The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind and Meaning in a Technological Age

The role of consciousness has never been more fiercely debated than it is today. It is as if some new organ has recently been discovered in the physique of men. With this emphasis between brain and thought being so actively discussed there is now a sense that 'consciousness', as such, is finally taking over as the driving mechanism of the human species, not its reliance upon custom or collective emotive states.

In a new book by Kingsley L. Dennis, The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind and Meaning in a Technological Age, the author attempts to address what is now a post-modern obsession: how can the mind be integrated into the mechanisms that it creates? That the mind might be digitised, and so objectified with a view to externalising its presence outside the body, has become one of the driving ambitions of modern science.

Dennis charts this evolution in thought with eloquence and erudition. He has found a way to enter a field that most people find daunting. The idea that nature has been supervened by what he calls the 'human matrix' as the basis for all scientific inquiry, in order that humankind might finally 'create itself' as something more than a collection of genomes – but rather, invoke a new neurological universe in the mold of Teilhard de Chardin's 'noosphere' – is central to his argument.

He puts forward a powerful case to the effect that humanity is on the cusp of giving birth to a planetary civilisation that makes all other localised cultures partly redundant. It is doing so by way of a relentless search for new ways of thinking within the preserve of our techno-scientific mindset. In other words, we can think ourselves into a condition once framed by Nietzsche as the ubermensch, that of the so-called 'Overman' capable of becoming more than himself.

Dennis argues that this is being brought about by our capacity to 'dream the world into being'. He calls this activity one of imaginal possibility – a combination of the imagination and the intellect. It is a word first coined by Henry Corbin, the great Ismaeli scholar of the twentieth-century. The imaginal, he maintains, offers us a powerful tool to inhibit science's headlong rush into bio-technologising the human species – making them, in a sense, merely transhuman. Transhumanism, a pernicious craze among an agnostic elite at this time, is a neat way of excluding the sacred imperative from the process. From here on it says, humankind will not have any need of the gods, of the sacred precinct, or of the act of deep meditation itself. These are to be seen as relics of a bygone thought era.

This, Dennis argues, represents a subversion of who we are, and what we wish to be. He does not say it as such, but the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides did: that there must be an acknowledgement of Limit if humankind is not to destroy itself by way of its excessive curiosity. The neurological sciences, and their current collusion with technology, has yet to acknowledge that there might be a risk in subjecting man to the excesses of his own investigations, just as nuclear scientists in the past failed to observe the consequences of theirs.

Dennis insists, however, that there may be a way forward in our desire to dream the world. It relies on a recognition that the sacred, what Otto called "the idea of the holy", does have a role to play in helping humankind to augment its own capacities, even as it engages with this emerging techno-scientific paradigm. A delicate balancing act, surely, but one that Dennis believes is possible if we remain cognoscente of our past and of our timeless inheritance. If there is to be an 'altered state of consciousness', then it must not be at the expense of the great spiritual traditions that have underpinned our existence since time immemorial.

Dennis draws upon a wide range of research in the fields of neurological and social sciences, as well as the latest knowledge derived from laboratory experimentation. He resorts to a variety of thinkers to inform his argument. One of them, Terence McKenna, writes that "language has infected matter", a statement that goes to the heart of Dennis's argument: that matter is now an extension of human thought. That matter is also a 'sacralised object', as traditional peoples observe (viz. Native Americans etc.), does not escape him, either.

The task Dennis asks the reader to address is whether he or she is content to live inside this new human matrix derived solely from science, without any continued link to the sacred. The idea that theos and bios might find a way to resume their ancient connection, as detailed by the Greeks and later the alchemists, in order that humankind continues to live as a spiritual being and not as a mere biological function, goes to the heart of his thesis. In other words, ancient traditions, esoteric doctrines, and religions have an important role to play in preserving the extraordinary wonder that is us.

The Sacred Revival is a deeply informative work. The gee-wizardry of modern science is gently rebutted. Dennis tells us that a greater maturity of thought is required, outside of the laboratory and its enthusiasm for discovery, if we are to press forward into a physical world that is ever-expanding, while remaining true to our hard-won subjective world, one free from the contingencies and depredations of time. The timeless is still relevant because it is attached to something other – to what the medieval thinker John of Ruusbroec called the "ghostly life". Thus, self-realization is more than an electrode attached to the brain and then scanned onto a screen for objective assessment. It is a spiritual deposit more resolved than any accumulation of data projected onto a future noo-computer yet to be devised.

The Sacred Revival will help all those who may be confused by the recent onrush of neuro-scientific discoveries and their claims. The 'human matrix' must be seen for what it is: a blend of the miraculous, objective knowledge, and the mysterious pneuma of the ancients that still permeates the cosmos, which cannot be isolated through experimentation or analysis.