Living in Connection

This book builds on Chris Clarke's earlier book Reality Through the Looking Glass and provides a rigorous account of what is entailed by a participatory world-view informed by quantum physics, consciousness studies and creation spirituality. It is also closely interwoven with Chris' own spiritual journey. The starting point of the book is his perception that we in the West live in a world of contradiction: 'our hearts respond to co-operation, connection, creativity; but we live and work in institutions filled with competition, isolation, control'. Although a new order is gradually emerging, there is still a great deal of confusion about, so this book outlines a path from fragmentation towards a coherent world-view with a new science and a new spirituality.

However, we have to start from a diagnosis of our current position. Here Chris makes it clear that he intends to combine not only the first and third person perspectives but also to stress the importance of the second person of relationship, the I-Thou dimension of Martin Buber. Chris calls this the perspective of inter-personal empathy. His understanding and explanation of the inheritance of classical physics is exemplary. He takes the reader through eight principles of the Newtonian world-view before introducing quantal thinking, including his observation that so-called complementarity implies mutual exclusion; he helpfully provides a 'fast-track synopsis' for the less technically-minded at this point (there is also a series of technical appendices). Here he also argues for decoherence and that consciousness has nothing to do with collapsing the wave-function. However, a profound level of interconnectedness arises from his analysis.

The next chapter takes us into the new science by showing us how it transcends the old: from determinism to indeterminism, from separate units to interconnection; from exact quantities to global patterns, from machine to organism, from observation to interaction, from control to participation, from competition to co-operation and from 'freedom is illusory' to creativity. Readers can appreciate that such a transformation has implications at many levels, which Chris then spells out in the rest of the book, beginning with an exposition of spirituality in terms of these same eight principles of the new science. It is here that he introduces a more personal account illustrated from episodes out of his own experience. Perhaps his most important notion is that of presence or being present as we are mutually 'entangled' with other beings in the universe (such as the tree on the book's cover). In the 'eternal now' one can become aware of the 'meaning of what is present'. The analogy of the web of life implies a spirituality of interconnection where 'each of my actions produces infinite effects' and where activity and passivity (receptivity) are the same.

The next chapter - 'The double breath of love' - enlarges the context of creativity and the 'entangled self'. In this sense, the subject is not so much a thing as a process, and does not reside in the skull, 'but has to do with the network of connectivity spanning the universe of which my body is a part'. There is an interesting connection here with Rupert Sheldrake's 'extended mind', but the idea is worked out very differently and does not explicitly involve telepathy. Chris speaks of the 'self extended to include the world' while Rupert refers to mind rather than self, but his findings require a similar connective picture. Chris develops the idea of 'playful self-transcendence' as a means of establishing our connectivity with a larger context. His philosophy of love distinguishes the longing for union from the desire to possess or dominate so that love is defined as 'a self-transcendence into the love of self of a greater whole'. The tendency of 'selving' means becoming more fully integral (hints of Wilber here) so that we come to appreciate that 'we are contained and participate in the love-longing for wholeness of successive realms of nature, from self to cosmos'. And this real connectivity is no mere exchange of signals but rather a sharing of being. The 'double breath of love' embodies itself inwards ('my own consciousness is a part of this pouring-inward of the world into all living beings' - also kenosis or self-emptying for the Divine) as well as transcending itself outwards. There is an echo of the macrocosm-microcosm pattern, but this is also understood within an evolutionary process whereby the world is embodied in different organisms. As Chris puts it, there is an interplay of extension (self-transcendence) and embodiment (kenosis). Chris now expands his vision of a participatory world where the new science and the new spirituality are intertwined, drawing on both phenomenology and the histories interpretation of quantum theory. The last two chapters consider the evolution of ethics and the 'One'. As he points out, it is hard to derive an ethic from a scientific picture that by definition excludes the personal, but there are good grounds for an ethical framework emerging from a science of connectivity, as I have argued myself in Whole in One. Chris discusses Kohlberg's stages of moral development in terms of a progressive expansion of empathy and roots his ethic in being itself, quoting Henryk Skolimowski's dictum that participation requires empathy implies responsibility.

Applied to the planetary situation, it is easy to see how we have fallen short in this regard. Chris locates the basic problem in (endless) growth, coupled with taking from the earth without restoration. He illustrates his points with reference to climate change and genetic pollution, and criticises the very notions of stewardship and environmentalism as they imply the very separation of the human being from nature that he has been at pains to refute. The 'One', the ground of being, can be experienced by human beings, but can this One be equated with the traditional 'Creator God'? Chris thinks not, and spells out his reasons with great cogency. Our ideas about creation have been radically transformed by modern cosmology in any event. Chris insists - rightly in my view - on the centrality of love in his vision, the mystery being that of our separation from the whole web of the universe and hence from the One. If, as he does, he equates the One with the whole universe, it is important to remind oneself that this includes consciousness and leads to a theology of panentheism - where the beloved is 'both self and other-than-self'. This book presents a profound visionary synthesis and deserves careful study by those seriously engaged in the dialogue between science and spirituality, challenging as it does some of our most embedded patterns of thought.