Why does the world look ugly?
Most of us are hypnotized into pessimists and skeptics trained to see the world as pitiless machine, empty of purpose, meaning of value. It's all a lie.
It is vitally important to realize that 'ordinary consciousness' is incomplete. In fact, to put it more emphatically, everyday consciousness is a liar.
Colin Wilson
The sun was an extra special treat this morning as I walked my two little girls to school.
New Zealand has been drenched with rain for one very long year with very few breaks. At the end of January, Auckland got more rain in a day than we usually get in most of a year, followed a few weeks later by a mean cyclone that kicked sand in the wound.
We've lived in a damp dreary swamp ever since then. For a sun-lover like yours truly, endless cloud and rain isn't too far from my idea of Hell. Today was one of the first days we've had fully clear skies in 2023.
It's easy to take a negative view of life when situations like that happen to you.
"Why me?" is the default response. But it takes more than a few million liters of water to make the world look drab, ugly, and pointless.
You've almost certainly heard it told that the world in itself has no meaning, that us human beings are the one and only source of meaning, value, and purpose.
And maybe you've heard the arguments for that. Physics shows us that the world is just particles and force fields. Free will isn't real, consciousness is fake, you aren't anything special, homo sapiens lives in a fabricated reality of its own making evolved for survival over truth, and eventually you're going to die and the species will die out and the sun will die and that is that.
You've got serious intellectuals out there saying this stuff with absolute sincerity.
Heart-warming tale, isn't it? Meanwhile, anyone who dares to believe in more than the visible, tangible world of apparent things is thought of as soft-minded, deluded, confused, maybe crazy and definitely a sucker. Didn't you hear that religion was made up as a control system, and it took science and reason to save us from superstition?
I used to buy in to most of those thoughts.
I once thought that the ideas borrowed from materialism and natural science justified my deep pessimism and near-constant depression. It turned out that I had things exactly backwards.
Which brings me to the question of the day:
Why is it that the world looks so ugly, empty, purposeless, void of anything but mechanical cause and effect? Why is it that this story of meaningless existence is so plausible to so many people today?
I'm picking up a thread from last week's piece about the incoherence of skepticism, where I made the bold claim that there is a reality and we do have considerable — though hardly perfect, absolute, or unclouded — access to it.
This week I want to look at a different thought.
What if the skeptic's tale of the brain's private magic show is itself responsible for the pointless reality that we appear to inhabit?
If our brains conjure up the stories that we inhabit as the protagonist, then why would the story of a meaningless universe ruled by nature's pitiless laws be any exception to the conjurations?
Hang on to that while I introduce you to Colin Wilson.
How to stop seeing like a worm
When I go to a museum, I like to check out the paintings by standing as close to them as I can. There's no point in looking at a painting at a distance, after all. The reality of the painting is in the brush strokes, the tiniest patches of color, and really, the chemical make-up of the paint. With your eye mere inches from the canvas, you see the true reality as it is.
The painting itself, as seen from a proper distance? Just an illusion.
I'm totally kidding. I'd never look at a painting that way because it is stupid and misses the point of an art-work.
Yet this is exactly how materialists tell you to look at every other part of reality.
Get as close as you can, attend to the parts (and only the parts), and forget about the shape of the whole thing (which is only an illusion).
Alfred North Whitehead, once a well-known mathematician, scientist, and philosopher in his later years, marked an important difference between appreciating the painting and zooming in to the fine details.
We humans in fact have two kinds of perception, which Whitehead called "presentational immediacy" and "causal efficacy". The first is what you see right before your eyes (and other senses).
The second involves the perception of unified, undivided wholes. Whitehead offers the words "United States of America" as an example of the second type. You don't grasp each individual word, one by one, and then add it up to the whole idea. You may read that way, left to right, but the idea expressed in them is grasped in thought as a single entity, inseparable into distinct cause and effect.
We can take things apart in perception, and we also grasp the meaning of the whole, without dividing them up into causes and effects.
Colin Wilson, the sadly-underrated English philosopher and writer, put it this way:
We might say, then, that we have two 'modes of perception', which could be called 'immediacy perception' and 'meaning perception'. When you are very tired and depressed, your meaning perception becomes blurred. But this is an illusion, caused by tiredness. On the other hand, when you are drunk and feeling jolly, the world seems to be all meaning. Then it is your immediacy perception that becomes blurred; you cannot even get your key into the keyhole.
Then there are those perfect moments when all the tumblers click into place and the two modes blend together in harmonious balance. You see both "worlds" with full clarity.
Wilson likens the two modes of perception to the "worm's eye view" of immediacy — reality experienced at the “ground floor” level — against the "eagle's eye" experience of the world as if soaring above it, perceiving unbroken meaning.
Our task is to learn how to elevate ourselves out of the worm's mud and live from the eagle's perspective.
Have you ever got in the car to drive to the local supermarket, only to find that you don't remember making the drive?
We each have a "robot" inside us that takes over these rote tasks. The more we repeat an activity, the more habitual it becomes. We don't have to think about it.
This is not all bad. I don't like having to think about standing up and walking across a room. The more we automate activities that once required mental effort, the more we can achieve. That rings true for anyone that's ever run a business.
Before his time diving into philosophical questions, Whitehead the mathematician left us a different thought:
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
The robotic part of us can also automate the parts of life we care most about.
We've all been forced into this discussion in recent months. It isn't even about the Big Questions of who will have a job. The tendency to give our thoughts and actions over to unthinking behavior hits much closer to home. I feel differently about unthinking behavior when I lose an hour or more to scrolling through a social media app. (Back when I allowed such things in my life.)
We face two major problems from our robot.
It will try to take over the experiences that we want to be conscious and present for. It's fine to automate the ditch-digging but I want to be there for good meals and good company. But we can find ourselves slipping off into forgetfulness even in those moments.
Further, the robot doesn't distinguish between the good and desirable patterns of thinking and acting, and the bad and unwanted. You can automate a daily writing habit and you can automate a daily pack of cigarettes. The robot has no taste.
The robot, wrote Colin Wilson, is the major obstacle to perceiving our world and our lives from above the worm’s perspective of our monotonous daily routine.
What can we do about our built-in tendency to robot-ize our lives?
It's a matter of energy and attention.
Borrowing from the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, he of the 'hierarchy of human needs', Wilson suggests that the solution lies in a special power of the mind which lies mostly untapped within us.
Maslow described a special state of consciousness which he called a "peak experience", comparing it to standing high on a mountain peak, exhilarated by the cool fresh air, surveying the landscape of green valleys and rivers below. This is a state of elevated consciousness defined by a sense of power and and good spirits, connected to experiences of meaning.
In a peak experience, the world just feels right and we feel right in it.
This is the remedy for the robot and for our depressive view of the world. Maslow believed, however, that peak experiences could not be controlled. They simply happened to us.
Wilson didn't agree. He believed that peak experiences could be made to happen "on demand" with efforts of mind in the right situation. He noted that as Maslow's students began to discuss the phenomenon among themselves, peak experiences occurred more often for them.
The trick to it is a matter of our energy and attention.
When the robot is in charge, we flow through the day as if hypnotized in a dream. It takes a crisis to snap us out of our waking sleep. When we're put into any situation that demands concentration, we wake up these hidden reserves of energy inside us. A challenge focuses the mind and demands an effort of will from us.
And this is the secret. The philosophers since Descartes have all tried to understand the world from the Lay-Z-Boy. Thought became passive.
The experiences of freedom and meaning require our active participation.
It takes an effort of the will, guided by the imagination, to direct our attention at reality. When we do this, we activate the latent vital reserves within us, further lifting ourselves out of the mire of ordinary consciousness.
Of course philosophers come to see the world as meaningless, with individual persons left adrift and alone against that great grinding mechanism of the universe. They were spectators of the passing show, when our purpose is found out in the game.
If philosophers drove race-cars, we would have a different impression, Wilson wrote.
Tiredness diminishes our consciousness of freedom, and extreme tiredness — combined with depression or 'negative feedback' — makes us feel that there are no possibilities, that freedom is an illusion.
Peak experiences, on the other hand, create a virtuous circle aimed in the other direction.
The more we use our minds with intention and effort of will, directing our attention toward reality, the more energy we feel and the easier it becomes to experience the meaning already around us. Which only further raises our spirits.
Depression and pessimism start within us. As do a sense of meaning and optimism.
Waging the war inside your selves
How does this all work, anyway? Is there any more basis for it besides boring philosophy and woo-woo mysticism playing psychology dress-up? As it turns out, yes.
While there's a great deal we don't know about our brains, we do know that our brains are split into two mostly-identical left and right hemispheres.
Experiments by neuroscientist Roger Sperry back in the 1950s showed that when the connection between the two sides is cut, weird things happen. It's almost as if there are two separate persons with distinct mental skill-sets, one located within each hemisphere.
Even so, for a long time, the functional division of the brain was thought to be a discredited myth, leading to those tales about "left-brained" analytic types and "right-brained" creatives.
It turns out that this was premature.
Iain McGilchrist's brilliant and detailed door-stopper, The Master and His Emissary, brought the split-brain research back into the mainstream as a serious topic. McGilchrist makes a strong case that the brain's division is not so much about what each side does. Both sides have some claim to language, logical thinking, memory, visual and spatial perception, making their own contributions to analytical thinking and creative imagination, and so forth.
The two hemispheres differ in how they attend to things.
The left hemisphere, the side associated with the rational, logical, conscious, and deliberate thinking of the scientist and engineer, works by apprehending. Its role is to reach out and grasp, like a pair of hands.
The right hemisphere, which is the feeling, intuitive, imaginative, creative side of the artist, poet, and writer, attends to reality by comprehending the larger whole and higher, undivided contexts.
The left side works by taking things apart and bringing them under control. The right side works by perceiving integral wholes and making sense of them. We use, and need, both ways of attending.
Decades before McGilchrist revived interest in the physiology of our split brains, Colin Wilson made his own explorations into this badly-understood territory within our skulls. Surprisingly, or maybe not, he reached similar conclusions about our two selves.
The person we call 'I' is the scientist. The 'artist' lives in the shadows, and we are scarcely aware of his existence, except in moods of deep relaxation, or of 'inspiration'.
We each have within us two distinct persons with two unique ways of experiencing.
One is the "objective mind", the conscious ego that we call by the pronoun "I". This is the person that you believe that you are right now, as you read this. The other is the "subjective mind", which is your hidden, silent self. The subjective mind happens to control your energy levels, among other things.
Wilson compares this pair of minds to the old duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Ollie is loud and boisterous, the "spokesman" of your objective ego, while silent Stan is the source of motivation and purpose. Although objective Ollie is gifted with words and loves to make his presence known, it's subjective Stan who controls all your energy and sense of purpose.
So if you wake up feeling low and discouraged, you (Ollie) tend to transmit your depression to Stan, who fails to send you energy, which makes you feel lower than ever. This vicious circle is the real cause of most mental illness.
Powerful stuff there. If you're convinced by the materialist's view that all feeling is brain chemistry and illness of the mind is no different from a car with a blown spark-plug, it may be scandalous.
Regardless, there's truth to it, as I can attest from my own struggles in this area. The more I've followed his advice to deliberately use and concentrate my mind, the less I've felt drawn into that vicious cycle of depression and defeat.
Colin Wilson was not afraid to follow these ideas to their conclusion. Nor was he discouraged by the paranormal, occult, and supernatural possibilities opened up by the mind's potential.
If right hemisphere's attention to context and meaning reveals a world beyond the immediate facts of sensation, then on what basis do we reject that in favor of the greedy left hemisphere’s tendency to dismiss anything it cannot see?
It's an interesting question that I haven't seen anyone seriously tackle, much less convincingly rebut, since I started wandering my way through this rabbit-hole a few years ago.
Iain McGilchrist makes the case that our society is a "left-dominant" civilization. Everything you encounter from waking to sleep reinforces, nurtures, and encourages behaviors suited to your myopic left hemisphere. We look at our world, our problems, and each other as through a microscope. There's little place for the intuitive and imaginative styles of the right side.
It is this unhappy fact that leads to the "inevitable" conclusion of the meaningless universe. But if that thought is the direct result of your left-brain self being so preoccupied with its own piecemeal ways of experiencing that it can't "hear" the other side, then you haven't gotten at the "real" truth.
You've gotten stuck in your own ego.
The right brain, though silent, is the real master. The noisy left is only a servant that believes it is in charge.
What we've taken for the full sweep of reality is, quite literally, our own narcissism written into the fabric reality.
As our culture has become more convinced of science's absolute truth and less connected to spirit, meaning, and older ways of understanding, such ideas have fallen out of vogue. You're considered a crank, a loon, and a fringe figure if you even entertain such ideas.
But I wonder.
It wasn't that long ago that serious scientists and philosophers would entertain non-natural explanations if only as a live hypothesis.
I find it hard to buy that the loss of these attitudes can be best explained as the result of more rational and clear-thinking on our part. If anything it is the opposite. Today's "best and brightest" public minds seem to me less convincing, less serious, less capable, and less stable than those of 60 years ago.
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It's striking how much meaning materialists derive from committed belief in the meaningless universe.
That's no surprise, really. There's a great weight of moral and ethical baggage hidden right beneath the surface of the staunchest materialist. Yes, I said moral. Moral beliefs have a way of sinking down into the foundations of understanding to the point they no longer appear as what they are. Commitments to ideals of self-consciousness, freedom, and equality for all are powerful motivations for holding materialist beliefs, but they'll be found nowhere among matter.
Read that again carefully.
It isn't the truth of science and reason that creates honest materialists. Honest materialists are persuaded from prior commitments to ethical beliefs and moral points of view. These are all left-brain traits and preoccupations.
No human can live without a thick field of value distinctions.
You have a sense of right/wrong and good/bad that stands as background for your every belief and action, even if you’ve never stopped to put it in words. (Words are another left-brain bias.)
God-rejecting materialists don't see that, naturally, but if you were committed to the belief that the universe is nothing but particles and mathematical fields of force, how could you?
The cart can't pull the horse no matter how hard you try.
There is no better expression of what Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism: When the highest values devalue themselves. Left-dominant materialism worships humanity as its highest principle, while preaching that the human being is no different from the worm and the dirt.
One of my goals in these articles is connecting abstract and bloodless ideas to the real world of concrete problems and experiences.
I don't want you to think real hard for the ten minutes it takes to process the words, say "cool", and then snap back to the robotic monotony of your life, unchanged.
I want to hit you in the head and in the gut in such a way that you can't look at the hours lost sitting in traffic, in a cubicle, in front of the Netflix and the infinite scroll, the stupid politics and status games, in quite the same way. If I encourage you to ask yourself "why am I doing this?" even once as you wander through the sleepless dream that is daily life, mission accomplished.
It doesn't get any more concrete than the question of what it's all for. The most abstract and difficult question of all is also the most urgent.
What are we doing with ourselves and why? It's an existential question and an ethical question.
This has all been on my mind a good deal in recent years. You may sympathize. The world seems like a nuclear-powered train with no brakes and we can see the rusted-out trestle dead ahead.
But what if, just what if, our bleak view of the world is a product of our own bleak ways of attending to reality?
What if you're so locked into your left-hemisphere ego, and so unacquainted with the silent artist watching from your other half, that you've fooled yourself? The mystics of Asia say that this world is a kind of a prison, that our true self and true reality is beyond this. If they were right, how would the world look to you?
If your first inclination is to say "Yeah, but..." and then cough up some skeptical screed from the blackest part of your mind, I suggest that you have already defeated yourself. I urge you to pause and re-read this article.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.
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