AN UNKNOWN WORLD

Going beyond the immediate concerns of environmentalism, Jacob Needleman asks what is the purpose of life on Earth, and what is the role of human beings in this respect. As with some of his other books like Time and the Soul, there is an extra time dimension with the presence of his childhood friend Elias in dreams and reflections, helping him reached new depths of questioning. The title refers to the understanding that a world is a unity. Many thinkers have a vision of the cooperative unity of humankind, but we have yet to reach that point, as Lewis Mumford and Teilhard de Chardin already envisaged in the 1950s. The work of Vernadsky and more recently of Lovelock and Margulis has enabled us to appreciate the Earth as a living being and life as a form of directed movement in evolution.

An important theme is the limitations of the outward-directed mind and its corresponding ideology of scientism. For Jerry, this represents knowledge without understanding, the part assuming that it can understand the whole without a corresponding widening and deepening of consciousness. This is a form of literalism that corresponds to biblical fundamentalism. Understanding, by contrast, requires what he calls 'the active energy of inner perception' so that we are able to inhabit the physical more deeply - he also refers to a God-infused materiality. He reminds us in this respect that our bodies are our personal Earth and what we do to our bodies we indirectly do to the Earth - we can see this in the corresponding health crises of developed humanity and Earth systems. In this way, 'humanity's relationship to the Earth mirrors our own essential relationship to our own physical body.'

Jerry suggests that real questions are like seeds requiring tending and nourishment and that we should be suspicious of glib answers - their history is one of bloody progeny. In an arresting sentence, he comments that we do not suffer or commit evil because of our questions, but because of our answers. As Montaigne remarked even in the 16th century, it is putting a high value on your opinions to roast people on account of them. This is still happening today because we think we have the right answers. We are so used to thinking in terms of problems and solutions that we forget that the human situation is not in fact a problem to be solved, but rather a consciousness to be lived (p. 95).

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard insisted that our real task was the development of inwardness or being. Jerry cites a telling passage which is so concentrated that it is almost impossible to understand. I will spare the reader the detail. However, it presents an opportunity to experience a question: that man is not yet a Self. Jerry realises that we cannot understand the Earth without understanding man and we cannot understand man without understanding ourselves. This involves relating heaven and earth within ourselves and rooting ourselves in the transcendent: 'we cannot be ourselves without at the same time rooting ourselves in God.' Paradoxically, our independence is entirely dependent upon a higher force that can penetrate human consciousness. And, 'the more we choose it, the more it chooses us.' This deep understanding entails access to all levels of knowledge, perception and being, not just the physical. Here again lie the limits of physicalism and scientism: 'our state of consciousness, our mere fragment of the whole mind, can never understand that which requires the whole mind to understand.' Put like this, it seems an obvious point, but with far reaching implications. We are responsible for the way in which we direct our attention and therefore for the inner side of evolution.

At this point, Gurdjieff makes an appearance (p. 135) with his contention that the Earth is still growing in terms of greater consciousness and greater receptivity. In order to receive finer influences, a finer more sensitive apparatus is necessary, and humans need to continue to evolve. If we do not, then the destruction of humanity may result from our inadequate patterns of thinking and behaviour. Put succinctly, this means that human evolution depends on the inner world and inner efforts to gain access to higher levels of consciousness currently rejected or pathologised by mainstream science - this is what Gurdjieff calls the conscious third force. The important point is that the Earth needs a more enlightened humanity in order to take the next step of evolution. This is our deeper purpose and indeed our hope: an inner transformation of the mind leading to right action towards the Earth.

This is also where a science of consciousness comes in. Not simply an outward-directed science of consciousness, but also an inward-directed development of (the) human being that has been going on for centuries in the spiritual traditions. This means thought allied to feeling and beyond the inherent separation of egotism and greed towards another level of consciousness, one more integrated, more whole. This is the God-infused energy of awakened human beings, not just the isolated rational mind, however brilliant (p. 184). The real is in fact the invisible and the capacity 'to love, to be impartial, to will.' We are 'unfinished animals' – 'the next stage in the evolution of life on the Earth depends on the intentional inward effort of man.' This is not just a philosophical point, but one pivotal to the positive future of life on Earth and coming from the very centre of being – the I Am that we all are. This eloquent book is a necessary counterpoint to the outward focus of most environmental thinking, reminding the reader of the essential relationship between inner and outer and reinforcing the point made as far back as 1967 by Seyyed Hossein Nasr that the ecological crisis has an inner dimension.