The Political Nature of Pride and Prejudice

Posted on by

Having recently re-watched an incantation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which is now getting an increased showing due to its twenty-year anniversary of the version which starred Keira Knightly, I was soon reminded of how I had recently read how Virginia Woolf, of all people found Austen’s novel of young people who have never been in love before traversing the often tricky territory of love itself.  Woolf, as anyone who has read one of her brilliant stream of consciousness novels knows, was vitally concerned with how the consciousness of highly self-aware people passes through them, and not so much with the often perilous territory of interpersonal love relations.

So I began to ask myself exactly why Jane Austen would be the one female writer who Virgnia Woolf respected above all others when Austen’s novels, like Pride and Prejudice, seemingly had to do primarily, it would seem, with young women finding husbands, rather than with the sort of heavier, more androgynous topics and characters which tend to populate her writings. What might be the answer is simply that Ms. Austen wrote about the details of women’s lives during the period in which she was alive without succumbing to the sort of rancor or resentment at having been born a woman which Woolf says can be found in the writing of those such as Charlotte Bronte or George Elliot; whose indignation, according to Woolf, prevents them from properly expressing themselves.

Instead, what Austen did, according to Woolf was to quite frankly observe romance and relations between men and women from a distance by carefully observing the inherent political nature of those things. That is, in realizing that sexual politics can be just intriguing and important as politics involving seemingly larger issues such as conflicts between nations, local governance, or women’s suffrage, Jane Austen was able to create a purer vision for women writers than the likes of the Brontes or George Eliot. whose rancor at living in a male dominated society runs inescapably through their works such as Jane Eyre or Middlemarch, as great as those two works are.

The point of all this is that, to use a certain tired, old phrase regarding writing and writers, one should write what one knows, and not necessarily try to explore areas in which one has limited experience. Otherwise, one can easily subject oneself to the bitterness and resentment which comes whenever a writer is writing about subject matter with which he or she has little or no experience. Now, course, because society has opened up so much more fully to the pursuits of women, female writers are now free to write about whatever subject they choose without becoming indignant due to a certain lack of understanding. Therefore, one wonders what sort of even greater works women from the 19th century might have produced if they had been able to have greater contact with their world.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has often been mistakenly characterized as just a novel about women looking for husbands in order to embolden their family’s monetary situation. However, it is in fact so much more than just that. What it is is a pristine account of the potential intricacy of sexual politics which may arise between two people who are in love, but haven’t yet learned how to negotiate the territory, so to speak; the sort of politics which, as most of us know, can be just as complex and fascinating as that found in international relations. So Virginia Woolf, in extoling the virtues of Jane Austen, was in fact quite right to do so.

The Hidden Danger of A.I.

Posted on by

Some fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote his prescient book “Future Schock, that in which he described how the pace of change within a society will have a decided effect on people’s psyches. Since then, as many of us are now aware, that rate of change has expanded exponentially, almost to the point in which, with the emergence of A.I., it is often even stripping the pace at which we are able to think and process information. This means of course that there is a significant danger that we will all grow increasingly less settled and at peace within ourselves simply because our minds and thoughts are moving inside us at an increasingly faster rate of speed.

Then, as a result of this trend, we can easily grow less creative in approaching difficulties and concerns in our daily lives simply because, due to the movement of our increasingly quicker thought processes, the rate of which we are losing the ability to control because of how the digital world has conditioned our minds and thoughts to move forward at an increasingly faster pace, we will become less likely to slow our mental lives enough to take the necessary amount of time to be as creative with our thoughts as we otherwise might become. As a consequence of this, our creative processes in dealing with events and circumstances in our lives might well grow increasingly shallower and narrower.

There has for a long time now been an old mistaken adage that the more quickly one thinks, the more creative one will be. This is not only necessarily untrue, but it in fact often points us all in the wrong direction, for much of the time one’s capacity to think creatively has very much to do with the capacity to slow one’s thought processes enough to where one can experience moments of direct insight which exist on the other side of thought, memory, and even knowledge. In fact, possibly the single most important dynamic leading toward creative apprehensions of the world is a quiet mind, one that is able to make significant connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information simply because the space in one’s mind had become more open, more expansive.

There is also the tendency, one which has become increasingly pronounced, to let A.I. discover the validity of certain information for us for which we may be looking, rather than to explore the labyrinth of our own thinking minds in doing so. What this no doubt means is that we will spend less time exploring what might be the vast expanse of our minds in attempting to apprehend the truth about something; and in doing so we tend to abrogate the possibility of a larger consciousness growing within us simply because our mind has become less expansive as we follow its contours. On the other hand, as one takes this particular journey far enough in the other direction, as certain visionaries have, one might indeed come to inhabit some sort of larger, potentially limitless intelligence.

For centuries now, almost from the time when people became aware of the thoughts inside their minds and what they might do to control them, mankind has been searching for a quiet mind, one which will allow us to find some measure of inner peace. Unfortunately, with the current advent of digital technologies, particularly an intelligence which is becoming increasingly artificial, that goal may be on the way to becoming increasingly unreachable. And for those who believe such a quiet mind can always be reached by following certain meditative practices, they might do well to bear in mind that true silence within oneself comes during the course of one’s daily life, not through certain practices which are necessarily separate from that existence.

 

 

 

Why Dostoevsky is Needed Now More than Ever

Posted on by

Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Brothers Karamazov. Just the titles alone by the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky speak to bottom line existential questions that have become veritably eternal. Albert Camus once said that although stories with original plots and complex characters are of course interesting to him, the only stories which truly engage him are ones which involve human fate in all its simplicity and grandeur. In other words, stories which only concern the sort of bottom-line issue which are important to us all, whether or not we recognize them as being such.

To this end, Dostoevsky defines for us more than ever the world in which we live even though all of his great works were written nearly two-hundred years ago. Notes From Underground concerns the life of an alienated social recluse, similar to someone today who might be obsessively swallowed up inside his computer, shunning human contact in favor of safe digital connections to others. Crime and Punishment is a tense murder-mystery thriller which examines just where the potential line is between good and evil, between moral and unethical behavior; while The Idiot attempts to present what a beautiful soul might look like in a morally conflicted world.

Demons is the story of modern-day nihilistic behavior played out in a world in which there is intense conflict between the generations, and between those with highly different value systems. And of course, in his great final novel The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky examines three iconic approaches to life in the world (that of the amoral nihilist who seeks meaning at the edge of life’s ethical boundaries; the sensualist who cannot control his basic impulses; and the religious ascetic searching for truth and right behavior), pitting each against the other in an existential cauldron existing midway between good and evil.

Needless to say, the ideas and topics represented in these books are more than highly relevant in our modern world. Over time, they have become veritable definitions of the world in which we live.  Nihilism; isolation; the search for a beautiful soul amidst the world’s ugliness; the conflicts between generations; and the constant struggle between moral and immoral behavior. These are very much the actual existential quandaries we face today. And what is so great about Dostoevsky is that he gives us no easy answers in presenting both sides of every question. Having presented us so brilliantly with the difficult existential questions we all must face he then leaves it to us to provide ourselves with potential answers.

However, in order to read and fully understand the complex, difficult issues with which Dostoevsky is presenting to us takes a genuine ability to attend to the writing itself, and likewise a capacity to allow oneself to become fully absorbed emotively in both the inner lives of the characters and the particular dynamics of the story line. In other words, an ability to become fully absorbed within his great novels so that they might leave the deepest impression upon one. Yet, unfortunately, in our current digital age, both of these capacities are now on the wane due to how our obsessive use of digital devices and the Internet are now adversely affecting our capacity to fully concentrate on story lines or other such matters and likewise our capacity for emotive absorption.

Therefore, the works of Dostoevsky are more important to us than ever for two different reasons. One, because they allow us to define for ourselves so clearly the sort of extreme existential quandaries which many of us may be in today, and likewise because they compel readers to experience great works of literature like his with an ability to fully attend to complex ideas and storylines, and to allow ourselves to become fully absorbed in the details of our existence. The great Russian writer, whether or not we fully realize it, provides us with both of these valuable opportunities.

How A.I. Might Adversely Affect Genius

Posted on by

Now that we’re seeing the advances of the digital world, particularly that of A.I. move increasingly into not just our personal lives, but likewise into the artistic and scientific worlds, it seems fair to ask how artificial intelligence might actually affect those unique paths of discovery which great artists and scientists such as Einstein, Picasso, Virginia Woolf, or Niels Bohr employed to create their visionary art and science. That is, would A.I., if it had existed during the time in which they were alive, have somehow stifled or impeded their brilliant creations and/or discoveries in any way?

If Picasso had fed information into an artificial intelligence system in order to create his startling, multi-dimensional paintings and drawings, he might have produced art that was even more visionary and radical than what it became, but at the same time, his creations wouldn’t have come as fully from inside him. That is, the emotive, mental, and tactile parts of his persona, all working together, wouldn’t have been able to explore the potentially malleable fabric of space in which his art existed in the very same, open-ended way.

Likewise, if Einstein had used the technology of artificial intelligence to explore space and time in the manner in which he did in both his Special and General Theories of Relativity, the latter leading toward his iconic theory of gravitation, he might have been able to do so more expeditiously. Yet the beauty of the trial and error process of the scientific method, which he used as creatively as any other scientist has ever done so, might have been significantly swallowed by the more predictable, rigid nature of artificial intelligence.

In similar fashion, if Virginia Woolf had used artificial intelligence to create story lines for her brilliant stream of consciousness novels, with A.I. providing her with ways to most effectively weave the personas and storylines of her different characters into one another, this might have potentially allowed her to make those things more intriguing. Yet, at the same time, she wouldn’t have been able to use to the same degree her incredible vision of how separate lives intermingle with one another, one derived from her own intense struggles with her sanity, to meld her own unique psyche with the words she put on the page.

Also, Niels Bohr almost certainly could have used A.I. to determine how specifically electrons orbit the atomic nucleus in a way that prevents an atom from collapsing in upon itself, perhaps even more effectively than he actually did. Yet the extreme satisfaction he must have experienced when he fully realized that his lifelong struggles with the vagaries of his rational mind had led directly toward his revolutionary scientific discovery would have almost certainly been denied him in the bargain.

When iconic artists, writers and scientists such as these probed a certain part of their world using their own thought processes and/or emotive reactions to pursue their investigations, they were using paths of discovery which took place entirely within their own inner lives. On the other hand, if they had used the tools provided them by artificial intelligence, they might well have been creating paths of discovery which existed significantly outside their own psyches. That is, within the digital pathways which would have existed within whatever A.I. tools they would have been using. So, it would seem that within our current Internet age a choice has to be made between the easiest way to produce valid external results or the maintenance of the richest inner life possible.

An Antidote to Authoritarianism is Democratic Learning Environments

Posted on by

As of late, a number of people have become justifiably worried that our one- time democratic society is inevitably headed toward a state of genuine authoritarianism where all power in our government is coalescing within the Presidency; from specific progressive policies which a President doesn’t like because they threaten his particular value system; or those upon whom he wants to seek  retribution because he feels they have somehow done him wrong in the past; or simply because a sitting President might have an intense need to be in control of everything which he might influence. And so the reach of such a potential power grab seems to be frightening many people these days.

However, perhaps the larger question that needs to be asked in all this, beyond just stop-gap measures on how to limit the sort of unchecked power of an executive who might in some way threaten our democracy might appear to lay in seeking how to insure that our democratic principles don’t become actually threatened, as many people fear that they are now. That is, what are the root causes of people in a society either ignoring or actually turning away from a truly democratic society? Surprisingly, one of the significant answers to this quandary may not lie so much in amending the levers of power in order to maintain our democracy, but how children are being educated in our schools.

In the past, several important writers on education reform, from John Dewey to George Dennison to Ivan Illich have proposed the idea of truly democratic learning environments in which all of the participants in a particular environment or school, both students and teachers, share with each other both equal rights and equal responsibilities. I myself ran an attempt at such a school recently for twelve years for children six to fourteen, in which I endeavored, as much as possible, to base the entire learning environment on such an equilibrium, from discussions with individual students about what their rights and responsibilities were in any given situation relative to those of the teachers, to a weekly democratic meeting in which students were allowed to discuss and then vote on a number of rules which governed the school.

Within such an environment, as difficult as it may be to implement at times, young people can learn the crucial importance of establishing a democracy based on shared equal rights and equal responsibilities. Otherwise, if the adults in the particular environment are making most or all of the decisions in order to control the nature of the learning environment, they may be unwittingly training people who later in life will have little interest in shared rights and responsibilities in any particular situation in which they might find themselves.

A number of people may remember from several years ago how the economist John Nash, whose life and ideas were depicted in the popular movie A Beautiful Mind, developed his revolutionary equilibrium theory which stated that within a particular group the people involved should work toward developing a solution to any problem in which everyone determines what is the best possible outcome for himself and likewise for the group as a whole. In fact, as much as we could, although we were certainly not always successful, we attempted at our school to employ John Nash’s novel theory in discussing and likewise coming up with problems which had presented themselves involving student rights and responsibilities.

Many people tend to believe that a true democratic society is necessarily one in which a certain group of people maintain their right to assert themselves in a given situation in opposition to those groups of people who oppose them with different values; and may the best person win, so to speak. Yes, of course that sounds like the essence of a democracy, but ultimately it generally leads toward one side grabbing as much power for itself as it can get. A true democracy is based on establishing an equilibrium in which everyone involved agrees to a solution to any given problem in which everyone has both equal rights and equal responsibilities. And that’s something worth exposing young people to in our schools for the sake of our democracy.

Moving Back to Move Forward in the Digital Age

Posted on by

It’s been said many that time moves in a circle, taking us to points where we’ve already been so that we can move forward; something suggested by no less than the great mathematician Kurt Godel while exploring the possibility of time travel. Yet the idea can likewise be applied to societal movements and tendencies; this notion that we may have to move back into the past in order to move forward in the present; or so it would seem in the case of certain Luddite students at Temple University in Philadelphia who are according to them, “promoting conscious consumption of technology” by significantly walking away from what they consider to be the destructive parts of it.

Members of the Luddite Club sketch and paint while sitting side by side rather than surfing the web or checking their phones for text messages. They sit together and read quietly, favoring writers like Dostoevsky. Kerouac, and Vonnegut. They sit on logs in the outdoors and complain about how TikTok is dumbing down their generation while their flip phones (yes, flip phones) are decorated with stickers and nail polish; with those from different parts of the world who have become aware of what they are doing responding by the hundreds, including famous activists like Ralph Nader, who wrote in a recent essay that their rebellion needs support and diffusion.

Furthermore, two years after their club began, according to reporter Alex Vadukul of the New York Times who was the person who originally wrote about them, these Luddites still have disdain for social media platforms and how they use impressionable young people, causing them to create picture-perfect false identities online which have little to do with who they really are. Possibly most heartening of all, they still rely on flip phones and laptops rather than succumbing to the enticing addiction of smart phones, and they have even drafted a mission statement aimed at connecting young people in various communities who share their antipathy to digital addiction.

Furthermore, the activities of so-called Luddite organizations like this one might seem to beg the question of what real progress is.  Is it something like increasing the capacity of artificial intelligence sites like ChatGPT to not just provide information but to actually give prescriptive advice? Is it a production of a new smart phone which everyone can wear on their eyeglasses or carry in their wallet or purse? Or is it an approach to digital technology by which we can reclaim access to our short and long term memories, our capacity to attend, or the depth of our impressions and emotive lives that many of have seemed to have lost in this radical new digital age?

Those scientists who study the dynamics of our universe, and who have in the past speculated that time may indeed be circular, and so we need to occasionally delve into the past in order to progress in the future may indeed be worth listening to now; which of course means that we may need to revise our ideas concerning what forward progress really means, particularly in this new Internet age. In other words, what me may need is a much broader discussion concerning what moving forward really means simply because the idea may not be as simple as we previously considered it to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3****

A Fractured Consciousness and The Possibility of Change

Posted on by

In 1981, Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and biochemist from Cambridge University and Harvard introduced his concept of Morphic resonance to the world; an idea which states that different species inherently possess what he calls morphic fields, those which allow different organisms to stay in touch with one another through a distance. For example, there is good evidence that many species of animals may be telepathic, and that if certain members of a species learn a new skill in one part of the world, other members of that same species in other parts of the world will soon show that same proclivity.

This of course might lead one to beg the question that if this dynamic is true of members of the animal kingdom, might it be possible for human beings to have a similar unitary consciousness in which we all may be similarly mentally united with one other, even from a distance. This of course suggests that if there is in fact some type of unitary consciousness of which we are all a part, that if even one person is able to fundamentally and radically change his or her consciousness, then this will somehow have an effect on all of us, even as we might not realize that this particular dynamic is in fact occurring.

Taking this particular argument further, as strange as it may seem to some, this is not so much some sort of mental telepathy as it is an acknowledgement that we all may be part of the same conscious field in which we are endlessly interconnected, without even realizing that such a reality exists. This then would seem to suggest that if one is desirous of change for the better in the world, then the best way to accomplish this may not be through political or social action, but rather through a fundamental change in one’s own consciousness in which others may be affected at a distance by this sort of change even as they’re not able to recognize it occurring in themselves.

Unfortunately, often when people draw up sides, so to speak, to affect some type of change, there may well be an inevitable fracturing of that common consciousness that we all share with one another. Even in those cases where people are fighting against the evil of others in attempting to make the world a better place, just the fact that there is an inevitable fracturing of human consciousness in the process is something which, as much as anything, may tend to produce the sort of internal violence in people which leads toward violent conflicts on a larger scale. Thus, many of the armed conflicts and terrorist activities which we see in the world today.

Speaking at an anti-war rally at Berkeley during the period of the 1960s, the writer Ken Kesey told the crowd that had gathered, all amped up before their march on an army induction center during the time of the Vietnam War, that often the best thing one can do when they see something that is fundamentally wrong is to simply turn their back on it and just say “fuck it.” Otherwise, according to him, you’re essentially playing the same game as the evildoers. Although he may have been right from the standpoint of what tactics are most effective against those same evildoers, he may also have been right as far as not engendering the sort of fractured consciousness which eventually leads to so much violence in the world.

What Might the Term Soul Mate Really Mean?

Posted on by

It’s been ten years now since the film Her appeared in which Jaquim Phoenix, a lonely man, fell in love with the operating system inside his computer, in particular with the voice of Scarlett Johansson which embodied it. Since that time, according to a recent article in the New York Times, it has been reported that more and more people are likewise attempting to have some sort of close personal relationships with the personification inherent in digital technologies, even replacing what might be close relationships with others in the real world with less perilous digital ones. Obviously, with the recent growth of artificial intelligence in our society, it would appear that this trend is almost sure to continue and even  grow.

However, as predictable as this development in our current digital age is, even as it might be seen by many as being strange and potentially even pathological, at the same time it does appear that it does in fact beg the question of what a close personal relationship, particularly a love relationship, actually means. To this end, there is of course the full spectrum of close personal, love relationships between two people, all the way from the most casual to the most intense and meaningful. Yet, at the same time, there is one term in particular, one that may in fact be in danger of being significantly misused, that has been employed to identify the most intense and meaningful of close personal relationships, which is that of soul mate.

Soul Mate has been used in the past to define all manner of close personal relationships, particularly romantic ones; from an intense sexual relationship; to a best friend for whom one has intense feelings of caring; to one with whom has a certain sympatico which one doesn’t have with anyone else; to even a close personal friend for whom one has special feelings and with whom one occasionally has physical relations. At the same time, however, it seems possible that none of these close relationships when applied to the term soul mate goes far enough in getting at the potentially mystical nature of being in love.

That is, might it be possible that two people who are soul mates, so to speak, both inhabit together some otherworldly place that neither is fully aware of, yet at the same time, they still experience the intensity of that reality during their life in this world? That of course puts the term in an infinitely broader context, one which might seem to have few boundaries. It also takes the love of another person to whom one feels that he or she is vitally connected in this way into a whole mystical area where the experience of love for someone else and the search for a larger, more expansive consciousness conceivably become one and the same.

The 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth told the story of a young girl who, during the time of fascist Spain which she was caught up in, experienced a number of mystical, otherworldly encounters which came to influence her behavior in this world, those being directed from the mystical, otherworldly kingdom which she inhabited before her earthly life began, and to which she was destined to return. Therefore, relative to the idea of two people who love each other actually being soul mates, one might begin to wonder, even as far-fetched and unreal as the idea might seem, if such a thing is actually possible. That two people might indeed be connected in some otherworldly place which, even though they might not be aware that this is occurring, this connection still affects their lives in this world.

Of course, in this new age world in which we now live, there are all kinds of supposedly mystical dynamics that take place in the world of astrology, fortune telling, and the like. Yet still it seems that it might be possible for two people to be connected inside some otherworldly consciousness which has nothing to do with the hocus pocus world of all these new age pursuits, which makes the entire dynamic much more real and much more meaningful; simply because it might in fact be a genuine part of human consciousness. Now that, it seems, would be exciting.

L.A. Fires and the Fear of Uncertainty

Posted on by

Having moved from Chicago to Ojai, California some four years ago, this was my first experience with the powerful Santa Ana winds, and with the sort of devastating fires that are now consuming major parts of Los Angeles. The winds, it seems have a pernicious, almost mystical quality to them; something about which the late, great Joan Didion wrote for years, noting how the winds have the power to somehow adversely affect people’s mental and emotional stability by causing some to fret, sulk, be unwilling to come out of their house for days, or in one well known case in San Bernardino, apparently hatch a plan to kill their spouse.

Having lived in the Chicago area most of my life, I endured any number of periods of intense, bold-chilling cold or else several feet of snow. Having relatives living in Florida, I listened to their stories of dealing with powerful hurricanes by barricading themselves in certain rooms of their home. Yet as difficult as those events are to endure, it seems that there is a certain predictability to them which tends to make them somehow bearable. That is, by knowing just how cold the temperature will become, as is often the case, one can prepare in advance how to hunker down inside one’s home or apartment. And in the case of hurricanes, the weather service can often correctly predict the approximate path of the storm, in doing so, often giving people time for how to deal with it.

Yet with events like the Santa Ana winds, wildfires, or the 5.2 earthquake which hit Ojai last year, that sort of predictability, it seems, is no longer really afforded one. Earthquakes are entirely unpredictable. They can strike at any time despite the best efforts of geologists to tie their possible appearance to the state of a certain fault line. Nor can the exact speed and power of the Santa Ana winds which might be blow down from out of the mountains be known in advance. And of course the start of wildfires, like the one currently decimating Los Angeles, can’t possibly be known in advance.

California has always had an element of uncertainty to it. As one drives along Highway 101, one is able to behold the powerful beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Yet at the same time, it might occur to one that this is the end of the continent, and that if he or she wants to indulge their pioneer spirit and move onward, there is only the possibility of going back, of returning to where one has already been. This may not necessarily be a constant conscious thought, but nevertheless it is a reality which tends to remain with one, at least at an unconscious level. Of course, during a tragedy such as the recent wildfires that have occurred in L.A., people may be thinking about packing up and leaving. Yet one imagines a certain pioneer spirit, even one that is only unconscious, may stop a number of them in their tracks.

To live at the end of a continent, where forward movement is not an option, and which provides one with a measure of inevitable uncertainty concerning potentially catastrophic events, can feel at times like living on the edge, so to speak. Yet at the same time, this is also part of the fascination which many people have with California; that there is a certain sense, albeit one that is unconscious, that one has chosen to live at the edge, so to speak; an inheritance of a certain pioneer spirit that lives within us, whether we recognize its presence or not.

A.I. and Spirituality

Posted on by

To date, artificial intelligence seems to have found its way into just about every corner of our society, from science to art to literature to politics. Yet, all the recent discussions of how A.I. might actually possess consciousness notwithstanding, there doesn’t seem to have been many attempts to relate A.I. and the virtual world to the activities having to do with some larger spiritual dimension, such as might be found in such things as yoga practices, various forms of meditation, or even mindfulness programs and activities. That is, could it be possible that the virtual paths inherent in A.I. could lead one toward some larger, spiritually based consciousness if used properly?

If one looks at how great artists, scientists, or thinkers such as Einstein, Picasso, Krishnamurti or Beethoven pursued the type of art or thought which in fact did lead toward a larger consciousness, what seems strikingly apparent is that they did so by weaving important aspects of their personal lives into their search. That is, their important creations, investigations, and discoveries invariably emanated from thoughts and emotions which were quite obviously highly unique to each of them. And in many cases, it was even those thoughts and feelings which troubled them most which led directly toward great art, science, or thought.

For example, there is certainly a direct link between the troublesome states of mind which plagued Virginia Woolf during one of her depressive illnesses, during which she would often lose control of the pattern of her thoughts, and the brilliant stream of consciousness writing which would appear in her novels. That is, as painful as it was for her at times, the first often led inexorably toward the second. In similar fashion, the terrible burden which Beethoven experienced as he realized that he was growing deaf led to his heroic defiance of fate which can be heard so clearly in his iconic Fifth Symphony. Once again, his eventual triumphant state which can be heard in that brilliant piece of music most likely couldn’t exist without the dark night of the soul which Bethoven first went through.

When viewed through a larger lens, these are in fact important spiritual developments in the lives of these two great artists. That is to say, the personal difficulties and suffering they endured led directly toward the sort of larger consciousness which was part of their brilliant creations. Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing pointed inevitably toward a limitless awareness that exists beyond words, thoughts, and past knowledge; while the music of Beethoven, particularly that which can be heard in his latter string quartets, points toward a sublime acceptance of all which life may have to offer, a state of being which then points inevitably toward something larger.

In other words, when searching for a larger consciousness, through one’s art, scientific investigations, or through other means, it is impossible to separate what might be difficult aspects of one’s personal life from one’s larger spiritual development, that is if one wants to use that term. Therefore, this is something that artificial intelligence will never be able to accomplish; taking into account how one’s personal development, as difficult as it may be at times, can never be separated from the search for a potential spiritual core to life, arrived at through a larger, more expansive consciousness. Let us hope we all can soon realize this.