Other balances are necessary in order for us to be able to think freely, to weave thoughts around that central sense of self. We have to be able to perceive the outside world through the senses, but it is equally important for us not to be overwhelmed by sensations which could otherwise occupy all our mental space. Then we could neither reflect nor imagine. That this balance holds is as extraordinary in its way as — for example — the fact that our planet is neither too far from, nor too close to, the sun.
We also have the ability to move our point of consciousness around our interior life — like a cursor on a computer screen. As a result of this, we have the freedom to choose what to think about. If we did not have the right balance of attachment and detachment from our interior impulses as well as from our perceptions of the outside world, then at this very moment you would have no freedom to choose to take your attention away from the page you are looking at now and no freedom to think about anything else.
And so, crucially, if the most fundamental conditions of human consciousness were not characterized by this set of exceptionally fine balances, it would not be possible for us to exercise free thought or free will.
When it comes to the very highest points of human experience, what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow usefully called ‘peak experiences’, even finer balances are necessary. For example, we may be required to make decisions at the great turning points of our lives. Again, it is the common, if not universal human experience, that if we try to work out what is the right thing to do with our lives using all our intelligence, if we work at it with a good and whole heart, if we exercise patience and humility, we can — just — discern the right thing to do. And once we have made the right decision, the chosen course of action will probably require all the willpower we are capable of, perhaps for just as long as we are able to bear it, if we are to complete it successfully. This is right at the core of what it means to experience life as a human being.
There is no inevitability about our consciousness having the structure that makes possible these freedoms, these opportunities to choose to do the right thing, to grow and develop into good, perhaps even heroic people — unless you believe in Providence, that is to say unless you believe that it was meant to be.
Human consciousness is therefore a sort of miracle. If today we tend to overlook this, the ancients were stirred by the wonder of it. As we are about to see, their intellectual leaders tracked subtle changes in human consciousness with as much diligence as modern scientists track changes in the physical environment. Their account of history — with its mythical and supernatural happenings — was an account of how human consciousness evolved.
Modern science tries to enforce a narrow, reductive view of our consciousness. It tries to convince us of the unreality of elements, even quite persistent elements in experience, that it cannot explain. These include the shadowy power of prayer, premonitions, the feeling of being stared at, the evidence for mind-reading, out-of-body-experiences, meaningful coincidences and other things swept under the carpet by modern science.
And much, much more importantly, science in this reductive mood denies the universal human experience that life has a meaning. Some scientists even deny that the question of whether or not life has meaning is worth asking.
We will see in the course of this history that many of the most intelligent people who have ever lived have become devotees of esoteric philosophy. I believe it may even be the case that every intelligent person has tried to find out about it at some time.
It is a natural human impulse to wonder if life has a meaning, and esoteric philosophy represents the richest, deepest, most concentrated body of thought on this subject. Before we embark on our narrative, therefore, it is vital that we apply one more sharp philosophical distinction to the softer edge of modern scientific thought.
SOMETIMES THINGS GO WRONG, AND LIFE seems pointless. But then at other times our lives do seem to have meaning. For example, life sometimes seems to have taken a wrong turn — we fail an exam, lose a job or a love affair ends — but then we find our true métier or true love as a result of this seeming wrong turn. Or it happens that someone decides against boarding a plane, which then crashes. If something like this happens, we may feel as if ‘someone up there’ is looking after us, that our footsteps have been guided. We may have a heightened sense of the precariousness of life, how easily things could have turned out differently had it not been for an almost imperceptible, perhaps otherworldy nudge.
Similarly with the down-to-earth, science-oriented part of ourselves we may see a coincidence as a chance coming together of related events, but sometimes deep down we suspect that a coincidence is not a matter of chance at all. In coincidences we sometimes feel we catch a hint, albeit an elusive one, of a deep pattern of meaning hidden behind the muddle of everyday experience.
And sometimes people find that just when all hope seems lost, happiness is discovered the other side of despair, or that inside hatred hides the growing germ of love. For reasons we’ll look at later, questions of happiness are these days closely connected with notions of sexual love, so that it is often the experience of falling in love that gives us the sense that ‘this was MEANT to be’.
RECENTLY LEADING SCIENTISTS HAVE been widely quoted as boasting that science is on the brink of discovering the explanation for — or the meaning of — everything in life and the universe. This is usually in relation to ‘string theory’, a theory, they say, shortly to be formulated, of all the forces of nature, which will combine the laws of gravity with the physics of the quantum world. We will then be able to relate the reasonable laws that govern objects we can sense with the very different behaviour of phenomena in the sub-atomic realm. Once this has been formulated we will understand everything there is to be understood about the structure, origin and future of the cosmos. We will have accounted for everything there is, because, they say, there is nothing else.
Before we can learn the secrets of the initiates and begin to understand their strange beliefs about history it’s important to be clear about the distinction between ‘meaning’ as it is used in connection with questions about the meaning of life and ‘meaning’ as scientists use it.
A boy arranges to meet his girlfriend for a date, but she stands him up. He’s hurt and angry. He wants to understand the painful thing that’s happened to him. When he tracks her down, he interrogates her. His repeated question is WHY?
… because I missed my bus, she says,
… because I was late leaving work
… because I was distracted and didn’t notice the time
… because I’m unhappy about something.
And so he presses and presses until he gets what he’s after (sort of):
… because I don’t want to see you any more.
When we ask WHY, it can be taken in two ways: either as in the girl’s first, evasive answers, as meaning the same as HOW, that is to say requiring answers which give an account of a sequence of cause and effect, of atom knocking against atom; — or, alternatively, WHY can be taken in the way the boy wanted to be answered, which is a matter of trying to winkle out INTENTION.