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Christian de Quincey |
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 Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps Toward a Deep Ecology of Mind by Christopher Bache (SUNY, 2000) review by Christian de Quincey  Millions of sane, intelligent people living today seem to live in a world that modern, scientific cosmology tells us just doesn’t exist. Either they are deluded, or what they have to say about the world calls into question the dominant cosmological myth. Judging by a deluge of media reports and a growing body of respectable scientific literature, a great many people are having experiences that don’t fit into our civilizations dominant cosmological map. You may be one of them: someone who has experienced, for example, powerful, even precognitive, dreams; remarkable synchronicities; undeniable psychic events; or convincing mystical experiences. But, according our cultures cosmology, none of these experiences is supposed to be possible. In this book, transpersonal psychologist Chris Bache opens up a different way of approaching this conundrum by exploring the spectrum of our consciousness and what it implies for a much wider and comprehensive cosmology. The personal and social consequences of such an expanded worldview are profound. Cosmology orients us in the universe. It tells us where we came from, where we are, and where we are going. Implicitly or explicitly, it defines what is possible for us as human beings, and thus it channels, or limits, our highest ambitions. Modern Western culture lives entirely within the confines of what Bache identifies as daytime consciousness (see excerpt below)that is, it takes into account only what we can perceive through our outer, physical, senses, and of those perceptions it takes seriously only those we can measure. These data are then organized according to the rules of logic and reason (mostly mathematical). Nighttime consciousness what we can learn about the world through, for example, dreams, intuition, psychic or mystical experiences, and other non-ordinary states plays no part in designing modern cosmology. As a result, we are moving into a kind of cultural dislocation, in which the official cosmology fails to map many of the experiences that matter most to us. Combining philosophical reflections with deep self-exploration to delve into the ancient mystery of death and rebirth, Bache emphasizes collective rather than individual transformation. Drawing on 20 years of experience working with non-ordinary states, he argues that when the deep psyche is hyper-stimulated using powerful psychedelic techniques, the healing that results sometimes extends beyond the individual to the collective unconscious of humanity itself. Bache presents one of the most persuasive accounts--based on many years of personal spiritual exploration and incisive scholarly work--of why our culture needs to take seriously the spectrum of non-ordinary states of consciousness experienced by so many people. Imagine . . . . . . for a moment a civilization that denied itself the vision of the night sky, a society where by custom no one dared leave their homes after sundown. Trapped within the sun-drenched world, they would have intimate knowledge of the things that lie near at hand but be unaware of distant realities. Without knowledge of the night sky, they would have a deeply incomplete understanding of the larger cosmos within which they lived. They would not be able to answer the question, Where did we come from? with any accuracy. Cut off from the vision of the stars, they would be restricted to the relative immediacy of here and now, stranded in near-time and near-space. They would never discover our celestial lineage, never place our solar system in the Milky Way or the Milky Way in a cosmos almost too large to be imagined. We are this civilization, of course. Taken as a whole, Western thought has committed itself to a vision of reality that is based almost entirely on the daylight world of ordinary states of consciousness while systematically ignoring the knowledge that can be gained from the nighttime sky of non-ordinary states. As the anthropologist Michael Harner puts it, we are cogni-centric. Trapped within the horizon of the near-at-hand mind, our culture creates myths about the unreliability and irrelevance of non-ordinary states. Meanwhile, our social fragmentation continues to deepen, reflecting in part our inability to answer the most basic questions about meaning or value, because neither meaning nor value exist in mere sensation nor in the compounds of sensation. Similarly, we will not be able to explain where we came from or why our lives have the shape they do as long as we systematically avoid contact with the deeper dimensions of mind that contain the larger patterns that structure our existence. Though of enormous importance, the victories of the age of enlightenment were purchased at the terrible cost of systematically disparaging the depths of human experience and of prematurely dismissing our ability to penetrate these depths. In the modern university, being rational or logical includes the rider of not straying too far from sensate experience and its derivatives, and critical thinking is marked by its epistemological commitment to ordinary states of consciousness. Meanwhile, non-ordinary states are little explored or understood, and their relevance to basic questions being raised in epistemology, philosophy of mind, or even ethics is seldom acknowledged. But this is changing. As the twenty-first century opens, new evidence is challenging old assumptions in practically every department. Seldom have so many axioms been questioned on so many fronts at the same time. The historian of ideas can barely keep up with the revolutions brewing, and one of these revolutions, a major one I believe, centers on non-ordinary states of consciousness. |
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