Eyre Lines

There’s an account of an interview with James Kugel here; James has written a book called “The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times”, which has among its theses that not only did people in Biblical times think of themselves less as individuals and more as members of a body (a tribe or people), but that also their consciousness was (and this is my words not his) more permeable to having experiences of God, or angels, or other supernatural entities.

These two might well be aspects of the same difference in psychology; as I’ve written before, in the mystical experience, one hallmark is the breakdown of the barrier between “me” and “other” – the sense of self becomes amorphous, and in peak experiences virtually disappears (the consciousness of unity with all things). If he’s correct (and I have a sneaking suspicion he is), this argues that, on average, the consciousness of human beings has contracted over the last couple of thousand years, from something which could identify with at least a sizeable group of people as being in some sense “me”, and possibly something much wider than that (God, for instance) to something locked up in individual skulls.

I’ve written about the “fall” as the advent of self-consciousness (and thus self-centredness, which I regard as the “original sin”); I’ve written about God encouraging dependency rather than individualism and my writing is massively informed by the mystical dissolution of the boundary between self and other. I am also writing a sporadic series about tribes, which are not necessarily a good thing, given that they promote “us-v-them” thinking.

What I fear, here, is that whereas Kugel describes a society in which the larger group, in particular the Israelites, is the primary identifier for someone, before they are an individual, and one in which a consciousness of something beyond even that is common, we are now looking at a society in which the individual is the basic identifier (promoted by neoliberal economics, I may say, which is one reason why I criticise that so much), and if horizons expand beyond that, it is to the tribe (or political group, or religion, or nation, or – well, whatever other identity group or intersection of groups you choose) rather than to anything wider.

I fear, in other words, that we are progressing inexorably in the wrong direction, despite people talking about new dawns of spirituality and the expansion of consciousness. This may be the case in a relatively small group, but the vast bulk of people? In my nation, at least, we are far less communitarian than we were when I was growing up, and the mechanism to encourage any broader consciousness is not clear to me. I can write, I suppose, but I have only a small audience…