The Evolution of Consciousness - Dr Mark Vernon

so what am I going to talk about it's more the evolution of self-consciousness over historical time and in fact what precipitates the the sort of the beginning of what I'm going to try and talk through and give you a sort of felt sense of as much as anything as well as throw light on our predicament today and is it begins that they're totally the merger of historical time from prehistory it's very fascinating that this his idea of sort of prehistory and history and normally it's talked about because of records that we just don't have you know independent as aware evidence or very much safer whether the Trojan War really took place in the Iliad and Homer but it's also because something was beginning to shift about say two-and-a-half thousand three thousand years ago and even the notion of time as we tend to think of it we're starting to emerge where you could as it were counter up the years and go back in a fairly linear state that to takes the kind of shift of consciousness for that to emerge even if you read the founder of of history sometimes that he said in the West Herodotus he's quite good at counting the years sort of maybe five years ago ten years ago but the mini get beyond that it becomes rather vague and it's almost like his mind it's just beginning to get some sense of what it might be to count back the years so what I'm going to talk about an hour is more say the history of the evolution of self-consciousness our experience of what it is to be human today and how that has changed if you're interested in sort of the broader areas here and this is related to what sometimes then is the axial age the founding figure here was the German philosopher Karl Jasper's and there's quite a lot of good introductions to the notion of the axial age broadly the metaphor of axial there is that around in about two and a half thousand years ago middle of the first century and that first millennium BCE and it seemed that a lot of civilizations around the world shifted on their axis and you get figures like say loud sir or Confucius I mean China you get figures like the Buddha in India we've been hearing about you get to figures around the Mediterranean Basin particularly focus on people like Socrates and then in the Hebrew tradition the Hebrew prophets and and broadly speaking the idea is that the axial age emerges when people start to pay much more attention to their inner life and you get deprecated replications all over the place yes so for example in Indian philosophy we were just talking about the Vedanta there and the very early Vedantic texts much more interested in the external world you know the one the famous discussions is of the horse ritual which takes two years to perform focuses on the king and is very much about being in the environment and then some of the later panel adds they start to focus on the interior life and then the Buddha and the founder of Jainism as well so you get this movement seems to be turned inwards so what I'm going to say is it's quite related to that another terms you can come across in more anthropological texts is this notion of participation participants your mystique which is Association associated with anthropology and it's bored of the idea that and when anthropology has looked back particularly beyond about two-and-a-half thousand years or maybe in indigenous cultures now and they have traditions and civilizations that you haven't changed much in time there's a very different sense of what it is to put to participate and in with others with the natural world with with the gods and that you get a sort of sense of that in these anthropological studies a different type but complementary again is work by Robert Kagan their Harvard psychologist and he does very interesting work about how our consciousness evolves through the course of a lifetime hence his book there the evolving self and but it matches very nicely onto and the sense of how eat consciousness has evolved in a collective sense as well and how a part of a sort of unfolding now - so it's related to these different aspects and but the person I'm really going to pick up on is a chap called owen Barfield and his notion of how our participation in life shifts and by participation he means our sense of what it is to be ourselves to be with others to with nature to be with gold all the gods to be with the cosmos what is the sort of felt consciousness of what is to be human and how that has shifted I've been very drawn to bar fields ideas if you haven't come across him before he died in 1997 and was part of the group with the Inklings he sometimes known as the last inkling he himself II if you think he was born in 1898 died in 1907 so he's bought fall in the last years of Victoria's reign and died in the year that Tony Blair came to power he died just after Tony Blair came to power saw this that's quite a shift of consciousness in itself maybe that's why he got interested in this but he was one of the Inklings alongside here you can see I hope at the bottom there I'm talking then Barfield and then Charles Williams and then on the right hand side is CS Lewis and this famous I'm group of literary figures and others actually Barfield spent a lot of his life working as a lawyer in fact and both Tolkien and Lewis the famous members of the Inklings said the bar filled out all the best ideas and that's why I got interested in bar filled I thought what were these good ideas and Barfield isn't such a good writer certainly when it comes to you know fantasy fiction as both took both Tolkien and Lewis but you can see particularly I think how Tolkien actually used Barfield idea ideas in his creation of the Lord of the Rings and to cut to the chase the different hominids that he creates in the Lord of the Rings say the elves the dwarves and the humans they experienced life in very very different ways and this can be broadly mapped onto our fields ideas about the participation of life and so you know the elves have a much more kind of connected sense there's not really clear distinctions between what's mortal and what's immortal and what's human what's not human amongst the elves whereas the dwarves and you know havoc they have a kind of fight with with the material world particularly in their caves and caverns they're miners so there's different sort of experience of consciousness there and then the humans feel they're on the the emerg of some new time something new beginning to emerge you know the old times have gone too the West in the Lord of the Rings and something new is emerging so talking got a little of his ideas I think in that broad sort of conceptual sense from bar fields ideas now the way the bar field got into it was thinking about words like others amongst of the Inklings he was a phonologists he was very interested in in how words changed meaning over time and he had sort of two brilliant observations that helped him develop his ideas about the evolution of consciousness and one was that words have soul and so words aren't just signs or indicators but they have a sort of felt side to them to when we use words and we experience something and we don't just as a word taking information like say a computer might do we register words in the fullest possible sense they sort of land in us and they can release a felt experience as much as tell us something you know a bit of data so they have a vitality and both have got very interested in how words change and their soulfulness over time and in particular he he went with an observation which wasn't only here's actually quite a lot of people particularly the 19th century made this observation it's slightly fallen out of fashion now but a quite a lot of people like Jeremy Bentham who worked just around the corner from here and he noticed this that words originally have a kind of external meaning and that now can mean something interior from us for us so words originally isn't were seem to have originated in there in the external world in the material world and the world around us and now carry meanings for us into in our interiors as well and so some of the words that you might think of you could actually play this game and both Bentham and Barfield concluded that all words originally have a sense in the external exterior world and that now has moved inwards so you take you know the word like right and it's what I'm speaking right and this is a kind of interior abstract notion is that correct false could you prove it and so on and but of course it originally comes from the notion of being upright standing upright and if I'm right today then I'll sort of stand a bit more upright whereas if someone questions at the end poses a question that demolishes my whole thesis you'll see me shrink so you know right would be an example if you're into Latin in Greek you can play this game extensively one of my favorite words is the word supercilious which literally in Latin means raising of the eyebrows and if someone you know you feel someone's being supercilious it's kind of quite what you do and so he noticed that words have these external meanings that become interior and that was part of what got him onto and the notion that words have soul and this means that words therefore are fossils of consciousness and we argue that if you can trace the meaning of words back then you can use them a bit like play-doh biologists use fossils that are found in the ground to track how the human body has and other bodies have evolved so - you can do the same with words and they can be treated as kind of fossils of consciousness and if you can trace them back then it'll reveal something to you about how consciousness itself has evolved so that one again just one example to give a feel for that and would be say the word that which we use for wind I'm sorry it's a bit of a stormy day outside the word which we used to wind in Greek it's Ponemah i'm in hebrew a''- you can play this game across quite a lot of ancient languages and notice that it means also spirit in the ancient languages so the Greek word Ponemah means both spirits and wind and when you come to translate Greek this is really quite a problem because nowadays we have to choose because we feel these two things are very different and it's gotta be it's either spirit or it's wind if you if you ever go to church and you hear John's Gospel read and the spirit goes where it wills and all this we treat it now as a metaphor wind for spirit in a context like that but the Greek word makes no distinction and so broader the idea would be the consciousness when maneuver was I'm originally used didn't made that distinction too and that what was there was a vitality in the external world which mirrored the vitality the in interior world inner life so you get this sort of much more porous sense of what it is to be human whereas we have a much more bound read sense we tend to as always strip out the inner life of things we more or less hold on to our own inner life although it took quite a big dip in the middle of 20th century behaviorism and long as which was vaguely touched on to earlier on but nonetheless you have to work quite hard to persuade people nowadays certainly in scientific world that nature the cosmos let alone gods might have it an inner life that we can relate to we separated out spirit from wind and it happens in many many ology ways heart is another good example you know the word heart now means a sort of pump but we still have enough of the metaphorical inverted commas uses of heart you know hard-hearted warm-hearted cold-hearted to capture the inner emit the older sense which was the heart is the seat of emotion as well so ball field really got onto all this and spent many hours I think trawling through the Oxford English Dictionary learning other languages and tracing it out and what he came up with was a schema for the evolution of consciousness and it takes place in three sort of broad steps and the idea is that if both can be traced over time over the last two and a half three thousand years but also these different positions of consciousness which we now know in ourselves as well that we can have these different experiences of consciousness in our own individual lives in a bit like I have five fingers because the fish had five bones in its fin at some point that I can use my five fingers in different ways and so too we have a sort of gathering of consciousness and can experience what would have unfolded over the last three thousand years or so so they're both stages and positions the original one he called the first one he called original participation so this is you know roughly before about two and a half thousand BCE you read Homer I'm gonna basically my talk I'm gonna look a lot at the different stages and and hopefully give her a good full sense of it but the first one is this original participation and it's an immersive kind of consciousness where there's little no distinction between the inner life of the cosmos and the inner life of the individual in fact there isn't really a proper sense of the individual I'm in this stage life was experienced much more collectively and there wasn't much difference between what's me and not me between subjects and an objective between say mortals and immortals and between nature and an inner life there's a much more sense of living in the kind of flow of being and your task in life is how to kind of navigate that flow much more than discover your own inner essence so that's original participation about two and a half thousand years ago it starts to go through what Barfield called withdrawal of participation and this is a kind of any gathering of vitality and life which is why the axial figures started to focus inwardly and discover a kind of inner cosmos now this has a great kind of advantage that the individual starts to develop a much keener sense of you and choice and conscience all these notions start to emerge about this time but presents a problem too which is how to connect back to life as it was back to the flow of life around you and so there's a kind of uncoupling from inner life of the cosmos which intensifies the individual but also leaves a sense of being alienated from the world around us and I think that's broadly speaking why these axial religions stop get going or Western philosophy in a way they're they're about dealing with the challenge of this newfound gap and this opens up because of the shifts of consciousness but if you can as well work through that withdrawal without regressing back to the original immersive state where as it where you just sort of obliterate this into new found individuality and then it's possible to gain what Barfield calls a sense of reciprocal participation which is where what is known within is sort of reflected without but in such a way that you still have a powerful sense of yourself within so this is a kind of mystic or perhaps sense of things where there's a reconnection between the individual life and then and the inner life of the cosmos the consciousness of the whole world as Barfield put it that's broadening his sketch conceptual schema for this individual is evolution of consciousness in the last three thousand years or so and you can sort of compare and contrast it with notions on the axial age from John Keegan's notions other notions but broadly speaking this sense of withdrawal in words and then the problem of how to reconnect is is under takes place now I want to be much worth having a first little discussion about that and with the neighbor just for five minutes just to sort of give you a chance to put it into your own words get a sort of sense of that yourself whether it makes any sense at all to play with this a few thoughts on your own is that were self consciousness do you know of this immersive we might say egoless state psychedelics were mentioned earlier on and sometimes like a telex seemed to sustain a sense of ego on the trip but at other times there is a kind of blast of the ego kind of egolessness and can emerge and that might be akin to Barfield original participation do you know this alienated consciousness there was a famous self-help book that I read and quite a while ago called lost in the cosmos and it's quite a theme of 20th century 21st century writing this sense of alienated but nonetheless the advantage of being an individual that you can make choices that you have a notions like freewill that there's a kind of a sense of your own purpose in life that can be gained so there's this sort of good side and bad side and then thirdly this mystical sensor and where as a way you can dress others and address nature in an eigth our relationship to recall boobers expression rather than the sort of blasts of egolessness there's a sense of conversation or dialogue or exchange and between your inner life in the inner life of others nature Gold's the gods a reciprocal experience of participation so have a little conversation for with the neighbor just for a couple of minutes get a sense of this in yourself whether it broadly makes some sense what are the reason for just doing out of this stages maybe just register in your mind now where you kind of feel you lie in these three different state you might say three different positions and I hope that what I'm going to say here on will help to sort of illuminate a deep in these different states and maybe even suggest ways that one can move between them because I think life tends to go well when there's lots of potential for movement and fluidity rather than being stuck in one state or the other they're not you know one's not good one's not bad they all have that kind of upsides and downsides and generally speaking I mean life if we can move between different positions that makes for a better life so take a little a sense of where you lie now and see how it feels when we come to the end I also actually mentioned to say the start I hope everyone's seen their copy of this handout this is sort of a set of resources really for my talk rather than me going through it step-by-step I'm so as much to take away and have a look at again afterwards and I hope that you know there's a almost like a sort of little revising it might illuminate why things are on the page I will refer to some of it but this is much to take away as a sort of set of resources okay now what I thought I do now is sort of tell this story of the evolution of consciousness particularly has that unfolded around the Mediterranean and so forgive me if I don't mention your favorite Indian philosopher it's put you just a sort of a question of concision and to go into things enough depth in order to get a proper sense of it and it's also nicely to actually I went to the British Museum during the lunch break there and you can walk around fantastic museums like booj Museum and treat it adds a kind of little tour of ancient consciousness I mean you go into the Egyptian gallery there and you ask yourself you know what was this supposed to be conveying what kind of mind participated in life in this way and so if you wanna be the homework I think of you shot that time we're finished but do go back to the British Museum some some time and and and and use it as a kind of trip or exploration of consciousness and that's in fact where I'm going to start out actually with with ancient Egypt I think part of the reason why ancient Egypt us in such thrall and it's because it speaks so powerfully of this position that Barfield calls original participation when there's a profound sense of porousness between what sins outside the divisions between mortals and immortals don't exist life is lived broadly on the collective and the cosmos isn't fully enchanted and it draws us back almost like a kind of lost memory of how life can be experienced I think and so just to talk through these four images you know the the early Egyptian civilization certainly you know when it comes into the the early dynasties famously built pyramids and I think a pyramid so appealed because it reflected the nature of society was a pyramidal shape it's recently being argued that the pyramids weren't built by slave labor it was actually quite a good job to have to participate in the building of pyramids and I guess it was sort of fulfilling in order when you took part in the building of the pyramids because it spoke to your inner life as much as it being a job of work and it's very interesting now that quite often in psychology the pyramid shape is used to map internal experience so Abraham Maslow was mentioned earlier on and his famous a hierarchy of needs it's often presented in a pyramidal shape and with self-actualization suffer realization at the top of the pyramid I guess originally and the Pharaoh would have been at the top of the pyramid in an externalized version of that so pyramids a sort of part of this very different experience may think of the effort that went into building pyramids is you know totally extraordinary it must have come as a were from the bottom up in terms of how life was experienced and lived it wasn't just a kind of vanity project for the Pharaoh so I think that says something about how life was there from the outside in at this time animal worship the veneration of animals again I think that this makes sense when you think of life not located inside struggling to relate to the external world and but rather the other way around that you felt yourself to be a kind of collective of different spirited parts and the Horus I - is it relates there that your eyes weren't felt to be primarily your own they were felt to be part of horace in your own life and simile with animals that different animals could be associated with different moods different feelings different experiences and so rather than as it were going and lying on the psychotherapist couch and examining things inside you would have gone to the temple that venerated the appropriate animal made the right offerings and light libations that that's how is it worth psychology was done you might say if you're imagining back and so these things which are now quite strange to us floating body parts the veneration of animals start to make sense if you think of life coming from the outside in and having to negotiate life by sharing in this vitality which was around and about you through religious rituals be they collective or individual and magic too very much makes sense in this kind of world that's the kind of little altar there I think is actually I remember rightly as a figure of Horus again and you would have a poured water over that and maybe dip some object in again it's sort of sense of vitality energy coming from the outside in you could cause spells against your neighbors by getting a bit of their hair sticking into a wax dummy you know this is how people experience life so magic very much makes sense I'm in this context the feels you know a bit strange to us sort of appealing or frightening or hung come you know depending on how you look at it but nonetheless something very different going on I think you get the same experience of confidence on the outside in in Homer as well another thing you might like to try when you go home is just get a paragraph or two particularly the Iliad it's also shifted but in the Odyssey versus early and Iliad where gods appear miasma has come down this is a picture here of Achilles about to strike Agamemnon but whereas we might sort of as worth think better about trying to kill the king and doesn't happen to Achilles what happens is that Athena appears and it repulsed back his head that's the way that Homer describes it so very very different experience of what it is to be human in that and homers fascinating actually it's sometimes a bit lost in translations but for example there's no word for the individual in Homer there is the word soma which came to mean the kind of individual personal the individual body and but in Homer it means the corpse when the spirited entities had all left and people looked at this and come up with a proposal that there just wasn't really a sense of the individual I mean the way that we would think of it as a kind of identity gathered within Somer just meant the kind of dead body and then it gradually comes to mean the body of an individual who's alive and similarly a lot of and the physical organs so key associated with psychic functions in Homer - so Achilles will be said to ponder these things in his lungs he talks about his art his heart easing with sorrow that makes a bit more sense to us because the heart has sort of managed to capture it carry on with this sense of being a kind of emotional center as well as a pump there were women in the Iliad who were called the belly stalkers and people are said to keep their counsel because the gods instructed them a bit like Achilles they're having his head pulled back four by Athena and so you get this in Greek culture as well as Egyptian culture - warfare is thought about in very different ways here's quite one in pictures of your into the ancient Egyptians Pharaoh in his chariot defeating his enemies that presumably the the Nubians down there at the bottom and you might wonder you know why is Pharaoh painted so in such that you know so so large size compared to the Nubians sometimes people said this is kind of like veronik rhetoric bit of propaganda bolstering pharaoh's position in society well i think actually this is how it would have been experienced that pharaoh would have been a semi-divine figure and he would have beed have been experienced in such a way that the image represents and it's not some sort of dubious propaganda to try and keep pharaoh in power and this is a representation of how things felt and if you're into the Hebrew Bible again there's quite a lot of the earliest bits of the Hebrew Bible reflect similar kind of ideas and that it's not just we as it were fighting our enemies but our leader nature the gods themselves are fighting on our side so for example in Judges five there's a description of and the early Israelites going out to defeat another of the sort of hill tribes around ancient Palestine I mean it says when you Lord went out from sear so when you Lord not when we went out and when we marched on the land of Edom the earth shook the heavens port the clouds poured down water the mountains quaked before the lords that one of Sinai before the Lord the God of Israel so you got the sense that nature is quaking and shuddering that other mountains not just a mountain of Sinai which is associated with Yahweh they're quaking before Yahweh and marching forth and from the heavens the Stars fought from their courses they fought against Sisera the other tribe the river kishan swept them away the age-old river the river KITT shark ish on March on my soul be strong in conjunction with this great kind of native outpouring similarly in Homer in the Iliad Achilles has to fight some River gods and things like that as well as his human enemies and so warfare is conceived in a very very different way and there's another example the afterlife I'm two very very different kind of experience broadly the idea before about two and half thousand years ago maybe even a little more recently than that is that there wasn't a great distinction between life and death but what happened was that death was a kind of phase change where on the whole you as an individual in life it so far as you have been a person you rejoin the ancestors and kind of fade away so people talk about being buried and gathered with the ancestors in it you just indigenous cultures you know holy lands are very very important for this because that's the place that the ancestors are and when you're buried in ancestral ground and you rejoin the ancestors this is a picture gustave doré A's and depiction of the sticks and you see all the poor souls kind of disappearing into the water unless they've got particular dispensation to to ride across the Styx and broadly speaking in Greek time it was thought that most people just fade out they turn to shades is the word when they die unless maybe they're heroes and the point about the hero is they've raised themselves a little bit above mere mortals they're a bit closer to the Immortals and so they might have time in the afterlife and in fact again in Homer when Patroclus dies kiddies great friends and sort of a can patriot when when when Patroclus dies Achilles is very worried that practice will have just disappeared as a shade and so he actually travels into Hades and discovers that Patroclus has is indeed a shade and he sees in giving away faintly and it's one of the great sort of moments of sorrow in his life that he really will have to say goodbye to his his beloved friend so the afterlife isn't you know kind of it's a phase change probably leading to afraid in a way rejoining the ancestors you might say that you need to have quite a powerful sense of what it is to be an individual gathered into your own self to even have hope and that you might have an afterlife that you might carry on in some particular way or other and that just doesn't really exist at this time so this starts to change I see that a couple hands get up with questions if you might hold your questions to the end just so I can sort of push on through some slightly conscious of the time but do please pick things up later on that'd be great this starts to change around the middle of the first millennium BCE this is the argument Barfield traced it inwards originally I'm going to try and tell it I'm in slightly different ways and in particular again partly as a British Museum is so nearby you can sort of walk through this change and by looking particularly at figurative art and how figurative art changes and there's very nice description of this thing Gombrich is well known but the story of art where he tells this story too but you can see how inner life starts to emerge in figurative sculpture so before I'm the fifth century BCE figurative sculpture had been a very formulaic in fact the same proportions and dimensions existed in Greece as existed in ancient Egypt and so this was quite a widespread sacred geometry and these aren't individuals as we would think this is a core core I on the left here and then a core on the right and male and female figures and you can just also surf remember you know what kind of consciousness are these figures conveying they're not individuals you know this isn't Joe who I knew down the street this is more like some sort of representation and I suppose we could say archetype now of a young man it's sort of a about manhood perhaps we know that these kuroi would have been many many would have been in one room so we might have had one that sort of in your in your accommodation to remind you to invoke a sort of spirit of manliness manhood that's what it was supposed to do and again this very much this sense of that coming from the outside in captured in this sculpture and similarly for the cause but what starts to happen in really double quick time around 500 BCE is that sculpture start starts to change and and these core and court choroid and core figures starts to develop a bit of individuality so what happens is that knees start to bend come forward and there's a bit of a gesture with an arm mouth starts to have a bit of a smile and again ask yourself you know what's happening in consciousness to start to produce these different sculptures they're beginning to have a bit of a sense of in a lie which presumably meant that the artist or the sculptor themselves started to get interested in the of the inner life of others and maybe in their own inner life to appreciate the lives of others the inner life of others you have to have a sense of your own inner life and what we would call empathy must start to emerge you have to offer a point of view a perspective and it starts to come about around about 500 BC another great indicator of this is on pots surviving pots and this is the the thing that Gombrich notes actually that before 500 BCE and there isn't a single pot and that has foreshortening so feet for example always done the egyptian way you know kind of impro file and then suddenly about 4 500 BCE a foot is presented him in in four shortens just sort of five little circles as it were showing it almost coming out of the pot and it's not difficult to do technically but what was difficult was I suppose the emergence of the consciousness that would think want to portray an individual in an individual fight say an individual dynamic not just a type of warrior and which is what would have happened before and so this individuality starts to emerge until you come to you know the tremendous Golden Age of Greek sculptures we think of it now where figures you know just fifty a hundred years later aren't just defining standards of beauty but are showing inner life in extraordinary depth you know so the Discobolus I'm here isn't just about a beautiful physique this is portraying extraordinary psychic pose as well and the whole of the physical strength and also of the mental acting a force a strength of this individual is focused on the discus they're about to throw there and then this is a sculpture slightly later actually but I saw in the British Museum she's actually a Hellenistic Egyptian queen Austen OE portrayed with this deep these diaphanous robes in a way physically very very beautiful but also conveying her inner beauty therefore you know this was a queen out to sort of impress with her presence and a sculpture and captures that - she was one person who would have stood before you rather than being a queen who was semi-divine and that was the source of her power and strength before and so I hope you get some sense of how that change is really in double-quick time and represents quite a dramatic shift of consciousness in Greece and again you can trace these these changes may be slightly different times and but roughly around the middle of the first century BCE first millennium BCE in different cultures now what this poses is this question this trouble how are we going to reconnect with inner life again the inner life of the cosmos now we've gathered are in sense of individuality and here I want to make the change to ancient philosophy ancient Greek philosophy all the things which the pre-socratics and then those who follow Socrates here start to do is ask this little question why and the point about asking the question why is that you don't just have the and but you ask yourself about the experience and again we asked why all day every day certainly you've got kids you know they can ask why incessant then it becomes very very annoying but like it takes a massive change of consciousness to ask this question why so starts to emerge particularly pre-socratics we can actually experiment right now which one of the pre-socratics cause I called examinees did I mean he blew on his hands and he blew on his hand in two different ways which we might have to try blow on his hand with his mouth open kind of like that and then with his lips pursed like that so mouth open and then lips pursed like that and he noticed something if anyone I turn temperature difference yeah so when you've got your mouth open it's hot warm at least when you've got mouth put lips pursed it's cold now presuming this was an experience that directly or not countless people had had before but an examine these things to ask why he both has the experience but as a were in his mind takes a step back and asks about the experience - he's not just immersed in the experience and he's got a sense of esteem self I'm in order to to think about the experience as well you might say that his inner life is triangulated and actually sometimes in mindfulness this Talton that's why I've I've heard and that there's not just you and the experience but there's the third position where you're able to stand back from the experience and think about it and this is what an examinees did it's now the phenomena is now very very widespread in our technological culture it's basically the science of refrigeration and that when hot air expands it cools so when you have your mouth open there's bored of the same pressure inside is out so it stays at body temperature and feels warm but when you have your lips pursed it's high pressure in lower pressure out and the air cools and as a result so there's air corner in this room I was wondering if there was everyone but if there is aircon in this room and then that's what it's doing now ank Tammany's isn't remembered as the discovery of a you know a great kind of technology Boyle's law is caught now after and the 18th century scientist Boyle he was remembered for this shift of consciousness so it's one of the reasons why he's the pre-socratic that was far more significant at the time than the the pure technology takes another shift of consciousness to think about turning these things into widespread technologies which is what we'll come to later and I think what happened is that a lot of these shifts kind of constellated all come together in the figure of Socrates which is why he now feels like a kind of turning point figure for us whenever you tell this story you tell the story of Socrates I don't know how many people have heard of examinees before because certain you've heard of Socrates and then Plato writes about Socrates in order to give a sense of the encounter I think primarily the encounter with this figure of Socrates who seemed to bring together this new consciousness for people and enable them to make something of it themselves you know a lot people didn't like it he was regarded with great suspicion if you know any about Socrates as well you'll know that he was killed in 399 BC and voted down by the democracy democracy always has at enter us to drift back to original participation mob rule and all that and it certainly happens in ancient Athens then Socrates was the victim of that at the end of his life but if you could tolerate and this sense of stepping back this asking question why enough of the the experience of having this gap then Socrates seemed to offer a whole new experience of what it was to be human and subsequent philosophy used Socrates in order to try and understand that so here's a little comment from Plato that I put up which does Socrates I'm said that he said about himself he said I have a divine or spiritual sign this began when I was a child it's a voice and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I'm about to do but it never encourages me to do anything this is what's prevented me from being part in public affairs and I think it was quite right to prevent me now this isn't Plato as it were reporting what Socrates might have said there's a word Plato is a bit like Shakespeare every single word that he utters or wrote down and carried quite a lot of significance and and this little phrase it in a way carries you through the Socratic therapy he might say so he has a divine or spiritual sign and so what he's saying there is I don't just go along with the collective gods of the city Athena particularly in Athens and but I have a divine or spiritual sign that I communicate with directly it was Apollo in Socrates's case he was set of his friend was said to have gone to the Delphic Oracle and who had received the blessing of Apollo and so Socrates as a well-used that in a sign as his sort of steer in life rather than the collective signs of the Athenian state all the reasons why we became suspicious of him it was you know pretty much a treasonous offence to say I have a divine or spiritual sign this began when I was a child another very interesting comment especially if you're a psychotherapist and this just about this time that the first intimations that our own development my matter and in terms of how we experience life not just the city state or the collective's development and that there's something going on in our own development and the shapes who we are and if we can pay attention to that then this will develop our consciousness expand life in some way it's a voice whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I'm about to do never encourages me to do anything now this is a sometimes known as the negative way I mean christian theologist called aqua fattest ism and again it's quite common in the spiritual traditions or wisdom traditions that about that merge around this time and the point is that you're not being operated like a puppet anymore you know when Athena appeared and pulled back Achilles head before he was about to strike Agamemnon Achilles was sort of being treated a bit like a puppet he was just moving according to his fate you might say now Socrates are saying you know this new way of experience lives mean in a place of doubt or uncertainty and it's in tolerating that doubt and uncertainty that I have to as a word come to something in conjunction with what's happening around me I have to learn to a relate to what's going on in the external world from within my own sense of self my own resources and personality develops individuality develops and the sense of beginning to reform a reciprocal participation if you can go through this period of uncertainty and doubt you know if you've ever known about Sufism you'll know that the wildermann time is a massive part of the spiritual process and I think that's something about this and there be other comparable experiences which part of different wisdom traditions and he says this has prevented me taking part in public affairs and was quite right to prevent me so he's not just going along with the crowd which the ancient Athenian democracy which you know you probably know was a very very participative experience he's trying to gather some sense of himself within and then work out how to act within the city what he can offer the city state from within himself rather than from preserving ancient traditions and so on Plato develops it he says you know if you have a well-developed consciousness of yourself then you'll have no need of the charms of a Burress the Hyperborean so a barista Hyperborean was sometimes called a shamanic figure and this was from original participation where the Shaymin as it were would go on a sort of spiritual journey and be able to guide you on your spiritual journey very very different spiritual undertaking from having an and gather against of yourself so Plato is saying that if you have a well develop your sense of consciousness of yourself as I'm putting forward now then you have no need of these old charms this is a bit of a side issue but I think probably what happen with Plato was that when Socrates died plaintiff was still quite young he was in his mid twenties and he was sort of left with his own in a struggle what was he gonna do with this experience of having met this figure Socrates that he was sure changed everything and I think that actually he travelled around a bit probably went to Egypt and maybe even took part in some of the old initiation rites and realized they weren't going to do the trick for this new consciousness and here is having a go at the Hyperborean who are probably around the Black Sea maybe you ain't up there as well but it is difficult here's another bit of Plato where he records one of Plato's disciples as he beardies and what it was like to know Socrates and he says Socrates makes me confess but I ought not to live as I do neglecting the ones of my own soul and busy myself with the concerns of the Athenians therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him Alcibiades was a great general in the Peloponnesian War so he was very very drawn to his own heroic status in the Peloponnesian War and Socrates said no no wait a minute you know maybe you're not caring for your own soul and by seeking your own glory he's the only person who's ever made me ashamed experiences like shame start to come in at this time conscience Euripides who was a contemporary of Socrates the playwright you reproduce he starts writing about conscience whereas only a hundred years before saying Aeschylus there wasn't the individual who experienced consciousness there was rather pollution came down on the whole city it was a collective experience and people were punished to the third and fourth generation now you have a sense of shame guilt conscience and it's the individual and who's got to grapple with this which you might think I'm not to be in my nature and there's no one else who does the same many a time I wish that he were dead eNOS I know that I should be much more sorry than glad if you were to die so that I'm on my wit's end he's been thrown into this state of bewilderment not knowing so much so that he can have hateful feelings against Socrates and yet somehow at the same time knows that Socrates somehow has the key to a better life for himself in parentheses it seems he probably didn't achieve that betterment and he died in ignoble circumstances and was hated by the Athenians in fact that Socrates is a trial it seems the Hausa biddies were cited that's counter evidence for this new way but nonetheless you take the point this is a sort of personal struggle and that's the kind of thing that starts to emerge at this time you can look at words at the time as well particularly in platonic philosophy and there's plays on words like quality and quantity in fact quantity didn't exist in Plato's time it's actually Aristotelian coinage just a few decades later but it captures the shift of consciousness that rather than life being experienced as a sort of felt level where qualities matter starts to be experienced where you can quantify things that requires this stepping back seeking as a work get a sense of the objective as opposed to the subjective so number quality becomes number quantity so rather than thinking about Warner's sort of unity one for Plato he still thinks about it mostly about oneness and what does it be to be whole round gathered a sort of unity that quality sense there's a nice little moment in while the Plato's dialogues where Socrates is watching the rain fall good little meditation for today and he notices two raindrops joining and forming one raindrop and he doesn't immediately go in his mind to light our you know what's the volume of the one raindrop is at the sum of the two a more quantitative kind of exercise he asks what happened to the tunas when it became one i'm tunis is a very different a sort of dyadic notion and tuna struggles to relate oneness is whole and what's happened to that qualitative experience similarly and a lot of Plato's writing uses what was now known as proof by analogy if you can get a felt sense of things in one part of life then maybe that helps you get a felt sense of things in another part of life a lot of philosophers now think what are useless proof because they tend to think about it in terms of analysis things like logic analysis again Aristotelian coinages and they start to emerge at this time and theory didn't mean I kind of neatly tightly defined proposal that you then go out and find evidence for put to the test theoria meant a kind of journey you went on that would change your perspective and one of Plato's best-known fail rears is the myth of a cave where he imagines how life is like being strapped to the back of the cave but for a process of steps and change and struggle as it were the rare individual escapes from the cave and realizes that life is wholly different from what they proposed what they thought before that's a theory in Plato it's not like Newton's theories of motion or something very different idea so many speculation wasn't about having a Ponton idea it's like Spectre calls this you know having a good look and looking directly direct knowledge and reason to I probably put this up because if you have read a bit of Plato you've got a unthink a lot of what you take these words to mean in order to really get his sense you know reason doesn't mean logic rationale dry abstract objective proof that you know anyone could see were right if only they've gone through the same they're called logical steps and reason is much more linked to the latter and rat ratio it's more about harmony and resonance and the ancient Greek philosophers felt that you've got to work on yourself in order to perceive life you've got to have you've got to be in a kind of in harmony or resonance with the world around you in order to then have a sense of knowledge and the wise sage was someone who was in tune with things rather than someone who knew lots of good logical arguments word shifting consciousness at this time and so you get this great sort of splurge of philosophy in the post of critique oh geez Raphael's famous School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle in the middle and other gathered philosophers around and about as they all am embark on this new consciousness constellated for them by and the figure of Socrates and the Stoics the Epicureans the skeptics of cynics and they all what they broadly do I think is take a different sort of entry point and the Stoics felt that the emotional flux was the way to get into this the Epicureans thought no no were pleasure-loving pain avoiding creatures that's what we must do to get involved in in this new consciousness skeptics Thornton and a no it's about wanting to know what's going on and can you tolerate the unknown the cynics bordey footnotes human conventions that keep us trapped in an old consciousness and we must give up things like clothing and money and housing and then we'll step into a new consciousness and a different sense of ourselves can emerge so sysm particular important for the foundation of CBT incidentally rate dating back earlier on the founders the CBT was self conscious modern-day Stoics but interestingly what they did was sort of strip out the endpoint of the ancient Stoics because the ancient Stoics along with all the philosophy schools I would argue felt that what happens is that if you gain a sense of yourself in relation to the hubbub of the everyday can do this sort of stepping back be mindful of yourself in the broadest possible sense then it's not just has therapeutic advantage because you don't just get swept along by the ups and downs by the collective by the masses by anxieties and so on or there does have that therapeutic advantage but it opens you up to a whole new experience of life as well they had no awareness of at all because you were so absorbed in what was immediate and so for the Stoics and they argued that it opens you up to a deeper pulse of life which they called the logos a kind of divine sense of things and the so it's the stoic stage try to align themselves more and more with the logos rather than with their own and flux and that was their sort of deepest promise and you might ask you know what happens when we kind of strip out that deeper pulse of things now and just try and keep going on our own volition our own abilities rather than as a we're trusting that there might be something else we can rest in rest there's a big mindful words and someone who's quite persuaded by these more theistic arguments and I sometimes want to ask mindfulness practitioners what are you resting in just your own observation or is there something deeper just to raise some of the questions really great go back to what was being said earlier earlier on so that's something about ancient philosophy before we just go for a break for five minutes and this gets picked up in the Christian period I think that essentially what Christianity manages to do is to develop these this new experience of consciousness for the masses ancient philosophy was always a bit of an elite activity but I think it had more of an impact than perhaps sometimes is thought but nonetheless Christianity managed to take them and develop them for the masses here's a very early picture of Christ from Hinton Samaria villa here in England I rather like it because it's a beardless Christ before and Christ takes on the appearance of the Emperor and but rather looks like apollo and apollo was a very interesting god at this time i think because in the greek it means that not many Apollo's not wife alive but a ploy and this gather sense of individuality seem to give quite a boost to Apollo as it were you start to appreciate the unity of the divine if you have a unity yourself within if you don't have a sense of unity within then how can you appreciate the unity of the divine so in original participation pantheism dominates but it's about this time the monotheism starts to emerge certainly around the Mediterranean and Christ depicted as Apollo and is an indicator of that and you know two color story short it develops into medieval mysticism here's a picture of Hildegard of Bingen as drawing I hope you can see Hildegard here and she's as I were looking onto the whole cosmos and seeing that the human mind can traverse and the whole cosmos and relates rather nicely to the divine mind that embraces it all so this was broadly the kind of Christian promise again reflected in other traditions but Boyd the Christian promises that the individual has the freedom to know of the divine you don't have to as a were rely on the old traditions the old rituals the old libations but you yourself can have this mystical experience it's a newfound freedom notions like free will start to take off in the early Christian period they don't exist before now we assume that it's a key part of bullets to be human to have free will and when people challenge it like these new neuroscientists we get up in arms and say but that doesn't make any sense and how the neuro sealant has been around about 3000 BC they would have gone to use no one's got free will but now it really matters to us because of this writers like meister i cought can say my eye and god's eyes one eye and one site one knowledge and one love and just to give just a quick nod to other traditions about this time say the bhagavad-gita just starts to emerge and then if this it's a bit earlier but then the commentaries which are so crucial for vedantic ideas now are about this time and early on the back of our gear you can read phrases like this which repeated time and time and time again only the material body is perishable the embodied soul within its indestructible immeasurable and eternal and that is the sort of the goal to know of life from that dimension not just be stuck with the material body and I think you can even make leaps into Chinese philosophy as well a bit more cautious here there's definitely a lot of traffic between Mediterranean philosophy and Indian philosophy I think Chinese it's also worth remembering that it's probably got very different ideas too but nonetheless there are parallels and schranz ER who's a kind of later Taoist figure in his book he writes what I care about is the way which goes beyond skill perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants so what he's saying there is that I know about the Dao the way not because I've got the right formulas the right skills and the old magic spells for example but it's about perception and understanding that then I can let go of and because I've become aligned to the way and it just happens as it were by itself this famous Taoist notion of Wu Wei and it's about the individual who has become - to the doubt to the deeper pulse I think they're all the parallels that you can draw there as well and so we come to our sense of our self before the modern period here's some Renaissance pictures you know where there's they're so appealing to us I think and because of the depth the interior OT of figures like the Mona Lisa and then I particularly this figure this painted by gerund IO of the old man looking at his grandson and you'll you'll sort of see a complete consciousness represented here because they're definitely individuals you know the Mona Lisa with a famously enigmatic smart is definitely an individual and it's a way you can dive into her interior aura tea wondering what is going on for her and but they're set against in the Renaissance way these backgrounds this is the whole world somehow a play here - you know with winding roads and winding roads Hills that represent sort of depth of perspective as well as the immediate and I think the Renaissance so appeals to us because it was a time when original participation individual consciousness a bit of alienation here going on but also a reciprocal sense of what it was to be humanist felt in the picture - and they were gathering that came to its peak in the medieval and then Renaissance periods there was a withdrawal in the modern period which is our challenge now but maybe we'll have a five-minute what he argued is that about five hundred years ago beginning of the sixteenth century certainly in the West there was another big withdrawal of participation various things unfolded in about a hundred years or so for in about 1500 onwards and that led to a big withdrawal of participation arguably even more so perhaps than the withdrawal of participation in the middle of the first millennium BCE and again just to say from the top you know this has advantages and disadvantages it's not like one's good and one's bad and this is a he's very much a cyclical sense of things I think they Barfield rather than a linear progression of consciousness but there's trials and tribulations as well as newfound blessings and perceptions so three things broadly happens I think about 500 years ago in the West first of all is the Copernican Revolution Copernicus publishes his final treatise on the revolution of the spheres in 1543 he'd had the ideas a little bit before pushing back to the beginning of the sixteenth century but nonetheless broadly speaking before the sixteenth century this was the presumed kind of cosmology that we were immersed in the cosmos we had enough individuality to be able to explore the celestial spheres from our own domain domain of the earth it was felt to be alive this is the Potomac universe which was very much picked up in the Christian period as well you know the Sun as divine or Plato just refined it slightly he said that the Sun is the child of the good so there is a kind of unity of good beyond the Sun and the sun's a mirror of that much as our soul can be a mirror the divine - but nonetheless it's very sort of immersive sense of things which which undergo and astrology is one of the big sort of things that comes out of this period astrology as we really know it and picks up in the Hellenistic time oracle horoscope Scott's baton to start to be cast for individuals about this time that our horoscopes before but they're always rather collective things about the seasons about the life of the king so astrology very much makes sense them in the in this this worldview and then it changes and the king I hope you know you can see from the imagery there is that the human figures aren't in the middle of it they're sat outside gazing on this is this sort of disconnection this withdrawal and that reveals new knowledge there is a huge advantage to it it reveals new knowledge but nonetheless very starkly presented there is the struggle of how to get back into the cosmos it's sort of that picture on the right there kind of suggest that you can't really you just gotta kind of gaze on and be alienated from what before had been thought of as aspects of the divine in the in the planets and so on and so the Copernican revolution definitely has a big impact the birth of modern science individuals like Francis Bacon and then Descartes - they really developed this they really run with this Francis Bacon separates quality from quantity and he starts talking about laws of nature a very quantitative kind of notion whereas in Plato he talked about ideas much more qualitative you know the good is an idea that tends to cause things to move in a certain direction to which we have attractions Francis Bacon says no no no its laws if you hit this that happens that kind of idea starts to emerge I mean modern science and then Descartes famously separates the mental from the material that's one of his things but also he develops ways of investigating space which before had been enchanted they'd been you might say places and with character with living divinities and consciousnesses and so on and he develops a way of treating the world and the cosmos as a space this is his famous x y&z which you learn about at school probably the more significant of his inventions actually then even then I think therefore I am is the the way of investigating space which this enchance place so that's that's that's to say something about that around about the same time we've just kept remembered here Martin Luther's ninety-five theses earlier this year and then that's John Calvin his slightly younger sort of who took up the Reformation challenge they do things like and they become very very anxious about allegorical readings of the Bible than nature before had been quite standard in the medieval world to read the Bible to read nature as not just something that happens as it were in the natural world but as allegories of God's working and aggregates of your own inner life and both Luther and Calvin talk of their struggles to throw off what they now call idolatry and the other thing that happens is that they become very wary of their inner life Martin Luther seems to be in quite a troubled character and was very wary of his inner life he thought he couldn't trust it he couldn't even trust this free will anymore he thought how do I know I'm not possessed by a devil and when I think what I'm using is my free will and then John Calvin one of his famous remarks is that were utterly depraved in our inner life it's completely untrustworthy so you need a new source of authority and it's Scripture that they turn to it was a good time to turn to scripture because in the Renaissance then the humanities have been emerging which were getting very interested in philology words history of text and so on so there was a new body of knowledge to turn to to seek some kind of authority about this time a bit like I think we try and see news forms of authority in neuroscience they did the same there with Scripture but there was this deep conundrum in the heart of the Reformation which was that you needed to turn to scripture but you've got to interpret Scripture you can't trust the church you can't trust the collective to do that interpretation for you you've got to trust the individual and yet you're also distrusting the individual your own sense of things because what early depraved inside and I think this is why Protestantism tends to have this fragment Ettore kind of quality it's great for the individual but never but always struggles to hold itself together it tends to fragment you know where's Roman Catholicism which is more rooted in medieval the mid that medieval world there can be a lot of debate as we were hearing on the news of Smalling I'm in the Roman Catholic Church and yet somehow the sense of belonging still being a Catholic in Ireland for example despite of all this happened Protestant churches would just divide as they sort of struggle to locate a sort a sense of authority that's a Reformation the third thing and then the second thing and then the third thing is the Enlightenment the modern enlightenment here's Immanuel Kant and ameno accounts fairly difficult to read except one little bit of camp which is quite readable which was an article he wrote for a newspaper called what is enlightenment and he summarizes it he says enlightenment is released from self-imposed immaturity in maturities an inability to make use of understanding without the guidance of another sorry all day have courage to use your own reason so this is the words rural again trust your own individuality don't rely on the guidance of another turn inwards have courage to know as it's also translated sometimes so these three things sort of mark the beginning of our own intensified individuality our own sense of consciousness and present us with the struggle of how we connect how we reconnect again now there are good sides and bad sides and here's some of the good sides just captured in three images technology is one obviously it's only when you have a really powerful sense that you can step outside the natural world and do with it as you will that technology really takes off a lot of technologies like steam engines did actually exist in the ancient world but they were seen as telling you something about the qualitative side of nature and you that you would has or have contemplated a scene a steam engine there would have been anyone who wanted to patent it and turn it into turbo turbines like these so that gets going I think about this time another huge advantage reflected in this room as well as the picture of Mary beard on the wall here and is the women as well as men start to be able to move up and down society to gain education much much more than I'm in their medieval world not not completely so we I mentioned Hildegard of Bingen earlier on but now we you know we'll take it for advantage hopefully we take it and as an assumption even if it's difficult to put into practice that the individual really counts and so differences you know like men and women shouldn't shouldn't be bars in any way and then there's the famous double helix that we can even look inside ourselves and discover the genome again a sort of bit of technology you might say biological technology and so it's now become very common to talk about my genes do this I'm programmed for that a bit like the immediate of victors are firing as we were hearing earlier on quite what happens to the person when you think you're just the sort of as it were a lumbering robot to use Richard Dawkins phrase and there's a moot point but these are definite advantages Medical Sciences definite advantage I'd rather have a toothache now than I would have had in 1503 so but here's the alienation you know the problems of existential angst we've talked we talked a little about mental health earlier on anxiety depression even that the individual completely breaking down in psychosis that be one way of understanding psychosis and that as it were the individual breaks down and there's a flood of the outside in so that the individual suffering physically can't tell the difference between what's inside and outside and there's no cultural memory or AIDS as a were around and about to be able to negotiate that everyone else has a keen sense of their individuality and you as the schizophrenic or the psychotic person saying I don't experience like that at all and it's you know immensely distressing and very difficult ecological disaster I'm you know I'm not proposing mindfulness and how to solve the economical crisis but nonetheless I think that part of the what we are wrestling with in some deeper sense as well as in more mediate concerns is we've lost a felt sense of our connection with nature so you know in a way it doesn't really matter to us that global warming is breaking up the ice caps and so on and we still go out and do all the things which have contributed to this week it's not just a moral question I think and that we really need to regain a sense of but a felt sense of participating with these things you know and then as well we would know we would really from the soul upwards would have a felt sense of what a good life was and then it doesn't involve destroying the natural world and then I put the picture caspere's picture there of the wanderer partly put there because it appears on the front cover of my books of Nietzsche who famously declared that god is dead and so you have the great crisis of FEA ISM in the West that God is dead and as you know if you've read in Nietzsche this wasn't a great sort of triumph or a declaration of him he thought it was going to be the great test of the centuries to come because when God is dead were left alone in empty space and we don't know where we are anymore it seems like the sons become unhinged from its bearings we just experienced darkness and we can't as a weapon iterate the clouds and so this is the great challenge of of modern alienation so what are we going to do about it there's many things and the sheets of paper has some suggestions you'll note think of others than just what i'ma going to suggest now but I thought at least try and talking the time I've got left about psychotherapy a little bit because I think psychotherapy is arisen in the time it has largely in response to this crisis Carl Jung certainly explicitly argued that that particularly Christianity in the West as he knew in Protestant Germany in Switzerland had ceased to work for people psychically and so psychotherapy is a kind of new way of trying to to deal with that and and the different traditions have contributed different things I think in the hundred years or so since Freud in a way kind of launched it all I worked as a psychotherapist now and we don't really use many Freudian ideas now British like a therapy all sorts of things have happened since and glad that we had a talk this morning saying that before we got something's right because it's quite common to say you know silly old Freud got it all wrong and that's doubly frustrating for me because I don't think I've got it all wrong but also we don't you know lots happened since as well the thing about Freud is he was such a tremendous writer and he's so easy to kind of quote and pick up on but nonetheless Freud's broad answer to this question of alienation was the constellation of illusions and he broadly argued that what we do is project our inner anxieties onto the world around us and try and befriend them thereby you know so he would say it's no coincidence that in Judaism he was due and in Christianity God is often conceived of as a father because when we were young we experienced life as in a way rather controlled by our fathers they had to provide the kind of security in which we could trust life but they also could turn on us at times and discipline us in order to help us to live civilly in the modern world and so you know the internalized fog father becomes the super-ego for Freud and this creating quite a great tension inside you know it's this father figure good or bad and can we trust them or they're going to punish us and one of the common ways that we use Freud argue to handle this inner anxiety and is to project make the father of God and the advantage of this has is that we can both tell stories about his ultimate beneficence that ultimately he wills and the good of us but also we can have a struggle with God about the things that are difficult and we don't like as well so it's a kind of adult version of an infantile state you might say so the consolation of illusions and you know he wasn't wholly wrong in this and projection is a very powerful human mechanism we do tend to project our inner life on to the outside world and it's quite common to read texts from theistic traditions and think is that not what they're doing but it wasn't the whole story I think that was sort of Freud's era he thought it was the whole story but it wasn't here's a picture of Donald Winnicott who is a very important British psychotherapist in this country anyway he works at Paddington sit Mary's Paddington not far from here and he he took Freud's ideas and said look it can't all be projection because if it's all projection if it's just my fantasies that I'm experiencing when I think I'm experiencing the real world we'd never have a sense of connection we'd never have a sense of groundedness we never have a sense of really meeting another person we'd all be as aware a bit psychotic all the time and so what Winnicott argued is that our projections do go out of us but sometimes they land and they're true and when we have a centre experience of that we feel we have connected we feel grounded and so for Winnicott and psychotherapy it can be many things but part of the bother is is becoming familiar with your own projections in order then you can discern the projections which speak of reality back to you it's it's a sort of parallel experience to the Socratic moment you know you've got a as a were be able to tolerate that space of not knowing in psychotherapy and that can you know often be a very key part of it's like a therapeutic experience realizing that you don't know as much as you thought you did and it can be very unsettling and you ask is that where your therapist it can hold that possibility for you during that time but nonetheless on the other side of it lies a sense of the world beyond you because you've got over yourself narcissism by the way in psychotherapy doesn't mean loving yourself it means the struggle to love yourself enough to get over yourself and see that there's more than just yourself you know that someone with a narcissistic personality disorder constantly tries to prop up their sense of themselves and it's a you know it makes them grandiose and because they're constantly trying to fight an inner fridge but most of us to use the win occulting expression have a good-enough extense of ourselves so that most of the time we're kind of comfortable with ourselves and can do this other work like working for our projections and regaining a sense both of myself I know myself better after the process of psychotherapy but also know my connection with the world better too so it's a reciprocal sense of participation and then Carl Jung came to listen to winnicott's I think a lot of Winnicott ideas are quite like Jungian ideas and but he is known now for sort of taking it a step further and arguing that it's not just our own inner lives that were negotiating when we have some psychotherapy but actually the inner life of the cosmos again that were encountering archetypes that have become partly our own but also are more than just our own they're part of the collective and they're part of the groups in which we live you know whether we be a student and there's a whole sort of collection of archetypes at that time of life you might say cultures have their own gatherings of archetypes and maybe they're even Universal archetypes and a bit like the medieval mystic would have experienced life a bit like in Dante's Divine Comedy traversing the cosmos and different spheres discovering different angels different saints and so on into in different spheres so Jung's idea a sort of broad parallel there would be that psychotherapy is about traversing our inner cosmos and realizing that we're actually then traversing the inside of the whole world to probably quite a long way down the line doesn't happen quickly but nonetheless this is sort of the promise a new promise of Union now I think I'm going to actually draw to a close there because I do want to give some time for questions there's on the handout you'll find some other ideas about virtues for example which are kind of personal qualities which we can cultivate they need us to respond to what's happening in life and I think this is very difficult for morality morality is very much about the right thing to do in a certain kind of scenario we tend to talk about morality I'm in the modern world and I'm very much for trying to think about things in terms of virtues again kind of characteristics qualities of what it is to be a person and that give us this flexibility to move a dot across different experiences of life you know so humility military for example and isn't about always putting yourself in the last place a sort of vague sense of AB self-abnegation when it's celebrated as a moral quality and it's rather about and that nice analogy I heard someone once says it's it's rather like being the sea being the humble person and the sea is in the lowest place because everything can flow into it and that actually makes it the greatest body of water as a well on the planet and so genuinely humble people I think don't is it worth Fame there kind of diminution of themselves but actually they're great sold individuals and you feel that they're channeling something there they're conveying something that's much bigger than themselves and that's what their humility allows them to do so I'm very much in favor of thinking about virtues are rather than the morally right or wrong thing to do and so that the sheet covers some of that but maybe we'll do in the last a few minutes is just have a time of Vienna questions clarifications points begin a process of digestion hoping that when you thought about original participation alienation reciprocal protection at the beginning you've got a bit more of a sense of what it might mean to traverse these different stages in the evolution of consciousness so any thoughts or comments or questions and I guess there'd be a microphone coming round yeah we see what one hand here and then one hand here straight away [Music] but rather than being in those yeah I agree I broadly think that what's happened my sauce story about what mindfulness is about is that it's become so big in the West because of behaviorism essentially that you know there was a very powerful movement in the middle of the 20th century which told us you shouldn't worry about your inner life and these were its rats in mazes that kind of thing that counts and that this led to a sense of you know emptying out of inner life and so the time was ripe for these chaps who've been in India to come back and tell us all about it once again but it's certainly an ancient tradition you know the the Stoics kept silence the leaders of Plato's Academy remember keeping silence the phrase navel gazing as a sort of you know you're sitting around just staring at your navel all day long that's actually that was a term of abuse used against only Christians and particularly the the mothers and fathers who went into the Egyptian desert and they were said they were accused of navel gazing so it you know I think it's just a common thing that probably exists across all traditions in fact but it's being remade for us and that's really important because the particular always matters you've got to remake it for your time in place so you don't lose the sense of individuality so it's not a trivial task what's happening with mindfulness movements I don't think yeah it's an art and it's game by making mistakes and so on yeah there's a question at the back then very good question I perhaps should just say that many historians don't talk about history in this way anymore in fact marry beer talk up on the on the wall there she hates it sort of called historicism she hates all that and if you saw her civilizations programs on the telly she deliberately talked about a core without referring to this history of consciousness kind of stuff actually she didn't say damned history evolution consciousness by I suspect that was kind of in the back of her mind but nonetheless the people that do talk about it in this way different theories and ideas what I quite like actually is to do with writing that writing existed for quite a long time before the middle of the first millennium BCE but it's about this time that things started to get written down beyond just bureaucratic stuff you know so cuneiforms full of how many wheat bales you know you've got to pay taxes on and stuff like that but Homer for example was an oral poem poems we've got get starts to get written down about the sixth century BCE and what happens when you write down um is that a gap opens up between you and the words you know you haven't learned it by heart it's not coming out flowing from within you and the the sort of the Bartok tradition of which you as the poet a part of and the words have a kind of life of their own you can not read a text for decades centuries even and then pick it up and then comes the struggle to make the words live again you've got her as it were discover what they mean discover their life work out how it connects with you so it creates a very different experience of what it is to gauge with a literary tradition when words are written down so I think there are other factors but that I think that must be part of it at least yes you certainly see that in the Hebrew tradition you know the being the Hebrew Bible starts to get written down about this time in the post-exilic period and the deuteron o mists and in particular major on this in gathering of the self is when monotheism really started to get going in Jewish tradition because you got the sense of gathered unity that can then even perceive that there might be a unity to all things mirrored in your own soul in the depths of your own soul did you say what the lost but again I'm I'm in support you said oh right okay yes yes of the pineal gland if you're where Descartes thought that the minds might meet the matter I mean poro Descartes get such a bad writer he actually thought there was a kind of unit of substance that contains both mind and matter but there's often forgot again he's a bit of a he suffers because he's such a good writer I think therefore I am is such a good phrase that everyone doesn't bother to read the rest and he speculates in one text that maybe the pineal gland has something to do with it I don't think he thought that he proven anything there or not but maybe he was a bit like an early neuroscientist that thought they've got the spot and yeah so it's an idea but I don't think it's it stands and falls it's kind of way it's a way of contemplating the problem as much as a solution to the problem you might say put it like that yeah but so it's a great problem and you know I work at the multi Hospital and people actually very nervous about introducing religious ideas in a therapeutic session or whatever thing that might be conceived of in that way because people get sued and you know there's big cultural walls around these things but I I do wonder whether part of the reason why we see these kind of rises and falls in these broadly contemporary fair appears you know so CBT as we were told everyone had this kind of big sort of moment and now there's plenty of studies coming out saying it's short term and that's actually quite good for psychotherapists like me because people that have CBT then get passed on to us but nonetheless you know and I do I just wonder whether that what we're not sure is if is it all ground and that CBT can help and don't get me wrong I really think CBT can help but the intervention is probably going to be short-lived because you know we're not just as it were isolated monads and the more or less hold life together for ourselves especially if we're interested in life we want to expand into something more and know about relating to that and so that that would be my sort of sense that there's a part of the crisis of our age is seen in these kind of cognitive therapies and I reckon the same thing might happen with mindfulness until we regain a different sense of reciprocal participation and it becomes much more culturally acceptable to talk about these things again I think you see in various areas you know I've noticed myself just in the last five or ten years that someone mentioned precognitive dreams earlier on I reckon about five years ago you might not be even dared ask a question like that and if it had been asked the respondent would have said well you know the evidence is out at the moment things are changing quite dramatically I think so it's quite a good time to live I look particularly sci-fi I love I'm quite a consumer of sci-fi and I know I love that film arrival that came out a year or so back and we're by learning a different language the scientists discovered it too inclined of consciousness a different experience of time you know these things are around in our culture more and more can you talk about the new-age things such as synchronous yeah um summarizing when you get on to it the person I think writes really interestingly about this is a psychologist called Jeffrey with the K Jeff ich rifle and he has quite a little stuff online and talks and so on and broadly speaking his understanding is that paranormal experiences and various kinds are as it were reality breaking back in we've rather lost the ability to relate to the wider sense of things become individualistic and you know when the New Age is accused of being narcissistic in the pejorative sense you know that's broadly speaking what's going on but unless you do the work on yourself what breaks back in gets mangled with your own projections and fears and anxieties and so on and so there's a kind of cultural history you can tell about say UFOs I personally don't think that et is visiting I think it's some sort of collective way of trying to interpret the sense there's more to life than just our own you know knocking about in our own brains and and people like Jeffrey quite bull have written about this and it's a it's a reflexive experience that requires a lot of undertaking a lot of untangling and understanding yeah why why would it be otherwise you know we're talking about the gap you know between what's me and not meters going to be as it were colored by Who I am you want that you want to be an individual as well as relating to the wider world should we move on I just have a couple more questions yeah yeah yeah well to cut to the chase big subject and I'm only a sort of punter here and you know read the papers like you but my sense is that if a I've shown anything and I think this has started to become the new narrative around AI is that we're not were not algorithms you know there's been big effort over quite a long time now to produce artificial intelligence like our own and then it basically fails and now what people are saying is that maybe what we're on to is creating different kinds of intelligence that with luck we can put into the service of ourselves so that broadly speaking I think is a new kind of narrative around AI I also buy the further arguments just made by people like Jaron Lane yay the chap who coined the phrase virtual reality so he knows about this and he says the great risk around AI now is that we forget that we're we have human intelligence with form of a better word all this kind of spiritual potential and we just saw were collapse our lives into the intelligence of the machine so he writes very well about Facebook and how it limits our consciousness because basically you can do is like or not like and so you know his books about coming off social media and realizing the whole world kind of opens up again before you so I think that both AI won't deliver consciousness like human consciousness I personally I think it will be machines will ever wake up at all they'll just get more and more sophisticated imitating various kinds of intelligence but the greater risk really is that we forget our own potential because we become so immersed in the machine and the machine is that within which we live and move and have our being to use the stoic phrase and rather than the divine law goals should we have Bank above near go go for one because they're only got another minute yeah oh that's good stuff door a dor e with a circumflex okay it's always fantastic you know if you interest early EP he got this and there was one more question here and there maybe that would be about about it yeah well I'm afraid that this is gonna end on a low point but I do believe in I do think that we have to go through these periods of bewilderment and disorientation and not knowing and uncertainty and the ancient Greek way of putting it was periods of tragedy and I suspect that's the way it's going for us and that may be something on the other side a new form of life and my emerge for us collectively someone mentioned civilizations there rises and falls I do by the kinds of get sir Oswald Spengler people write about it in this way I think that there's a lot of sense in that and so our task now is it were to be in the vanguard he's are not beat moment tend to be in the vanguard of the evolution of consciousness and you know doing the work on ourselves because at the end of the day you know what counts is not that I can try and persuade you by logical argument that there's more to life than just what's going on in my own brain what really persuades you is when you meet someone who's living this and then you think I want that too and you feel it and so you know engaging with life in that way I think is in the longer term and it's going to be much more beneficial I don't think there will be an awakening I think we're on the cusp of an awakening anytime soon as a collective as a society but nonetheless you meet people who you do feel they are awakens and they encourage you and draw you forward yeah yeah yeah which also close there if you like my little book you want a bit more immediately go do you get the book have a look at the handouts as well and there's some poetry and so on in there which I hope might make some more sense but thank you very much indeed for your comments below

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 15,251

Rating: 4.8631177 out of 5

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, evolution of consciousness, mark vernon, freud, socrates, owen barfield

Id: Uoy2jarCSro

Length: 91min 34sec (5494 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019