The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation. Chapter 8: Metanoia, Part Two
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“Metanoia” is an ancient Greek word that translates as “beyond/after mind/intellect”. In modern psychology it refers to a mental breakdown that is followed by a positive psychological rebuilding. In Christian theology it came to mean “conversion”, in the sense of a fundamental transformation of one’s vision of the world and oneself. William James used the term to refer to a fundamental and stable change in an individual’s worldview. Jung developed this usage to mean a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being remade in a more adaptive form – a form of self healing associated with psychotic breakdown. He believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as an existential crisis that might be an attempt at self-reparation.
In the opening chapter of this book I described my own psychological breakdown as a result of an unconditional acceptance that the civilisation I was part of was going to collapse. It was a life-altering experience, but not one that could be accurately described as metanoia on its own, for it was only the beginning of that process. The world, along with my personal “religious” commitment to squarely face reality, however inconvenient that might be, had led me to a choice between suicide and nihilism, and I had chosen nihilism. Apart from that, not much had changed. I certainly wasn’t healed, and I had no reason to rebuild anything more than what I needed to live from one day to the next. It felt more like an important part of me had died. I had been forced to accept that the world I lived in was insane, and nothing could be done to fix it. I did still have my commitment to the truth and my deep connection with the beleaguered natural world, but that wasn’t enough to build a life around.
At the time I would have resisted any idea that my self-invented “religion” was spiritual in any way. When describing it as religion it is always in scare quotes – this personal code that I’d decided upon was far too simple to qualify as religious, wasn’t based on any religion (I was unaware of theosophy) and my motivation for adopting it wasn’t consciously tied to morality.I used the word “religion” only because I lacked a better term.The main purpose of my hardline approach to realism, rationalism and truth was the need for a stable foundation for my own thought processes. I had a religion-shaped hole in my life, but no path towards any sort of religion was open to me. I was a materialist, I had a strongly negative opinion of religion in general and no reason to use the word 'spiritual'.
“Nihilism” means belief in nothing. Strictly speaking, the belief that materialism is true is not a belief in nothing – it is a metaphysical belief which is often held very strongly. However, that is not how I saw it at the time, either before my breakdown or in the years that followed. I did not understand the relationship between science and metaphysics. For me “metaphysics” and “spirituality” were both just subcategories of woo. Materialism was a default position for me: the absence of woo. And if you combine that with having totally given up hope for both your own future, and that of the society you live in, it amounts to nihilism. I considered the prevalence of religion and other forms of woo to be a major component of the complex of problems that had forced me to give up on the human world.
In fact my twenties weren’t so bad. I had fallen in love with a person who was just right for me at that time. We had a lot of fun living a life that revolved around making and enjoying music. But something was wrong. Underneath those positives I was still resigned to the conclusion that civilisation was heading somewhere very bad and so was my own life – I was merely trying to find pleasant ways to fill my days until everything started to go horribly wrong, at which point I knew suicide was always there as an option. This was just a matter of fact for me – the emotional connotations of suicide were gone. It was just there as a way out.
This is no way to live your life. It is a way of existing, but it offers you no means of navigating the future and eventually I couldn’t keep it going. My girlfriend wanted to plan for the future, but how could I commit to any sort of “normal life” when my views about the world were so overwhelmingly negative? How could I even consider having children, for example? How could I make any long-term commitments at all? It was a non-starter, and that ultimately led to the breakdown of that relationship and another descent deep into depression. So I left London and ran away to Brighton – a place for people who don’t fit in anywhere else. I doubled down on hedonistic nihilism and put another band together.
This was the early days of the internet, and I was involved with the fore-runners of today’s social media, starting with Usenet – the first sort of rolling noticeboard, which was moderated by nobody. Then somebody invented the bulletin board and social media as we understand it today began to emerge. I had two main areas of interest. The first was climate change and all the other scientific aspects of ecological breakdown and collapse, and the second was atheism/skepticism. Richard Dawkins was still an inspirational figure for me. I spent a lot of time on those early forums – starting with a Christian site called Apologetics.org and the Secular Web (the Internet Infidels), where I was proud to become their first science and skepticism moderator. I also posted on James Randi’s educational forum (Randi was a stage magician, uber-skeptic and enemy of all things woo), and a bit later on another forum called Rational Skepticism. This gave me some sort of purpose – it was a place to debunk anti-scientific nonsense of all varieties (but for me especially climate change denial) and try to help believers of woo to see the error of their ways. So what changed? I had spent many years mulling over certain mysteries. How can something come from nothing? How can we make sense of the weirdness of quantum theory? Why is the universe so mathematical? What makes music so special? What is consciousness? Why haven’t we found signs of alien life in the cosmos? More recently I had begun to wonder whether the universe only exists so there can be life – that life is something very special and not just a meaningless cosmic accident.
I had no answers to these questions, and no expectation that I would ever find any. They lurked at the edges of my worldview, and I could see nothing beyond them. My consumption of psychoactive drugs may well have predisposed me to pondering these questions. Many years earlier, during my first magic mushroom trip, I had come to the conclusion that the cosmos is a giant question in the process of being asked, and that I was on the cusp of finding the answer, and if I found it then the everything would instantaneously cease to exist. I also became absolutely certain that time isn’t real – or that it had stopped – something I found absolutely hilarious (and I assumed at the time that everybody else was in on the joke). But when I came back down to Earth nothing had changed; none of these experiences had any noticeable impact on my materialism or my naturalism, and I was no closer to finding answers to my questions.
Then two things happened around the same time, one involving the origins of Christianity, and the other involving cosmology. I was rooting around in the online library of the Secular Web in search of material to help 'save' a young Christian I had met who was struggling with the belief that she might end up being sent to hell if she continued to hang around with me and my not very Christian friends. I never did succeed in this quest, but I did find an article that opened up a completely new interest in my own life. The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ was written by a mysterious individual who called herself “Achyra S.” (her website was called “TruthBeKnown”). Her central claim was that the narrative story in the gospels could not possibly be historically true because its key elements predated Christianity by several centuries – that the story of a God-man with 12 disciples who performs miracles, then dies and is resurrected, was not a Christian invention at all, but an adaptation of earlier forms of religion. I did not unquestioningly believe everything she had written, but she convinced me to go looking for more credible sources, and this eventually led me to all sorts of other information I had previously had no idea was out there. Mainstream Christianity’s understanding of its own early history is quite extra-ordinarily bad, and this not accidental. [Footnote: I did consider including a chapter on this subject, but it is too tangential. For anybody interested in what can reasonably be deduced from the surviving evidence, rather than the mythology that the overwhelming majority of Christians wrongly believe to be historical fact, I recommend the work of John D. Crossan and Burton L. Mack.]
The other thing was a breakthrough in my personal understanding of what many regard to be the most important philosophical question of them all: how can something come from nothing? How is it possible foranything to exist? Why isn’t there just nothing? I was already familiar with the idea of the quantum vacuum, where pairs of particles and anti-particles are continually popping into existence out of empty space, only to disappear again almost immediately (unless one of them happens to fall into a black hole...). Then I found an article speculating that the entire cosmos sort of “adds up to nothing” because all of the matter and energy exactly cancels out all of the gravitational potential energy of everything in the universe being attracted to everything else. The ultimate free lunch, if you like. This points to an intuitive answer to the big question – the only way something can come from nothing is the same way that one and minus one “come from nothing”: 0 = 1 + -1. I found another website proposing a new sort of number system, where zero is replaced by infinity. This meant all the other numbers can “come from” zero – which leads directly to mathematical Platonism – the idea that the integers and other mathematical structures have a real existence at the deepest level of reality. This in turn led to progress on my question about music. If mathematics is somehow fundamental to existence, and not just a useful human invention, then the beauty of music could be the result of our intuitive understanding of natural mathematical beauty embodied in the frequencies of sounds.
I tried explaining my insights to my friends. Nobody could understand my excitement, but two of them pointed me in important directions. One informed me that Plato had written about the number thing in the 5th century BC, that Pythagoras had figured it out even earlier, and that I ought to read an introduction to philosophy called Sophie’s World (by Jostein Gaarder, 1991). The turning point came one evening when I was ranting to another friend about the above equation: “Zero equals one plus minus one! Can’t you see? It’s the only sensible answer to that question! There can be no more elegant an explanation of how something can come from nothing!” My friend looked at me and said “Geoff, you’re talking about Yin and Yang”.
I was stopped in my tracks, and forced to think. All I knew about Yin and Yang was that it was a popular symbol with purveyors of certain sorts of woo. I knew very little about Eastern religions in general, and nothing at all about Taoism. It was a religion. Not one that had bothered me much in the past, but still a religion and therefore woo. However, it was impossible for me to deny that the Yin-Yang symbol (which is actually a diagram representing a process) is a perfect visual representation of what I had been ranting about. In fact, the visual representation is an improvement on my crude mathematical version, because of the sense of dynamic motion and interdependence that it conveys. Not Cartesian Dualism but two dynamically evolving aspects of an undivided whole.
My friend showed me his copy of the Tao Te Ching, the second verse of which is:
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
I had no idea what the second half means, but the first could not be clearer. There was the equation again, this time in words. Now I had many questions. My thinking was based on science and reason. How had it been possible for a Chinese person who had done no scientific experiments to come to the same conclusion in 570BC? What else did that person know? Did they have anything to say about the consciousness question (which was looming ever larger in my mind)?
When I asked my friend about that he replied that “consciousness is everywhere, all around us”, and he waved his arms about to show me where it was. “No!” I responded automatically. “That cannot be so. Consciousness is brain activity – we know that. I am sure of that.” My materialism with respect to mind was still intact, though by that point it was beginning to fray at the edges. Then another friend loaned me the book that really did prise open my closed mind, but only after it had thoroughly pissed me off. The book is called Prometheus Rising (1983), written by somebody I’d never heard of called Robert Anton Wilson. In it he describes his own version of Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness, which was also new to me, regardless of my familiarity with psychedelic drug culture. Circuit one he calls the “oral biosurvival circuit”, and this he tells us appeared with the first multicellular life forms. Circuit two is the “anal emotional territorial circuit”, which appeared during the Cambrian Explosion. Circuit three is the “time-binding semantic circuit”. This was my circuit – the circuit that does the rational thinking. Since I considered this the highest form of cognition, I was wondering what on Earth all the other circuits were supposed to be for. I was over-dependent on my brain’s left hemisphere, according to Wilson, and paying insufficient attention to the right. I was a third circuit rationalist robot. Circuit four didn’t seem too theoretically problematic – the “moral socio-sexual circuit” was maybe not my strongest, and I would never have placed it higher than circuit three, but that was a quibble. It was at circuit five that everything started to go horribly wrong – “The holistic neurosomatic circuit”. This part of Prometheus Rising begins with a badly copied illustration of a card from Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck, and from that point onwards the book is a combination of serious woo and speculation about the future, most of which has turned out to be wrong – Wilson was hopelessly optimistic. One concept that keeps cropping up is synchronicity. The higher up the circuits you go, according to Wilson, the more synchronicity starts to show itself. That was enough for me. I hurled the book across my bedroom and it lay in a corner, in a pile of junk, for several weeks. I can date this to January 26th 2002 , because I kept the copy of that week’s New Scientist magazine, which landed on my doormat the next day. On the cover is a large digitised zero, with a surgical implement removing pieces of it, and the headline Smaller and Smaller: Curious Things Happen When You Slice Up Nothing.
Shortly after that I escaped from materialism, thanks in part to the writings of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers, and then curious things started happening. I kept experiencing weird coincidences, most of which were connected to my ongoing investigation into the nature of reality. At first I ignored this, because I still had no place in my map of reality to put it, but the more I ignored it, the more glaringly obvious the synchronicities became. Ignoring them seemed to intensify them, and they were leading me in a direction I did not want to go. This was both fascinating and frightening, and I think it was only because of my residual nihilism that fear did not take over. If you’ve already given up on your own future, then even experiences that threaten your basic understanding of reality aren’t that frightening. I was already fully prepared to use suicide as an emergency escape route, so what was the worst that could happen to me? Being sent to hell? Eventually I picked Wilson’s book up again and this time I finished it. The whole system is a Whole System. I will not go into the details of what happened next, though I was posting about it online at the time. I was already known as a vocal skeptic, and now I was telling other people in the skeptical community about an ever-increasing intensity of serious woo happening to me. You can imagine the response.
Then it got even weirder. Richard Dawkins set up his own forum, on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website. Or rather, his left-hand man Josh Timonen set it up; Dawkins himself almost never posted on that board. Again I was involved from the start, though by this point I had switched sides. I was an ex-materialist who now believed synchronicity was real, based on direct personal experience. However, unlike most believers in woo I had a deep and comprehensive understanding of the materialistic worldview I had been evangelising for the previous 20 years, and that made me difficult to debate. Josh had picked a couple of likely candidates as moderators, but they did not fare well in their encounters with me, and they used their power to attempt to silence me. Seeing this happen, Josh decided to relieve them of their moderator status and asked me if I would like to take over from him as the site administrator, because he thought I had shown the deepest understanding of both sides of the argument. I agreed, Josh made me the administrator, and then he departed, never to be seen again. I received no further instructions and no oversight from above after that – I had total control of that forum and there was no active higher authority for any of the users to appeal to. The only hard evidence I can provide to support any of this story is a well-worn RDF T-shirt sent to me as a thank-you for my services, but I am guessing all of the online stuff is filed away in a backup somewhere. My username was usually UndercoverElephant (a cartoon character from 1977).
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. A freshly minted arch-critic of Dawkinsian materialistic scientism had been left in sole charge of Richard Dawkins’ new online forum, and Dawkins himself had no idea this had happened. This generated much consternation and conflict. For the more passionate members it was a matter of principle: they were outraged that a wooist was in charge, and there were plots and provocations and attempts at mutinies, etc... After a year or so of trying to keep the quality of the debate high, and keep a lid on the simmering discontent, I decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and left. The trolls then took over, and when Dawkins eventually intervened in an attempt to reduce the level of toxicity they started attacking him too, at which point he pulled the plug and the RDF forum was no more. Footnote:Richard Dawkins takes on the net, BBC – Will & Testament, 26 February 2010.
By this point I had left my career as a software engineer and embarked on a degree in philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Sussex. I did this in order to try to make sense of what had happened to me, and find a belief system capable of incorporating all of it. I was no longer a nihilist. I didn’t know what I was.