Heaven is in Your Mind
HEAVEN IS IN YOUR MIND
In the Circe of Gelli, Ulysses tries to persuade men who have been transformed into animals to wish to become men again. Only one could be persuaded – the elephant, king of the beasts. All the others refused. Tillyard uses this story to illustrate the Great Chain of Being. My heretical take on it is that – freed from the burden of consciousness – Ulysses’ men had the horse sense not to take it up again.
The dawn of consciousness was an awakening, but an awakening is as much a loss as a gain. Bicameral man clung to his dreams and his gods for a thousand years. Why? Because consciousness sucks. Everywhere on earth it was regarded as Paradise Lost. Poetry, painting, music, and religion are how we express our longing (Sehnsucht).
The modern mind still draws nourishment from the remains of the old mind set, for too much consciousness is intolerable. It trips us up. It turns inward on itself – becomes a narrative that is relentless, inescapable, and supreme.
In the summer of 1984, I took an English course at Hunter College titled “Women’s Search for Self.” Among the assigned novels was Good Morning, Midnight. I was only twenty-one years old, but I knew Sasha. I understood Sasha – her inner life, her internal monologues, her imaginary dialogues with the people in her life – sometimes even while she is talking to them. This is consciousness cranked up to eleven.
The problem of consciousness cannot be solved by regression. There is no going back. What is broken can never be unbroken. The road through spatialized time only ever leads forward, but it is a forked road.
The existential crisis that began with the breakdown of the bicameral mind gets worse as religion declines. The trend away from religion, spirituality, higher consciousness, or whatever you might call it – the destruction of the last vestiges of bicamerality in man – is a truly dangerous idea. What will become of us if we sever our connection to our psychic past? Must we all go mad as incurably self-conscious beings?
Without our intimations of a cosmic consciousness, existence would be unendurable. We would be artificial beings, man-made automata, instead of what we might be – transcendent beings at home in the cosmos, in touch with our bicameral roots, our dreams and our gods.
Heaven is not extinction of self. The self is intact, but without memory, which is not the same as extinction of self. Not oneness as non-self, but the self experiencing oneness. We seek this when we expand our minds – the idyll of the blue flower, the bliss of the lotus eater, the rapture of the mystic.
The Christians were right. Salvation is at hand. Jesus does save. The Hindus were also right. And the Jews, the Buddhists, the Spiritualists. The Atheists as well. All were right. Though none of them in exactly the sense they meant.