From Atlantis to the Sphinx (47 page)

Such books are an example of what Gurdjieff calls ‘the third force’. In Luther’s day, two forces were in equilibrium—the power of the Roman Church, and the dissatisfaction of northern Europeans like Frederick the Wise of Saxony. And they might have remained in equilibrium until the end of the century, since the Emperor of Germany was Charles V, the most powerful man in Europe. But Luther nailed a paper with his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg, then had them printed. Everyone in Germany read it, or had it read to them, and before the Pope could stop it, the Reformation was under way. The third force had entered like a well-aimed kick.

I am arguing that evolution cannot be understood without this concept of the third force. One of Gurdjieff’s best illustrations was of someone who wishes to change, to achieve greater self-knowledge, and in whom the forces of laziness act as a counterbalance. In this case, the breakthrough can occur through
knowledge
—a perception of
how
it can be achieved, which brings a new drive and optimism.

In the same way, the neo-Darwinian view of evolution is that man evolved through the struggle against nature—two forces in opposition.

I am suggesting that the real stimulus to evolution was knowledge, man’s discovery that he could solve problems by the use of his brain. The brain explosion must have been due to the intervention of a ‘third force’—possibly an exploding meteor, but more probably the development of language, of religion, and of sexual attitudes. Again, I believe that it was Cro-Magnon man’s discovery of hunting magic that acted as a ‘third force’ that made his attitude towards his life and his environment more aggressive and purposeful.

In a highly original book called
The Chalice and the Blade
(1987), Riane Eisler advances her own view of what has gone wrong with civilisation. Proposing a theory of ‘Cultural Transformation’, she argues that there are two basic models of society, the ‘partnership model’ and the ‘dominator model’. The Amahuaca and Hopi Indians would be examples of what she means by the partnership model. A modern business corporation would be an example of the dominator model, with its ruthlessness and competition.

She believes that Palaeolithic and Neolithic culture were partnership cultures, but that ‘following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift’. In this respect, her theory bears an obvious resemblance to that of Julian Jaynes. The chief difference is that she believes that the ‘disruption’ started as early as 5000 BC, when nomads she calls the Kurgan people, who had been living in the ‘harsh, unwanted, colder, sparser territories on the edges of the earth’ began to invade the territories of the agricultural civilisations that spread out along the lakes and fertile river valleys.

She calls such civilisations ‘partnership’ cultures because she believes that men and women lived on equal terms, and that the worship of the Earth Mother was the most widespread form of religion—she cites an impressive amount of archaeological evidence to suggest that early cultures were oriented to the Mother Goddess—Graves’s White Goddess. Such cultures survived for thousands of years, but eventually succumbed to the invading nomads (whom she identifies with Aryans). Crete was one of the last to fall to these invaders, and its destruction, about 3000 years ago, marks the end of an era. Here again, the argument is very close to Jaynes.

The Kurgans brought a ‘dominator’ culture, ‘a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm.’ And this, she declares, has lasted until our own time. Now, she argues, mankind stands at an evolutionary crossroads; what is needed, if we are to survive, is a return to the partnership culture of the past.

One authority on evolution, Ashley Montague, described
The Chalice and the Blade
as ‘the most important book since Darwin’s
Origin of Species
’. Predictably, others have dismissed it as a piece of feminist propaganda. Yet it can be seen that her basic argument is very close to the one that has been outlined in the last three chapters. She also seems to accept that one of the reasons that man became truly human was some kind of sexual revolution in which woman assumed new importance—she cites André Leroi-Gourhan, director of the Sorbonne Centre for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Studies, to the effect that ‘Palaeolithic art reflects the importance our early forebears attached to their observation there are two sexes’, a conclusion ‘based on analysis of thousands of paintings and objects in some sixty excavated Palaeolithic caves.’ In other words, Palaeolithic man had begun to see woman as a kind of goddess.

Riane Eisler’s argument is certainly highly persuasive. Yet her final chapter, ‘Breakthrough in Evolution: Towards a Partnership Future’, which should be the most important in the book, is in fact the least convincing. She paints an appealing picture of a future ‘partnership world’ in which there will be no more war, no more male domination, and in which there will be a steady decrease in such problems as mental illness, suicide, divorce, wife-battering, vandalism, murder and international terrorism. But she seems to feel that all this will come about through goodwill and understanding. Gurdjieff would have pointed out that goodwill and understanding can change nothing. In a world in which the forces are in equilibrium—in this case, dominator culture versus partnership culture—change can only be brought about by a ‘third force’.

But
what
force?

In his
Experiment in Autobiography
(1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been ‘up against it’. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays, you can say to a man: ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but—
what do you do
?’ His
real
interest may be in something else—art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.

He goes on to compare mankind to the earliest amphibians, who dragged themselves out of prehistoric seas, because they wanted to become land animals. But they only have fins instead of legs, and they find the land exhausting, and long for the sustaining medium of the sea. Man is not yet a true creature of the mind; he has fins instead of legs. After a short walk in the world of the mind, he is exhausted. There is a sense in which
we are not yet human
.

Gurdjieff would have put it more harshly; he would have said that we think we have free will, but we have almost none. At the beginning of the First World War, he and Ouspensky saw a lorry loaded up with crutches heading for the battle front—crutches for men whose legs
had not yet been blown off.
Yet there was no way of preventing those legs from being blown off. This is the objection that Gurdjieff would raise to Riane Eisler’s vision of a ‘partnership society’. Human nature cannot be changed by wishful thinking.

On the other hand, when we look at this problem from the perspective of human evolution, some interesting insights emerge.

Most animals seem to possess no self-awareness, in the sense of being able to reflect on themselves. We cannot imagine a dog asking: ‘Who am I?’ But from the moment man began to perform any kind of religious rite—carving sun discs, ritual cannibalism, burying the dead with funeral observances—he had achieved a new level of self-awareness; he was now truly human.

Forty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon society may have been more rich and complex than we can imagine, with observation of the heavens, worship of the moon goddess, hunting magic (possibly with a priestess as shaman) and a life whose rhythms were those of nature. This ‘partnership society’ reached its peak in ancient Egypt, where Isis and Osiris shared the throne of the gods, and ended some time during the past 3500 years.

But this ‘Fall’, as we have seen, was not without its advantages. As an individual, isolated in left-brain consciousness, man began to use his mind in a new way. It was Pythagoras who invented the world ‘philosophy’—love of wisdom: that is, love of knowledge for its own sake, not for any practical purpose that it might serve. And Plato describes how Socrates, preoccupied with some philosophical problem, stood in the same spot for a whole day and night.

This story is undoubtedly an exaggeration. As Wells points out, man is not
quite
that much a creature of the mind.

Yet he continued to develop this odd faculty of living inside his own head. The ancient Greeks were perfectly happy to sit on a cold stone seat watching an actor wearing a mask and pretending to be Oedipus. And just over 2000 years later, audiences were just as happy to stand in the Mermaid Theatre, watching an actor on a bare stage claiming to be Tamburlaine the Great.

Less than two centuries after this, a printer named Samuel Richardson invented a new form of entertainment—the novel. Of course, it could be said that the novel was as old as Homer. But until 1740, it had been a kind of fairy-tale. Richardson turned it into soap opera;
Pamela
was about the girl next door. Suddenly, everyone was reading novels—and writing them. The novel was a magic carpet that could transport readers out of their own lives—and the problems of being ‘up against it’—and into the lives of other people.

The chief development in man in the past few centuries has been a development
of imagination.

But at this point we become aware of a new problem. This escape from the real world was so intoxicating that many people lost all sense of reality. Romantic poets—and painters and musicians—found the world of fantasy so greatly preferable to the harsh realities of life that they began committing suicide, or dying of drugs or alcohol, in alarming numbers. The typical artist of the nineteenth century was an ‘Outsider’, who felt miserable and alienated. De L’Isle Adam’s Axel summed it up in the words: ‘As for living, our servants can do that for us.’

Two world wars, and a sense of global crisis, have helped to restore some realism. But it is still obvious that Wells was correct; our real problem is that we are still not creatures of the mind. The problem is not wickedness or male domination or scientific materialism; it is boredom. When faced with a challenge, we are magnificent. But when the problems are solved, and we have re-established peace and leisure, we tend to feel stifled and directionless.

Yet here is one of the most interesting observations about humankind. When we are faced with some appalling problem, we can
see
, perfectly clearly, how pleasant it would be if the problem went away, and life was back to normal. And if someone asked us: ‘But wouldn’t you find it boring?’, we would reply indignantly: ‘Of course not!’ And this is not self-deception. We can see how
easy
it would be to use the imagination—which has now become such a useful tool—to re-create our present state of anxiety and misery, and relax into an immense sense of gratitude that it has gone away.

And in fact, when a major problem vanishes, we
do
experience an immense gratitude—for a few hours. Then we relapse into our usual state of ‘taking for granted’.

The truth is that although the development of human imagination in the past three centuries has been extraordinary, it is still not powerful enough to make us immensely grateful for all the miseries and difficulties we are
not
experiencing.

Yet as we look at the matter closely, it becomes obvious that this development of the imagination
is
the third force that can alter the course of human evolution. Our technological civilisation has created more freedom than man has experienced in his whole history. Yet he is not
aware
that he is free. He feels trapped, bored and restless.

Let me cite some examples of the third force creating a sense of freedom.

In
Swann's Way
, Marcel Proust describes how, feeling tired and depressed, he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea, and experienced a sudden sense of overwhelming delight. ‘I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.’ Then he realised that the taste had reminded him of his childhood, when an aunt gave him a taste of her cake dipped in herb tea. The taste
made his childhood real again
, and brought the sudden sense of ecstasy and freedom.

As a bored and depressed teenager, Graham Greene took a revolver on to the common and played Russian roulette. When there was just a click on an empty chamber, he felt an overwhelming sense of delight and relief, and the recognition that life is infinitely rich and exciting.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase ‘peak experience’ to describe such moments. He tells of a peak experience described to him by a young married woman. She was watching her husband and children eating breakfast, feeling cheerful and relaxed, but preoccupied with the next thing she had to do. Suddenly, a beam of sunlight came in through the window, and she thought: ‘Aren’t I
lucky
!’ and plunged into the peak experience.

In a book called
Seeing the Invisible
, a collection of ‘transcendent’ experiences, a sixteen-year-old girl describes how, approaching a wood on a summer evening, time stood still for a moment. ‘Everywhere, surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this
light
was everywhere...’ She comments: ‘I only saw it once, but I know in my heart it is still there.’

In the first three cases—Proust, Greene and the young married women—we know what ‘triggered’ the experience; in the fourth case, we have no idea. There are obviously occasions when the peak experience ‘just happens’.

But Maslow noted an extremely interesting thing. When he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to recall peak experiences that they had had in the past, then forgotten. For example, a youth who was working his way through college by playing drums in a jazz band recalled how, at about two in the morning, he suddenly began to drum so perfectly that he ‘couldn’t do a thing wrong’, and went into the peak experience.