourselves, are we not? In the end, whatever we have of meaning and conscious experience of the world will be found in the computerized robot as well.
And so we who pride ourselves in being fully awake seek to expunge our last memories of those shadowy dreams still echoing from the childhood of the race. No longer capable of taking our own dreams seriously, and blind to our evolutionary past, we would reinterpret the consciousness of our ancestors upon the analogy of the computer. Not content with waking up, we deny we have ever dreamed.
This is all too easy. For the dream today has become fragile in the extreme, vanishing quickly from mind under the bright, featureless glare of daytime wakefulness. The gods no longer favor us with overwhelming and powerful visitations. Why should we who have delivered ourselves from the fears and superstitions of the night take any further notice of these things? But primitive fear and superstition are not the only sources of terror in the world.
We have discovered our own more sophisticated terrors. Or, to put the matter differently, the gods with whom we once coexisted in a dreamworld find a way to take vengeance upon those who unceremoniously abandon them to the subconscious. Not yet are we merely walking computational devices -- as the very busy mental wards of our hospitals testify.
It was Jung himself who most forcefully pointed out our self- deceptions in this regard. If our dream-deprived world is no longer alive with psyche, if the gods have disappeared from it he repeatedly reminded us , it is only because they have taken up residence within man himself. And so long as we do not recognize their presence, we experience them as demons working their mischief through our subconscious instincts.
We then condemn ourselves to live out meanings not of our own making, without being awake to them. In other words, we obtain our sharply delineated consciousness by pushing our dream awareness ever further into the unconscious, where the elements rage unrecognized and beyond our control. As a consequence -- and all our enlightenment notwithstanding -- the parade of wars, tortures, mass murders, and suicides continues unabated, while alienation and psychic disintegration steadily corrode the thin veneer of civilization from below.
Waking up, it turns out, is not quite the simple act we might have imagined. But the world remains the only mirror in which consciousness can recognize itself, so that we progressively come to experience ourselves in the same way we experience the mechanically conceived external world. We lose our own inner life, and our consciousness converges upon the empty abstractions of the machine. Ancient man, while dreaming, was at least dreaming of the powers enlivening the world.
We know and understand very little of it. He never hesitated to say, "I don't know. A basic tenet: All products of the unconscious are symbolic and can be taken as guiding messages. What is the dream or fantasy leading the person toward? The unconscious will live, and will move us, whether we like it or not. Out of this welter will slowly emerge our way to the star. At no time in the future existence of the universe would they ever arrive at a point of disconnection […] Nothing is itself without everything else.
Among the insights attained by this meditation has been a sense of the curvature of the universe whereby all things are held together in their intimate presence to each other. This bonding is what makes the universe what it is, not a collection of disparate objects but an intimate presence of all things to each other, each thing sustained in its being by everything else.
Existence itself is derived from and sustained by this intimacy of each being with every other being of the universe. This cannot, obviously, be achieved immediately. But if this is not achieved in some manner or within some acceptable limits the human will continue to exist in a progressively degraded mode of being.
The degradation both to ourselves and to the planet is the immediate evil that we are dealing with. The enhancement or the degradation will be a shared experience. We have a common destiny. Not simply a common human destiny, but a common destiny for all the components of the planetary community. It needs such support for its planetwide programs. The entire planet would then be considered as a commons. Already the atmosphere, the seas, and the space above the Earth are being recognized as areas of universal relevance.
There are also biological areas of concern. The natural world itself is the primary economic reality, the primary educator, the primary governance, the primary technologist, the primary healer, the primary presence of the sacred, the primary moral value. The primary purpose of education should be to enable individual humans to fulfill their proper role in this larger pattern of meaning. We need an Earth-centered language. When the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the Earth, and the curvature of the human are once more in their proper relation, then Earth will have arrived at the celebratory experience that is the fulfillment of earthly existence.
Written by Thomas Berry. Edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, orig. More immediately, it takes a solar system and a planet Earth to shape, educate, and fulfill the human. Our explanation of any part of the universe is integral to our understanding of the universe itself.
Renewal is a community project. Here we come to the critical transformation needed in the emotional, aesthetic, spiritual, and religious orders of life. Only a change that profound in human consciousness can remedy the deep cultural pathology manifest in such destructive behavior. Such change is not possible, however, so long as we fail to appreciate the planet that provides us with a world abundant in the volume and variety of food for our nourishment, a world exquisite in supplying beauty of form, sweetness of taste, delicate fragrances for our enjoyment, and exciting challenges for us to overcome with skill and action.
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