In one of my first posts on this blog, I mentioned that one of my writing projects, entitled 'On Vision', would eventually be featured here on 'Archaic Visions'. In the ensuing period, the remit of this writing project has rather expanded, and thus is now called 'On Vision and Being Human' to reflect the wider purview - Darwinist, neurological, cognitive - that I am taking in my quest to come to a new understanding of the nature of visionary experience. As I write, this essay stands at some 45,000 words with a few more sections still to write, and as such, the serialisation here will likely last a long time! Eventually, an illustrated book is planned... For now, however, here is the introduction to the thesis, which I hope will whet your appetite for further reading!
As an artist whose work deals with vision and the experience of myth, the nature of these perennial themes in human culture is of principal importance to me, as is the nature of the art that I do: Visionary Art, a complex and multi-faceted artform. At heart, for me, it is the inner and outer quest to uncover ancient and future sacred images that reveal the deepest wordless essences of what it means to be alive in this cosmos as a human being. The visionary image is transpersonal, and transcultural, unhinged from the personal and from local time, place or culture into realms of myth, of sacred journeys, of dreams and imaginal flights of fancy, shamanic and entheogenic visions, and of half-forgotten sacred vistas shimmering within the Underworlds of our Human Souls. And for all of this to be rendered using techniques that speak of craft, lineage and ancestral lifeways.
As an artist whose work deals with vision and the experience of myth, the nature of these perennial themes in human culture is of principal importance to me, as is the nature of the art that I do: Visionary Art, a complex and multi-faceted artform. At heart, for me, it is the inner and outer quest to uncover ancient and future sacred images that reveal the deepest wordless essences of what it means to be alive in this cosmos as a human being. The visionary image is transpersonal, and transcultural, unhinged from the personal and from local time, place or culture into realms of myth, of sacred journeys, of dreams and imaginal flights of fancy, shamanic and entheogenic visions, and of half-forgotten sacred vistas shimmering within the Underworlds of our Human Souls. And for all of this to be rendered using techniques that speak of craft, lineage and ancestral lifeways.
But such words are easy to write without following their implications, and the implications of visionary experience in light of what we now know, here in the early 21st century, about the cosmos and our own minds, are huge. Darwinism and Quantum Mechanics have in many ways acted as watersheds in human understanding, rubicons across which many of us have failed to step for fear of the stripping away of all the untruths we have long spoken about ourselves and our place in the world.
On the surface at least they appear to deprive us of some of what we consider to be the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human, and thus, for many people, visionary experience is a phenomenon that can only thrive in environments where a nostalgic Classical or mid-19th century view of the world holds sway, or in which a kind of confused pseudo-science must prevail. Or we read from those calling themselves humanists that religion, along with visionary experience, is nothing but delusion and nonsense, perhaps unaware of the excision of important aspects of humanity that such statements demand. Religion meanwhile is receptive to vision, at least in some forms acceptable to the given faith, but opposes those aspects of science which render the world godless.
Let me state, then, at this outset: I believe that a fusion of science and vision is possible, one which joyfully steps over the Darwinian/Quantum threshold and in doing so, strips away some untruths but finds deeper meaning in our humanity nonetheless. The detachment from hidden realities and worlds beyond as the primary driver of meaning in human lives, and the realisation that religion and ritual behaviour evolved in as much a Darwinian manner as any other behaviour trait among humans or animals, when followed through to their logical conclusions, do not abandon us in a desolate and meaningless existence. Rather they grant us a richer and more colourful understanding of what it means to be human, and lead us to a delightful if surreal kind of neurological play, a subjective realm in which all these elements are fused.
On the surface at least they appear to deprive us of some of what we consider to be the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human, and thus, for many people, visionary experience is a phenomenon that can only thrive in environments where a nostalgic Classical or mid-19th century view of the world holds sway, or in which a kind of confused pseudo-science must prevail. Or we read from those calling themselves humanists that religion, along with visionary experience, is nothing but delusion and nonsense, perhaps unaware of the excision of important aspects of humanity that such statements demand. Religion meanwhile is receptive to vision, at least in some forms acceptable to the given faith, but opposes those aspects of science which render the world godless.
Let me state, then, at this outset: I believe that a fusion of science and vision is possible, one which joyfully steps over the Darwinian/Quantum threshold and in doing so, strips away some untruths but finds deeper meaning in our humanity nonetheless. The detachment from hidden realities and worlds beyond as the primary driver of meaning in human lives, and the realisation that religion and ritual behaviour evolved in as much a Darwinian manner as any other behaviour trait among humans or animals, when followed through to their logical conclusions, do not abandon us in a desolate and meaningless existence. Rather they grant us a richer and more colourful understanding of what it means to be human, and lead us to a delightful if surreal kind of neurological play, a subjective realm in which all these elements are fused.
***
I have experienced visions since I was a child, from various sources and of various natures, whether from migraines, psychedelic plants and chemicals, spontaneous and unbidden seizures of reality as well as from meditations and trance-based exercises such as dance. I have experienced – if that is the right word – being torn apart, the sky opening to reveal choirs of singing angels, travelling to other worlds and shadowy realities that appear to exist beyond our datum universe, or descending into underworlds as well as other strange and surreal voyages too numerous to list here.
I have noted that many people who have similar experiences tend to interpret them literally, a response which is perhaps natural given the human predilection for understanding the world primarily through experience rather than ideas, along with the notion that human language reifies internal experiences through reference to experiences derived from the external world. Thus it would be reasonable – if not strictly rational – to interpret a vision of a cloudful of angels as being literally real.
However I have long found Joseph Campbell's adage, that a literal interpretation of myth kills the meaning and transforms the living imagery into fossilised theology, to be deeply relevant here: indeed I believe that a literal interpretation of vision performs precisely the same action and destroys the vision with as much certainty as religious fundamentalists kill mythforms. This principle has been a guiding light for me and underlies everything written here.
I have noted that many people who have similar experiences tend to interpret them literally, a response which is perhaps natural given the human predilection for understanding the world primarily through experience rather than ideas, along with the notion that human language reifies internal experiences through reference to experiences derived from the external world. Thus it would be reasonable – if not strictly rational – to interpret a vision of a cloudful of angels as being literally real.
However I have long found Joseph Campbell's adage, that a literal interpretation of myth kills the meaning and transforms the living imagery into fossilised theology, to be deeply relevant here: indeed I believe that a literal interpretation of vision performs precisely the same action and destroys the vision with as much certainty as religious fundamentalists kill mythforms. This principle has been a guiding light for me and underlies everything written here.
***
For the past few years, then, I have been making notes on the nature of vision, the experience of being a symbolically-cognitive human in a quantum/relativistic cosmology that has expanded vastly beyond the brain's capacity for conception, Darwinian theories on the evolution of ritual and symbolic behaviours in humans and the implications of quantum theses (in particular, Bell's Theorem) for notions such as 'essences', 'deep reality' and the 'World-Beyond-Worlds', with a view to forming an essay, perhaps a kind of manifesto of visionary experience. It was originally to be titled simply 'On Vision' and explore, with visionary art as its starting point, the mythical dimensions to visionary experience with a focus on the perceptual uncertainty as to the 'reality' (in a datum sense) of such experiences.
But as I worked through some of the implications, I began to realise that a manifesto was severely limiting and the original sketch has expanded into a series of musings on consciousness, the menstrual origins of symbolic cognition, cooperation and trust as human biological imperatives and meditations on the first proto-deity in the Middle Palaeolithic. It is a kind of philosophy, in that I reject all literal systems of hidden reality whether Platonic or Kantian, but it also results in a kind of pragmatism that I hope will not merely be rational (or perhaps: not necessarily rational) but will be nonetheless delightful.
Hence its expanded title, 'On Vision and On Being Human'. The worldview taken is archaic in some senses – returning to the periods in which anatomically- and cognitively-modern humans emerged in Africa and seeking to understand their proto-cultural realities – but it is also modern, responding to a fundamental compulsion in me that we cannot, as visionaries and as humans-seeking-meaning, hold ourselves artificially in the late 19th century and speak of 'universals' and 'ultimate realities', merely because we experience them as such, when no datum evidence presents itself for them any more. We must engage with our 21st century quantum/relativistic cosmos, and with our Darwinian selves, and do so with bravery of heart and openness of minds.
But as I worked through some of the implications, I began to realise that a manifesto was severely limiting and the original sketch has expanded into a series of musings on consciousness, the menstrual origins of symbolic cognition, cooperation and trust as human biological imperatives and meditations on the first proto-deity in the Middle Palaeolithic. It is a kind of philosophy, in that I reject all literal systems of hidden reality whether Platonic or Kantian, but it also results in a kind of pragmatism that I hope will not merely be rational (or perhaps: not necessarily rational) but will be nonetheless delightful.
Hence its expanded title, 'On Vision and On Being Human'. The worldview taken is archaic in some senses – returning to the periods in which anatomically- and cognitively-modern humans emerged in Africa and seeking to understand their proto-cultural realities – but it is also modern, responding to a fundamental compulsion in me that we cannot, as visionaries and as humans-seeking-meaning, hold ourselves artificially in the late 19th century and speak of 'universals' and 'ultimate realities', merely because we experience them as such, when no datum evidence presents itself for them any more. We must engage with our 21st century quantum/relativistic cosmos, and with our Darwinian selves, and do so with bravery of heart and openness of minds.
***
The essay begins with an exploration of some of the problems of visionary experience, in particular its quality of 'otherness' and the ambiguity which emerges from traditional views of vision as 'real' experiences. We then proceed to paint a beautiful image of the World-Beyond-Worlds as a literally-conceived ultimate reality with specific visionary qualities, after which we come to the Quantum/Darwinist threshold of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over which this delightful sacred image cannot survive.
Quantum and noumenal considerations are exemplified as effecting a destruction of any literally-conceived hidden world, before arriving at the first of several explorations of neurology as the foundation for visionary experience and consciousness. Despite such rational musings, we remind ourselves to maintain a lively sense of the sacred (in perception if not in literally-conceived reality) before engaging upon a lengthy Darwinist excursion into the complex origins of symbolic behaviour in human beings.
Here, the notion of the symbol is examined in several lights, most notably primate ethology and signal theory, before visionary theories of language are interrogated and rejected, whereupon we move to the heart of the essay in narrating the profound role that menstruation has played in the emergence of collective behaviours, trust, ritual, art and symbolic culture in cognitively-modern human beings. Remarkably this leftfield and multidisciplinary theory leads to the natural emergence of all fundamentally human traits, including a sense of the sacred and the otherworldly, using only the strict Darwinian principles of selective pressures and adaptive advantages to make unexpected but surprisingly appropriate connections between disparate elements found throughout human cultures.
We behold an epiphany of the first proto-deity in the African Middle Stone Age before returning to a mixture of neurology and ethnography to explore the links between trance, symbolism and vision, embodied expressions of the sacred, and human perception as a variety of complex neurological projections in a speculative model which encompasses both visionary experience and pre-modern conceptions of the cosmos.
Quantum and noumenal considerations are exemplified as effecting a destruction of any literally-conceived hidden world, before arriving at the first of several explorations of neurology as the foundation for visionary experience and consciousness. Despite such rational musings, we remind ourselves to maintain a lively sense of the sacred (in perception if not in literally-conceived reality) before engaging upon a lengthy Darwinist excursion into the complex origins of symbolic behaviour in human beings.
Here, the notion of the symbol is examined in several lights, most notably primate ethology and signal theory, before visionary theories of language are interrogated and rejected, whereupon we move to the heart of the essay in narrating the profound role that menstruation has played in the emergence of collective behaviours, trust, ritual, art and symbolic culture in cognitively-modern human beings. Remarkably this leftfield and multidisciplinary theory leads to the natural emergence of all fundamentally human traits, including a sense of the sacred and the otherworldly, using only the strict Darwinian principles of selective pressures and adaptive advantages to make unexpected but surprisingly appropriate connections between disparate elements found throughout human cultures.
We behold an epiphany of the first proto-deity in the African Middle Stone Age before returning to a mixture of neurology and ethnography to explore the links between trance, symbolism and vision, embodied expressions of the sacred, and human perception as a variety of complex neurological projections in a speculative model which encompasses both visionary experience and pre-modern conceptions of the cosmos.
***
At length, all of these disparate visionary, neurological and Darwinian views are brought together to challenge some of the contemporary antagonisms and elitisms present in Western culture, and by so doing, seek to surpass them in creating a wholly new approach to experiencing the sacred, not as liturgy, as ritual or as belief, but as visionary play unhinged from belief or dogma, instead anchored to the deeply-seated human needs to act as the mythical protagonists in our own lives and to found our existence upon something beyond the particular or perceptually-evident.
It seems strange to me, as an artist and as one whose primary passion in life is mythology and the glorious psychological vistas that that field of study liberates, to largely avoid the complexities of those fields and instead be so preoccupied with the nature of visionary experience, which is the ultimate question this essay seeks to answer. But it may be considered that everything that proceeds in the present piece of writing partakes, to a certain extent, of a mythical and creative character, and although my intent here is quite serious, the sacred and playful spirits of μυθος, 'myth' and τεχνη, 'art', can be considered as ever-present, implied within every page of the text.
Thus I attempt here a fusion, of contemporary science and of visionary experience that remains, I hope, authentic to both fields whilst at times becoming speculative and irrational without being pseudo-scientific. A difficult task indeed! I seek then to answer a question that can perhaps only be asked in this time period: how do we find the visionary and the sacred in a godless cosmos, or can we reject our mythical heritage and remain fully (by which I mean: archaically, cognitively-symbolically and modernly) human?
It seems strange to me, as an artist and as one whose primary passion in life is mythology and the glorious psychological vistas that that field of study liberates, to largely avoid the complexities of those fields and instead be so preoccupied with the nature of visionary experience, which is the ultimate question this essay seeks to answer. But it may be considered that everything that proceeds in the present piece of writing partakes, to a certain extent, of a mythical and creative character, and although my intent here is quite serious, the sacred and playful spirits of μυθος, 'myth' and τεχνη, 'art', can be considered as ever-present, implied within every page of the text.
Thus I attempt here a fusion, of contemporary science and of visionary experience that remains, I hope, authentic to both fields whilst at times becoming speculative and irrational without being pseudo-scientific. A difficult task indeed! I seek then to answer a question that can perhaps only be asked in this time period: how do we find the visionary and the sacred in a godless cosmos, or can we reject our mythical heritage and remain fully (by which I mean: archaically, cognitively-symbolically and modernly) human?
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