I have often wondered what happened to the 1960s and 70s idea of rebirth.
Rebirth?
I don’t mean the facile doctrines of evangelical Christianity, in which, if you pay a fee to the TV man you will go to heaven. I don’t even mean, I think, the pseudo-Christian idea of being reborn in some slightly more meaningful fashion, discovering god etc. Nor do I mean, exactly, the various non-Christian paths to rebirth, like being convinced that buying some quartz, or something, makes you a better person. I don’t even mean, necessarily, what happens when a seeker takes off to some guru’s hideout in India for a session in immortality.
I mean something more along these lines:
I recall a small segment on BBC radio where a physicist was describing sitting on a beach. He was busy minding his own business, in his physicist’s kind of way, with, presumably, a decent knowledge of how the universe and everything is constructed. Suddenly he felt himself becoming super-aware of his surroundings. Suddenly every grain of sand, every molecule, every ripple in the water, became super-real to him. The universe was around him, and he was a part of it, a part of every tiny particle of it, every sparkle of energy was part of him… He came from that beach a man renewed. What previously had been to him the somewhat abstract and ignored reality of the universe had become part of his being.
Now that is a rebirth experience - an experience of super-consciousness, intense understanding beyond reason. He could never be the same.
Or, of course, there are the chemically-induced experiences of Aldous Huxley reported in his short book, The Doors of Perception. Again, the world, under hallucinogens, became a place of wonder and enchantment, super-real, and super-beautiful.
David Bowie sang of it in ‘After All‘:
I sing with impertinence, shading impermanent chords, with my words.
I’ve borrowed your time and I’m sorry I called
But the thought just occurred that we’re nobody’s children at all,
after all.
Live till your rebirth and do what you will, Oh by jingo.
Forget all I’ve said, please bear me no ill, Oh by jingo.
After all, after all
Not to be outdone, here is something of the kind from Brian Eno, Moebius and Roedelius, with the song The Belldog from After the Heat:
Most of the day
We were at the machinery
In the dark sheds
That the seasons ignore
I held the levers that guided the signals to the radio
But the words I receive, random code, broken fragments from before.
Out in the trees
My reason deserting me
All the dark stars
Cluster over the bay.
Then in a certain moment
I lose control and at last I am part of the machinery.
Where are you?
And the light disappears
As the world makes its circle through the sky.
Now this was something to aspire to.
And then its ambitions kind of faded away. Rebirth was taken up by various purveyors of snake oil, and gradually lost its power as a vision of possibility. Anyhow, the whole idea was probably nothing more than the privileging of some form of minor psychotic experience. But an experience with a positive nature, I would suggest.
It is now, so far as I know, almost absent from the ambitions of the age, except perhaps where the poor or needy need solace, and a salesman sees a happy niche for a costless product.
My question extended further though. I wondered not just where it went, but where it came from.
Huxley (left) and Gerald Heard
Well, I wonder if I have found the source? That it might have been tied up with Huxley hardly comes as a shock, but I was surprised to see the connection to Alcoholics Anonymous, and just as surprised to see that it could be so precisely located. I do not mean to pretend that one or a few people are responsible for the mystical ambitions of an era - there is more at work here than that. But it seems reasonable to propose that here you will find an important reference point for the twentieth century emergence of a new ambition of consciousness.
I love this stuff. I have always loved this stuff. I wish it could be true. That it might not be true, or possible, is an awful thought. That we might be reaching into a new state of enhanced emotional and perceptive capacity is a wonderful idea. That, on the ground, such an idea seems entirely unsupportable is a terrible shame. But there you are. That’s life - as we yet know it…
The changes that we make are more likely to come from the more mundane, but, let’s face it, still magical, development and use of new technologies.
Happiness is the new era
For those who seek some kind of new era… Well, we had an era change 200 years ago, when the European world shifted from a virtue based culture to a happiness based culture - democracy, satisfying self-interest, individual freedoms, all that. It goes under other names, such as Epicureanism, hedonism, eudaimonia, utilitarianism. Keywords for the previous era include Stoicism, honour, duty, and, of course, virtue.
Around the end of the 18th century theorists were developing how to free up the satisfaction of self-interest in economic activity, and in political structures. This brought about a most profound revolution in human social organisation. It took up to 150 years to implement institutionally - think of the lag in the implementation of women’s voting, or the long standing differing legal position of people with differing skin colour.
The fabled sixties (which probably really happened as much during the fifties and the seventies) was a time of shrugging off (or at least beginning to shrug off) some of the remaining detritus of the preceding era. The world was just catching up with itself, or learning how to live better within its new skin. Taking risks.
Even still, we are working out how to live within this brave new world.
For a little more on Gerald Heard, see here.
A little more about rebirth …
David Bowie again: -
Memory Of A Free Festival
Oh, to capture just one drop of all the ecstasy that swept that afternoon
To paint that love upon a white balloon
And fly it from the toppest top of all the tops that man has pushed beyond his brain
Satori must be something just the same
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Is it just that the term ‘rebirth’ has gone out of fashion? For a discussion of the modern quest see iamyouasheisme on The Unbearable Pain of Mindfulness.
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This excellent video on 2001 by robag88 discusses the symbolism of Kubrick’s film in relation to intellectual expansion (or rebirth). Should the video be removed see http://www.collativelearning.com (Thanks to Jahsonic for this link)
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iamyouasheisme’s The Unbearable Pain of Mindfulness brings to mind a passage or two from Huysmans’ 1884 novel, Against Nature. The main character, Des Esseintes, rails against the utilitarian world, and, it appears, the (capital U) Utilitarians - the political movement that played a pivotal role in ushering in democracy, legal reforms, capitalism, universal education, and liberalism during the nineteenth century.
[55] Like a hermit he [Des Esseintes] was ripe for seclusion, worn out by life and expecting nothing more of it; and also like a monk, he was overcome [56] by a tremendous lassitude, by a need for contemplation, by a longing no longer to have anything in common with the heathen - which was what he called Utilitarians and fools.
(I’m using the 1998 Oxford University Press edition translated by Margaret Mauldon.)
The following chapter builds on the theme. Des Esseintes takes on the role of corrupter. First he encourages a man to marry to test his theory of the ‘inexorable power of petty vexations - more disastrous than great ones to the well-tempered mind’. [57-58] Vindicated, the marriage fails. Then he tries to create a murderer by giving a poor youth, Auguste Langlois, the pleasures of a high class brothel, then removing the privilege, and seeing if the youth will turn to crime to sustain his new-found pleasures, to sustain access to what he never before had dreamed existed. [58-60] As Des Esseintes leaves the youth he says:
[60] ‘…keep in mind this quasi-biblical saying: “Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you”; you’ll go far with that precept.”
This, of course, is the inverse of the usual formula, a formula adopted by JS Mill in his utilitarian moral philosophy.
Finally he fully expostulates his theory:
[61] ‘…I was putting into practice the layman’s parable, the allegory of universal education which aims at nothing less than transforming all men into Langloises, by - instead of permanently and mercifully putting out the eyes of the poor - by striving to force them to open their eyes wide,* so that they may notice that some of their neighbours have destinies that are quite undeservedly more merciful, and enjoy pleasures that are keener and more multi-faceted and, consequently, more desirable, and more precious.
’And the fact is,’ continued Des Esseintes, following his train of thought, ‘the fact is that since pain is an effect of education, since it deepens and sharpens in proportion as ideas spring up, the more one tries to polish the intelligence and to refine the nervous system of those poor devils, the more one will develop in them those fiercely long-lasting seeds of moral suffering and of hatred.’
[*Eyes Wide Shut?]
What, I wonder, of the pain of the path to rebirth? The pain of mindfulness? And what of the quest itself? As we adjust to our Utilitarian-inspired world are we groping through the thickets of jealous rage to reach yet a new pinnacle of human existence beyond the horrors of inequality in a (relatively, compared with aristocratic society) equal opportunity world, a world of education and knowledge, a world of awareness of the privileges of others. Is nirvana, or rebirth, like some desert isle which will give us respite and the happiness we crave. I am reminded of the cover of Fripp and Eno’s Evening Star.
