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Beyond the dominant paradigm
Futures, Vol. 30, No. 2/3, pp. 223–233, 1998 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0016–3287/98 $19.00 + 0.00
Pergamon
PII: S0016–3287(98)00030-5
ESSAY Beyond the dominant paradigm Embracing the indigenous and the transcendental Ramana Williams
The Western modernist–postmodernist project is in crisis. Integral to that crisis is the ‘crisis in communication’. This paper seeks to expand the communication futures discourse by moving into non-Western cultural spaces: those of indigenous and mystical traditions. Here we examine the communicative potency of silence, transpersonal communication with Self, and a vastly expanded communicative community. Are these diverse, transcultural approaches to communication reconcilable, or is cultural diversity synonymous with cultural relativism? Do we, in fact, require a new conceptual map of human knowledge which includes different communication paradigms, capable of embracing the mundane and the material as well as the subtle and the spiritual? Answers to these questions, it is suggested, will be crucial in allowing meaningful alliances to be forged with the Other, with whom our preferred futures can become potent realities. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved If humanity is successful in building an enduring civilization on the Earth, then it will come from the synergy of the collective experience and wisdom of the entire human family.
Duane Elgin, Awakening Earth1
Ramana Williams is a spiritual teacher and freelance writer currently based in Brisbane, Australia. He has an academic background in political science and, more recently, in communications research, working with the Communication Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. The predominant influences on his work come from the socio-spiritual teachings in tantra, from his practical background in Maori mysticism, and from the neo-humanistic philosophy of P. R. Sarkar. He can be contacted c/o the Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology, PO Box 2434, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia (Tel: + 61 7 3864 1813; fax: + 61 7 3864 2192).
In search of balance In the midst of unprecedented material wealth, the Western (post)modernist project has become strangely pathological, ‘predatory’ even, as one writer recently put it: “L.A. driveby shootings, a ‘gulf war’ fashion show; serial killer trading cards...”.2 And yet it is not only the Western centre that has manifested the symptoms of cultural collapse. We find similar realities in such peripheral zones as Australia and New Zealand where the second biggest killer of young people today is ‘self-inflicted death’.3 In the face of these shocking statements of cultural malaise the non-West might well be declaring ‘We told you so!’. Still, one is left wondering how it all came to be so spectacularly out of balance. Progress towards answering this question would seem to be an indispensable part of working towards the solution.
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One such domain of thought that seems compelling in this regard, asserts that the definitive clue to understanding this complex matter lies at the level of cultural consciousness. That somehow these realities are self-created—the materialisation, if you will, of a pervasive cultural thought-projection—the origins of which lie at the core of a cultures’ belief systems—its ontology, cosmology and epistemology; that is to say, the fundamental premises of its worldview. This model implies self-responsibility: we in the West have knowingly or unknowingly created this reality by virtue of how we, as a culture, have come to think about the world, how we understand the world, and what passes as truth within that world. By cultural consciousness we are, therefore, substantially speaking about cultural epistemologies—our ‘ways of knowing’, and how these ways of knowing perpetuate and then legitimate certain cultural and material activities in the world. Within the West the epistemology that came to assume prominence in recent centuries has been overwhelmingly materialist and reductionist in nature, be it the empiricism of the physical sciences or the dialectical materialism of Marxist thinking, which along with empiricism, enamoured much of social science. It was this predominance of philosophical materialism, that Bateson declared to be “central to—at the root of—the epistemological nightmare of the twentieth century”.4 Lewis Mumford in concurring with Bateson, pointed to the need for “a new metaphysical and ideological base... a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of man”.5 The present paper is equally motivated by this seeking out of a more enlightened perspective, this ‘new metaphysic’, but seeks to do so in relation to a single and specific domain of human activity, namely, human communication. While progress will inevitably be required in all domains of human life (both intellectually and practically as well as at the individual and collective level) there can be little doubt that how we communicate and what we understand ‘communication’ to be, will be pivotal to this broader process of social transformation—the pervasive shifting of the cultural paradigm. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that communication—and the paradigms that define it—are so fundamental to the human experience that ‘homo narrans’ (communicating beings) stands as a
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close contender to ‘homo sapiens’ as the correct designation of our species.6 However, as one might expect, a significant body of communication scholars have asserted that the ‘nightmarish’ deficiencies Bateson identifies at the meta-level of Western philosophy are well discernible within communications discourse. Sensing something of the theoretical limitations currently afflicting the field, Rice and Williams asserted cautiously that “we may have to not only rethink current communication theories but, indeed, borrow from other disciplines...”.7 Other communication scholars identified dominant ways of knowing as being crucial to the conceptual limitations confronting the field. Hamelink asserted that a fuller understanding of human communication—other dimensions and possible futures—might be realized once the ‘methodological exclusivism’ apparent in Western scholarship, is critiqued and broken out of and alternative ways of knowing explored.8 In a similar vein Jones called for “... an epistemological break with the pre-given constructs through which we are allowed to perceive the world”.9 In seeking out such a decisive break with dominant frameworks, the focus of this paper is on alternative cultural experiences of communication. We look at three non-Western cultures: Maori, Aboriginal and the socio-spiritual culture of tantra. What emerges from this broad, transcultural purview of the field is the presence of a range of powerful communicative concepts which motivate quite different communicative practices and possibilities. These alternative conceptions cannot meaningfully be understood in isolation from the approaches to knowing that underlie them. To this extent, we consider also their epistemological origins. Our consideration of these non-Western models works, by implication, to deconstruct Western approaches to communication. However, as will clearly emerge as we progress, the tenor of this paper is not to limit the discourse, by denying Western models, but rather to expand it by considering alternatives which complement present understanding. This suggests an integrated conceptual model sufficient to the task of reconciling these different communicative realities. The paper concludes with a consideration of one such model that attempts to do this.
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Reclaiming silence There has been, in recent years, a renewed interest within Western communication discourse concerning the significance silence plays in how we communicate. The question has been asked, ‘Can communication be a silent—non-sensory—activity?’ Tehranian asserts that it most certainly can be, that everything human beings do has some communicative dimension to it, leading to the assertion that, “we cannot not communicate”.10 While we find within Western discourse an emergent acceptance of this concept, when placed within the larger domain of transcultural approaches to communication, we find that Western conceptions of silence carry rather a rationalist inflection, reflecting, arguably, their origins within the dominant approach to knowing.11 Hence, silence has often been considered important because it denied the voice of the other—women, minorities, alternative epistemic communities. This was silence as oppression—negative silence. While this has been a rich and important part of the journey to more fully understand communication, it cannot be said to capture the fullness of the communicative potency of silence. This becomes the inevitable conclusion once we place this insight alongside non-Western experiences of communication. The indigenous experience of silence reveals a great richness and depth. Lawlor reports that silence plays an important part in Aboriginal culture, being observed by newly initiated boys while living together for many days in seclusion following their circumcision initiations.12 Here only sign language is used for communicating. Widowed women, Lawlor further reports, “express sorrow publicly by maintaining vows of silence, even after remarriage, for months and sometimes years after the death of a husband”.13 He suggests that this parallels Indian yoga—that is tantra— where “vows of silence are believed to instigate rapid inner changes”.14 Maori culture likewise attaches great significance to the epistemological qualities inherent in silence. It is through deep silence—a deep inner stillness—that other knowing spaces open up. It was through the medium of silence that the deep communicability of the natural world was known to Maori, where the inner voice of nature becomes perceptible. It is an expanded awareness of the communicability of the entire natural world.15 This, however, is not something
that is intellectual, rather it is experiential and intuitional. It is a subjective realisation that comes through living with the rhythm of the land, hearing the ‘voice’ of the earth, the sky, the ocean, the rivers—knowing the interconnectedness of all things through experiencing the state of Oneness with all things—a state known to initiatic cultures. It is a voice that is heard through silence, a deep inner stillness; and it is in silence that its mana is retained. Silence and the transcendental In Eastern traditions we likewise find a tremendous richness attached to silence. Taoist thought, for example, posits that the highest knowledge—the Tao “... can neither be seen nor heard”16—silence taking up, where sensebased communication leaves off. In Vedic culture, the communication of meaning is considered to be only weakly linked to language, its fuller expression lying beyond language. Interpersonal communication stands as secondary to intrapersonal communication which is itself consummated only in transpersonal communication—“in which oneness of the world is unambiguously perceived”.17 As such, ‘truth’ is not considered to relate closely with either language or rational logic, being more fully realised in the intuitive realm— something experienced inwardly. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also sensitive to this point: “Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it”.18 In Buddhist cultures the highest form of knowledge—absolute knowledge—is believed to be intuitional in nature, and the means by which it is communicated is through the medium of silence: “true communication is believed to occur only when one speaks without the mouth and when one hears without the ears”.19 This point is well attested in the silence evinced by the Buddha when asked “Does God exist?”, to which he gave no reply. When asked, “Then God does not exist”, he chose again not to enter into the limited spaces of verbal communication, thus privileging silence over sense-based communicative forms. Speaking to the same issue, tantric philosopher P. R. Sarkar asserts: The world of spirituality is far subtler than the world of intellectual ideation. The cruder aspect of the mental world comes within the power of expression of the indriyas [sensory and motor organs], but the spiritual world is totally beyond the scope of externalization. The subtler the feeling, the greater the difficulty in expressing it... Hence, the scriptures say
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that Brahma [the Supreme Entity], will never be polluted by words... the spiritual world is beyond the scope of verbal externalization.20
While it is possible within Sarkar’s cosmology for that Supreme Entity to be subjectively experienced—Eastern spiritual culture has attested to this for millennia—it is not possible for that experience to be objectively communicated to others. Thus he writes: The human intellect cannot say anything final about the Supreme Entity because human beings cannot perceive [that Entity] through the vibrations of body, mind and speech... The Guru tries to say something about the Supreme Entity but cannot because the moment he tries to explain the Supreme he comes within the scope of verbal expression. The disciple has the capacity to hear a discourse about the Supreme Entity, yet cannot because the discourse comes within the temporal factor. That’s why I say that the absolute cannot come within the scope of relativity. Under this circumstance the preceptor becomes dumb and the disciple becomes deaf.21
Layers of consciousness and communication Asserting, in the manner of indigenous and Eastern traditions, that whole worlds of communicative phenomena exist beyond the scope of the sensory and motor organs, is not to suggest that such subtle worlds cannot be known. For Sarkar (indeed, for Eastern transcendental traditions generally) reality is held to extend hierarchically across many vibrational spaces. Within this conception sensory and rational experience correlates with a vibrational field that is apprehensible via the sensory organs and rational consciousness. More subtle vibrational fields require for their apprehension a more subtle consciousness. Hence, we find in ancient and modern tantric tradition the notion that human beings possess a layered consciousness which extends from the ‘crude’, instinctual mind through, ultimately, to the transcendental or superconscious mind. Hence, we find in ancient and modern tantric tradition the notion that human beings possess a layered consciousness. This idea of multiple levels of being is not unknown within Western accounts. Habermas, for example, delineates three levels of consciousness at which human beings exist, and which are amenable to three different types of enquiry: the cognitive–instrumental, moral–practical and the aesthetic–expressive dimensions.22 Tehranian advances four very similar layers of
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human consciousness: ‘practical consciousness’, ‘instrumental consciousness’, ‘critical consciousness’ and ‘communicative consciousness’.23 Sarkar’s alternative model, however, looks rather different. He uses sanskrit terminologies of tantric discourse to denote five distinct levels of consciousness at which human beings exist. Each of these strata are amenable to a particular type of knowing. The first of these levels is the material or conscious layer of being, which is made knowable through reason and sense-inference. The second level is the subtle layer of being which correlates with rationality, logic and the intellect. The third, forth and fifth levels are collectively termed the causal—relating to the supramental, the subtle-subliminal and the subtle cosmic minds, respectively. These three higher layers of consciousness are not amenable to sense-based or intellectual investigation requiring, instead, the use of intuitional capacities. In this manner, for Sarkar, the self is understood to exist vertically and simultaneously across many different epistemological spaces, thus concurring, somewhat, with Nietzsche’s hypothesis that “The subject is a multiplicity”.24 We find within Aboriginal culture a similar acceptance that human consciousness extends beyond the domain of the conscious and subconscious states accepted within Western tradition. Indeed, the very notion of the Dreamtime is premised upon a layered approach to consciousness, where human beings possess a ‘dreaming consciousness’. This is reflected in the practice of ritual where participants enter states of trance consciousness, such as the circumcision ceremony where ‘death itself is confronted’, opening the way for one to be reborn into a higher—initiatic—consciousness. The sleep state also forms part of the Aborigine’s tapping into higher consciousness: Sleep is but one entrance into the Dreaming. The Aborigine’s education begins in developing awareness during sleep and during the hypnotic state. Becoming increasingly lucid in sleep—to the point of being able to act consciously in the dream world and to bring symbolic messages received while asleep into the awakened world—is the beginning of the initiation process for every tribal person.25
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Myth and ritual as communicative agencies
An expanded communicative community
It is due to the realisation that verbal expression and rational intellection suffer substantial communicative limitations that recourse is taken to myth, symbolism and ritual. These become the means by which deeper realities are experienced—not through the descriptive and objective medium of analytical language (an ‘intellectual’, rational experience)—but through the synthetic and mythic medium of ritual (a participatory and ‘meta-rational’ experience), as well as symbolic meaning. In connection to the myth and metaphor of Aboriginal Dreaming, Lawlor makes the following insightful comment:
Implicit in much of the foregoing is a clear challenge to the Western conception of the communicative community. Within Sarkar’s tantric worldview, Western society has been animated by the ideal of humanism, as has, it can be contended, its conception of the communicative community. Here the communicative community embraces all other human beings and gives communicative rights to the polities from which they come. Sarkar, in his elaboration of the ethical system he calls ‘neohumanism’, seeks to substantially expand these boundaries whereby the sentiment of human love and affection is now to be directed towards all beings—animate, inanimate and supersensible. Thus is the way opened for expanding the communicative community to embrace all beings, all lifeforms, all existentialities. Sarkar’s ontology of consciousness, wherein even inanimate phenomenological forms gain existential (rather than merely utilitarian) value, is substantially shared with Eastern and indigenous cultures. Thus we find in Chinese tradition the notion that: “all things are ultimately one, for all come from the same ch’i”.30 The old songs of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, tell of this same oneness: tjukurrtjana, that fundamental stream of being from which all differentiated expression arose.31 For Maori it is wairua, “the non-material, inseparable, metaphysical linkage of everything”.32 It is this idea of interconnectedness that so baffles the German philosopher and communication theorist, Jurgen Habermas. Indeed, to the rational and analytic mind these subtle realities remain cloaked in mystery. For Habermas these are merely symptoms of the “totalising power of the savage mind”.33 Even while Habermas asserts a commitment to “emancipation”—an “ideal speech situation”—it is not one in which indigenous and mystical cultures can share. Gregory Bateson, in contrast, displays a greater subtlety of thought, recognising both the limitations—the dogmas—manifest in the indigenous world, as well as their profound strengths. For Bateson, it is this loss of the sense of fundamental interconnectedness that marks Western ontology from the non-West:
A dreaming story is not necessarily factual or moralistic; rather, it is designed to open thoughts beyond conventional horizons and make visible the patterns underlying the history of the cosmos, earth, and humankind.26
As Lawlor further reports, it is through myth, symbolism and ritual that the Aborigines sought to capture the “internal–external reciprocity between humans and the creative forces of nature”.27 To live and experience the Dreaming is about “maintaining a sensitivity to an invisible, metaphysical prototype”. Gregory Bateson was sensitive to this indigenous worldview and their accompanying communicative genres (such as ritual) in their capacity to capture deeper meaning as “ritual statements of unity, involving all the participants in an integration with the meteorological cycle or with the ecology of totemic animals”.28 Ritual likewise plays an important part in the communicative culture of Maori. The simple act of entering into the meeting house is, at the mythic level of the culture, to enter into the ‘body’ of an ancestor. Thus one symbolically merges with—passes under the shelter of—that illustrious personality. We find a similar metaphor used in Aboriginal myth where the ancestor entered into may be a totemic animal, such as in the Rainbow Serpent stories “in which initiates are swallowed and disgorged... [illuminating] how in ritual, initiates enter an ancestor in order to be born again”.29 In tantra the only being with which one seeks to merge is the Supreme Being, and this takes place in the ideative realm, a profound communicative practice that unleashes tremendous spiritual energies which can become demonstrably manifest within the initiates psychic and even physical structures.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious than all the minor insanities that characterise
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those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity.34
Given the interconnectedness principle of these ‘older epistemologies’ along with the idea of higher and lower states of consciousness, which they likewise share, it ought not be surprising that communicative possibilities are held to exist beyond the domain of the human family. One such example of nonhuman participants within the expanded communicative community would be what Hindu tradition refers to as devas—non-physical, intelligent life-forms with which communicative possibilities exist. Sarkar invokes another term: luminous bodies. These communicable beings appear to have equivalence in many other cultures, such as the jinns of Islamic tradition, angels of the Christian tradition and atua of Maori culture. In relation to Aboriginal culture, Roland Robinson tells the following story: Leodardi, an Aboriginal singer and dancer at Milingimbi, told me that he did not compose his song– dances. They were given to him by spirits in the bush. These spirits, ritually painted, emerged and danced and sang as he stood silently watching them. Leodardi ‘caught’ the song, the dance, and the painting, and brought the song dance back to his tribe.35
A similar story is told by the Maori scholar and political leader, Sir Apirana Ngata. In his Nga Moteatea collection of traditional Maori songs, several are reported to have been given by ‘kehua’ or supernatural beings.36 Tantric tradition likewise admits of the possibility of communicative interchange between the human and non-human worlds. Sarkar relates a number of episodes from his own life. In one such encounter he relates an experience in a forest where he heard beautiful instrumental music: “I was sitting there alone when that intoxicating melody, that rapturous sound, came floating over the forest...”. Presently he happened upon the owner of these subtle sounds: “a young man about my age... His body was like a motion picture, a play of light and shadow”.37 What again distinguishes tantric tradition, however, is the placing of this type of communicative practice within the context of the spiritual. For Sarkar, human communication, when all is said and done, is only truly consummated when communication with Self is attained. It is a rare communicative moment, when the dualism of ‘I–Thou’ gives way to merger in the transcendental Source. All other communicative interactions—whether with
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physical or non-physical participants—ought not to disturb that deeper communicative journey. Thus, does the communicative community ultimately come to embrace the Supreme. Mantra and the communicative community As we have seen, there is within indigenous cultures a clear openness to expand the communicative community to embrace non-physical life forms. To walk onto the Maori marae (the forecourt fronting the meeting house) amidst the incantative wailing of old women is for the living to walk with the dead, for both have been summoned and both can quite discernibly be present. In this respect, there is clear evidence that the architects of the Maori language were aware of the science of sound vibration—the mantra of tantric tradition. In the West this knowledge belonged to the earth or pagan religions, which were, of course, ruthlessly extirpated by the zealots of Christian orthodoxy, culminating in the spectacle of the European witch hunts. The same necrotic tendency manifested more recently in the rapacious drive by European cultures for colonies, leading to the suppression of indigenous mystical wisdom: witness such anachronistic legislation as New Zealand’s Tohunga Suppression Act, 1907, which criminalised the Maori shaman. There is still, in the West, however, a memory of the communicative potency of mantra and incantation. These we find in the story books of children where tales of charms and spells abound. Towards communicative integration While the foregoing appraisal has tended towards dichotomising the world into consciousness-based and material-based approaches to communication, this is, of course, a simplification. Just as Eastern and indigenous communicative cultures are not only spiritual and silence based, Western communicative cultures are not only material and instrumental based. The deeper need of the moment is for an alternative conceptual map of human knowledge that acknowledges the epistemological ‘unity in diversity’—the coherent multiplicity of knowing spaces—and which includes different communication paradigms. What follows is an attempt at providing the outline of such a framework, one that does
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allow the subtle to exist alongside the material, the mundane to share space with the supramundane and the spiritual. As a mere outline the following model will raise many more questions than it will answer, however, it is hoped that it will provide at least an inspiration to others to refine and evolve this idea further. Figure 1 diagramatically seeks to capture the range of epistemological and communicative spaces that opened up in our review of Western and non-Western approaches to communication. In this model, communication is acknowledged to exist in a range of different strata and spheres. After tantric and indigenous tradition we can understand these to exist as vibratory fields. Hence, it becomes possible within this model to place a broad range of transcultural communicative phenomena within one or other of these interconnected vibrational spaces. In the light of our preceding consideration of Western, indigenous and mystical cultures, we are obliged to acknowledge four different spheres within which human communication can proceed. Sarkar provides the clearest articulation of these various spaces, to which
we can apply the following terminologies: the mundane, the supra-mundane, the psychospiritual and the pure spiritual.38 We will see from Figure 1, that each of these spheres (with the exception of the purespiritual) are depicted in our diagram as being comprised of different strata, what we have termed the lower stratum, the middle stratum and the higher stratum. This is to acknowledge the qualitative differences that exist between communicative phenomena occupying the same sphere. For example, a communicative interaction with an ATM—an Automatic Teller Machine—consisting of a simple question– answers interchange, (‘Do you want a receipt’, Yes or No) and the relative sophistication, say, of a highly rational discussion of theoretical physics, might both be happening within the mundane sphere, however, there would clearly be a qualitative difference between the two. Hence, the above model provides three delineations by which qualitative differences can be negotiated. Further subdivisions within each sphere (again excluding the pure-spiritual, and this time, the higher stratum of the psycho-spiritual sphere) would again emerge as necessary to
Figure 1. A layered approach to communication—multiple communication fields spanning the mundane, supra-mundane, psycho-spiritual and pure-spiritual spheres.
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further differentiate communicative acts within respective stratum. These further subdivisions—what we might call ‘aspects’—can be termed ‘integrated’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’. Negative-aspect communication could be defined as communication proceeding from the ego which has the effect, intended or otherwise, of asserting a ‘power-over’ relationship with other participants disposed towards self-gain. These are, of course, highly subjective categories; however, within this model subjective experiences are accorded considerable validity. Hence, manipulative communication guided by a sense of obtaining something for one’s self would fall within this negative aspect. An avidya tantric using hypnosis to extort money from another could be said to be occupying the lower (or even higher) stratum of the supra-mundane sphere in its negative aspect. The scene in the recently re-released movie Star Wars where Darth Vader holds up his thumb and forefinger leading to the death of one of his subordinates could likewise be considered as depicting a supra-mundane, negative-aspect communicative episode. The earlier quoted example of Leodardi, the aboriginal singer who ‘caught’ his songs from spirits, points towards a type of supra-mundane communication, in its neutral or integrated aspect. The same could be said for the visionary insights of thinkers such as Darwin and Einstein who, reports Anandamitra, acknowledged that intuitional flashes (communication from the supra-mundane sphere) played a far greater part than did rational logic (mundane sphere) in evolving their ideas.39 Psycho-spiritual communication concerns the movement of the mind from the psychic to the spiritual plane. The use in many Eastern spiritual traditions of mantra, wherein the concentrated mind of the meditator intones a certain potentized sound vibration disposed towards lifting the mind from a conscious to superconscious state, would be an example of psycho-spiritual communication in, we could say, its positive (integrated) aspect. The intoning of the mantra is clearly a psychic process, however, the destination (that towards which the mantra is disposed) is the pure-spiritual. Hence, it pertains to the psycho-spiritual sphere. In contrast, the yogii who’s unit mind merges into the non-qualified state of pure Consciousness—transcending the boundaries of knower and known, transcending the psy-
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chic plane altogether—can be said to be undergoing a ‘meta-communicative’ experience in the pure-spiritual sphere. At this level, communication (in the sense contemplated in this paper) ceases—the duality of subject and object having been transcended. While mind can internally experience ‘the Other’—all of that outside of itself up until the psycho-spiritual sphere—such that a communicative exchange can potentially take place (including the purely internal exchanges within an individual), in the pure-spiritual sphere this ‘dialogue’ ceases. Hence, it is fitting to describe this state—it being the culminating point in the communicative journey—as being ‘meta-communicative’.
A multiplicity of communication fields The present model, in its abbreviated and undeveloped form, identifies twenty-seven different communicative spaces from which human communication can proceed and be received (across four spheres, three strata and three aspects). A more elaborate model would include, potentially, many more such fields. Clearly, a good many points emerge which this brief elaboration leaves unaddressed. For example, where the communicator is acting out of, say, the lower stratum of the mundane sphere in its negative aspect (engaging in, say, verbal abuse), the question arises as to the different possible places in which one could receive the interaction. Everyday life shows us that negative or abusive communication typically leads to a similar response. This model clarifies the many other spaces that are potentially available by which the receiver in the above communicative episode could receive the exchange. The example of Buddha remaining silent when questioned by his disciples regarding the existence of God suggests that the communicative space occupied by the disciples (which privileged the verbal) was very different from the space in which Buddha was situated (which denied the verbal). A good deal of apparently ‘failed communication’ can be traced to the different communication fields in which the communicating parties are situated, each of which privileges different communication practices. This accounts for a good deal of the difficulty indigenous peoples (with clear roots in the supra-mundane) have communicating within more rational and mundane
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Western spaces. The present model provides novel insights as to why this could be so. Learning from the other As we come together across cultural, subcultural, civilizational and gender boundaries to create new futures we need to be aware that consigning that collective process exclusively to any one sphere (typically the mundane), is to perpetuate a form of cultural and communicative violence. This seriously mitigates against transcultural involvement and the pursuit of a potent unified diversity. At a time when we desperately require an alliance with the Other—a harmonious blending of all progressive voices—we can scarce afford to ignore this point. This is not, therefore, merely a request to accommodate the communicative needs of the mystical and the indigenous. Many other spaces need to be negotiated to include such communities as the elders of all cultures, children, youth, the marginalised and incarcerated, those with disabilities and women. Viable communicative spaces need to be evolved and processes explored whereby meaningful connections can be established between these disparate communities. What will not suffice at this critical juncture will be continued separatism and receding behind the veil of a ‘negative’ silence. While it may be true that this ideal of a diverse, but unified, communicative community speaking—and not speaking—in many different tones, in many different rhythms, from many different communicative spaces, may well be without precedent in human history, it need not deter us. The times that are upon us are in many and profound ways without precedent: these are, indeed, epoch making times. The future is ours to make: a personal comment As futurists have long contended, if we do not make the future it will be made for us. We are all well aware of the tremendous resources (material and human) wielded by those vested interests arrayed across this planet for whom ‘preferred futures’ means—emphatically— more of the same. And yet, in the light of what has preceded, it can meaningfully be said that most of those resources are of the mundane sphere—being material and instrumental
(psycho-rational) in nature.40 Just as the subtle and spiritual spheres are vastly greater in their communicative expansiveness than the mundane (see Figure 1), so too are the potencies they yield forth. It is not at all, in this model, a quantitative question—it is far more a qualitative one. Very few people consciously and concertedly acting out of an integrated subtle and spiritual space can, in this model, exert a profoundly disproportionate impact on things. However, history graphically reminds us that human beings have the capacity to wield this tremendous potency in absolutely negative ways—the hypnotic oratory and occult symbolism41 of Adolf Hitler being the best known in recent times. This ought to dramatically alert us to the need to remain ever within integrated rather than ego space as we carry out our work—so much more so when we enter into the subtle spheres. It is well arguable that we do not have unlimited amounts of time to move into these new spaces, to take up these new ways of working, these new ways of communicating. The crisis of the West demands inspired action now.
Notes and references 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7.
8. 9. 10.
Elgin, D., Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness. William Morrow, New York, 1993, p. 14. Hayne, A., Review of ‘Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era’, http://www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/ researcher/issueXI-2/hayne.html. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1993. Bateson, G. and Bateson, M., Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. MacMillan, New York, 1987, p. 52. Harman, W., Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century. Knowledge Systems Inc., Indiana, 1988, p. 9. Fisher, W., Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1988. Stevenson, T. and Lennie, J., Anticipating applications for digital video communications: two scenarios for Australia. Technology Studies, 1995, 2(1). Hamelink, C., Emancipation or domestication: toward a utopian science of communication. Journal of Communication, 1983, 33(3), 75. Jones, R., Didier Eribon: Michel Foucault. Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, 1993, 22(6), 435. Tehranian, M., Technologies of Power: Infor-
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11.
12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17.
18.
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mation, Machines and Democratic Prospects. Ablex Publishers, Norwood, 1990. Saville-Troike, M., The place of silence in an integrated theory of communication. In Perspectives on Silence, eds. Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike. Ablex Publishing, Norwood, 1985, p. 12. Lawlor, R., Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Inner Traditions, Vermont, 1991, p. 193. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid. An example to illustrate this point took place when I attended a traditional Maori funeral several years ago. As the motorcade arrived at the Meeting House and the several hundred people gathered to move onto the marae (forecourt) for the formal speechmaking, a tremendous wind rose up. For the entire period of the orations (over an hour) scarcely a single word was heard, being swept away into the yonder valley by the wind. For the next two days the same scenario unfolded—with each party of visitors to be welcomed, this same wind rose up. Intuitively many of the people present understood that this had great symbolic meaning, some intuiting that it represented the Maori psychospiritual state of disharmony known as ‘hau-rangi’—where the mind (rangi) is likened to the wind (hau), moving about vigorously in a state of instability. The deceased had suicided. The question being asked was ‘Who will be the one to stop the wind?’. It was intuitively understood that only a person whose words carried great spiritual mana would be sufficient to the task. Late on the second day, a small group of manuhiri (visitors) arrived. Again the wind started. The words of the first of the two speakers for the visiting party suffered a similar fate as those who had preceded him. However, as the second speaker rose holding his talking stick and intoning a traditional chant, the wind dramatically and instantly stopped. This Maori elder, well known around the island for his simple and traditional spiritual wisdom, carried, in his words—and his tears—the potency of truth. This episode, perhaps, was to remind the living, and especially the eldership, that more than anything it is spiritual truth, and simplicity that our young seek after today. See also Brailsford, B., The Song of Waitaha: The Histories of a Nation. Ngatapuwae Trust, Christchurch, 1994. Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching, http://www.cnd.org/ BIG5... osophers/Lao—Zi.txt.html. Dissanayake, W., The guiding image in Indian culture and its implications for communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 156. Emerson, R. W., The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays. Henry Frowde, Oxford, 1906, p. 177.
19. Yum, J.-O., Korean philosophy and communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 85. 20. Anandamurti, S. S., Subhasita Samgraha, Part 21. Ananda Marga Publishers, Calcutta, 1994, p. 31. 21. Sarkar, P. R., Ideation on Brahma, file i& w10th.txt. In The Electronic Edition of the Works of P.R. Sarkar, Version 4.0. Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1993. 22. Habermas, J., Modernity—an incomplete project. In Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Pluto Press, London, 1983. 23. Tehranian, M., Communication and theories of social change: a communitarian perspective. Asian Journal of Communication, 2(1). 24. White, D. and Hellerick, G., Nietzsche at the Mall: deconstructing the consumer. WWW: http://www.ctheory.com/a-nietzsche—at— the—mall.ht, 1995. 25. Lawlor, op cit, ref. 12, p. 50. 26. Ibid., p. 151. 27. Ibid., p. 49. 28. Bateson and Bateson, op cit, ref. 4, p. 55. 29. Robinson, R., Legend and Dreaming: Legends of the Dream Time of the Australian Aborigines. Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1966, p. 9. 30. Chung-Ying Cheng, Chinese philosophy and human communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 27. 31. Lawlor, op cit, ref. 12, p. 266. 32. Richie, J., Becoming Bicultural. Huia Publishers, Wellington, 1992, p. 67. 33. Habermas, J., The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Beacon Press, Boston, 1984, p. 45. 34. Bateson, G., Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Wildwood, London, 1979, p. 18. 35. Robinson, op cit, ref. 29, p. xii. 36. Ngata, A., Nga Moteatea (The Songs): A Selection of Annotated Tribal Songs of the Maori with English Translation. A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1961. 37. Sarkar, P. R., Shabda Cayanika, Part 2. Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1996, pp. 125– 126. 38. The mundane broadly corresponds with the physical plane and the knowledge associated with it. Supra-mundane literally refers to ‘that which is beyond the mundane’—it is the subtle and psychic plane. Sarkar invokes the term ‘psycho-spiritual’ to denote that plane where there is movement from the psychic towards the spiritual plane. The pure-spiritual is the plane of pure Consciousness, beyond mind. 39. Anandamitra, A., The Spiritual Philosophy of Shrii Shrii Anandamurti: A Commentary on
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Ananda Sutram. Ananda Marga Publications, Denver, 1981, p. 142. 40. It is arguable that an exception to this would be the advertising, marketing and mass media industries which could be said to access in certain instances, subtle subliminal levels (the supra-mundane). Since this is typically disposed towards personal gain—financial profit—this type of ‘manipulative’ communication could be said to fall within the negative aspect of the supra-mundane sphere. In this model their is no longer a simple linear relationship between sender and receiver, nor merely a polysemic relationship, which, in emphasizing multiple meanings, still remains at a cognitive level. The multiple field theory model advanced in this paper acknowledges the energetic— vibrational—level that is also at work. Since, ontologically, within this model, everything is vibrational, we can come to understand communication as being the creation of vibrational spaces. It is not, therefore, simply the ‘message’ that is at work (the cognitive level), but also, the vibrational space that the message and the medium through which the message is conveyed, opens up. In a very real sense, public and private space becomes colonized by the vibrational frequencies of these type of mass communications. Or, put the other way around, human societies exist within ‘vibrationally colonised’ spaces—energetic fields that extend from the individual, household, community, regional, national, cultural and civilisational levels. In current formal models we can look to Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields as being relevant here, Jung’s collective unconscious or more probably, Sarkar’s theory of microvita. We can speculate that these energetic fields are microvitic structures that exist at
many layers (from micro (individual) to macro (civilisational) levels). For example, a typical Western university could be understood to have a particular type of microvitic structure encapsulating it. This would be generated by the type of mental, behavioural and cultural activities that take place within that space. Hence, to enter onto a university campus is to enter into a specific microvitic/energetic field. That space has been colonised by a dominant ‘archetype’ on the subtle (energy) level. The pervasiveness of this subtle structure will work to colonise the ‘individual space’ of those who enter within that energetic field. For this reason there will be a tendency towards ‘conformity’ in the mental stratum, including the modes of communication (rational–mundane). Where a person possesses an individual vibration vastly different from the dominant macro-field (the university in this case), there will be an inevitable tension; indeed, the tendency will, theoretically, be towards capitulation or conformity. Intuitively aware of this hypothesized level of reality, indigenous people such as Maori, have for a long time understood the need to conduct negotiations with Government in ‘Maori space’, where the dominant microvitic structures will privilege the supra-mundane. To this extent, we could expect very different outcomes from a futures workshop held in a university, as opposed to one held with, and in the traditional space of, the local indigenous community. 41. It is not widely known in the West that the symbol utilised by the Nazis—the swastika—is an ancient spiritual symbol utilised by numerous cultures, including those of the Indian subcontinent. It is widely seen throughout Asia and signifies permanent spiritual victory. The word itself is from Sanskrit.
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PII: S0016–3287(98)00030-5
ESSAY Beyond the dominant paradigm Embracing the indigenous and the transcendental Ramana Williams
The Western modernist–postmodernist project is in crisis. Integral to that crisis is the ‘crisis in communication’. This paper seeks to expand the communication futures discourse by moving into non-Western cultural spaces: those of indigenous and mystical traditions. Here we examine the communicative potency of silence, transpersonal communication with Self, and a vastly expanded communicative community. Are these diverse, transcultural approaches to communication reconcilable, or is cultural diversity synonymous with cultural relativism? Do we, in fact, require a new conceptual map of human knowledge which includes different communication paradigms, capable of embracing the mundane and the material as well as the subtle and the spiritual? Answers to these questions, it is suggested, will be crucial in allowing meaningful alliances to be forged with the Other, with whom our preferred futures can become potent realities. 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved If humanity is successful in building an enduring civilization on the Earth, then it will come from the synergy of the collective experience and wisdom of the entire human family.
Duane Elgin, Awakening Earth1
Ramana Williams is a spiritual teacher and freelance writer currently based in Brisbane, Australia. He has an academic background in political science and, more recently, in communications research, working with the Communication Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. The predominant influences on his work come from the socio-spiritual teachings in tantra, from his practical background in Maori mysticism, and from the neo-humanistic philosophy of P. R. Sarkar. He can be contacted c/o the Communication Centre, Queensland University of Technology, PO Box 2434, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia (Tel: + 61 7 3864 1813; fax: + 61 7 3864 2192).
In search of balance In the midst of unprecedented material wealth, the Western (post)modernist project has become strangely pathological, ‘predatory’ even, as one writer recently put it: “L.A. driveby shootings, a ‘gulf war’ fashion show; serial killer trading cards...”.2 And yet it is not only the Western centre that has manifested the symptoms of cultural collapse. We find similar realities in such peripheral zones as Australia and New Zealand where the second biggest killer of young people today is ‘self-inflicted death’.3 In the face of these shocking statements of cultural malaise the non-West might well be declaring ‘We told you so!’. Still, one is left wondering how it all came to be so spectacularly out of balance. Progress towards answering this question would seem to be an indispensable part of working towards the solution.
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One such domain of thought that seems compelling in this regard, asserts that the definitive clue to understanding this complex matter lies at the level of cultural consciousness. That somehow these realities are self-created—the materialisation, if you will, of a pervasive cultural thought-projection—the origins of which lie at the core of a cultures’ belief systems—its ontology, cosmology and epistemology; that is to say, the fundamental premises of its worldview. This model implies self-responsibility: we in the West have knowingly or unknowingly created this reality by virtue of how we, as a culture, have come to think about the world, how we understand the world, and what passes as truth within that world. By cultural consciousness we are, therefore, substantially speaking about cultural epistemologies—our ‘ways of knowing’, and how these ways of knowing perpetuate and then legitimate certain cultural and material activities in the world. Within the West the epistemology that came to assume prominence in recent centuries has been overwhelmingly materialist and reductionist in nature, be it the empiricism of the physical sciences or the dialectical materialism of Marxist thinking, which along with empiricism, enamoured much of social science. It was this predominance of philosophical materialism, that Bateson declared to be “central to—at the root of—the epistemological nightmare of the twentieth century”.4 Lewis Mumford in concurring with Bateson, pointed to the need for “a new metaphysical and ideological base... a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of man”.5 The present paper is equally motivated by this seeking out of a more enlightened perspective, this ‘new metaphysic’, but seeks to do so in relation to a single and specific domain of human activity, namely, human communication. While progress will inevitably be required in all domains of human life (both intellectually and practically as well as at the individual and collective level) there can be little doubt that how we communicate and what we understand ‘communication’ to be, will be pivotal to this broader process of social transformation—the pervasive shifting of the cultural paradigm. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that communication—and the paradigms that define it—are so fundamental to the human experience that ‘homo narrans’ (communicating beings) stands as a
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close contender to ‘homo sapiens’ as the correct designation of our species.6 However, as one might expect, a significant body of communication scholars have asserted that the ‘nightmarish’ deficiencies Bateson identifies at the meta-level of Western philosophy are well discernible within communications discourse. Sensing something of the theoretical limitations currently afflicting the field, Rice and Williams asserted cautiously that “we may have to not only rethink current communication theories but, indeed, borrow from other disciplines...”.7 Other communication scholars identified dominant ways of knowing as being crucial to the conceptual limitations confronting the field. Hamelink asserted that a fuller understanding of human communication—other dimensions and possible futures—might be realized once the ‘methodological exclusivism’ apparent in Western scholarship, is critiqued and broken out of and alternative ways of knowing explored.8 In a similar vein Jones called for “... an epistemological break with the pre-given constructs through which we are allowed to perceive the world”.9 In seeking out such a decisive break with dominant frameworks, the focus of this paper is on alternative cultural experiences of communication. We look at three non-Western cultures: Maori, Aboriginal and the socio-spiritual culture of tantra. What emerges from this broad, transcultural purview of the field is the presence of a range of powerful communicative concepts which motivate quite different communicative practices and possibilities. These alternative conceptions cannot meaningfully be understood in isolation from the approaches to knowing that underlie them. To this extent, we consider also their epistemological origins. Our consideration of these non-Western models works, by implication, to deconstruct Western approaches to communication. However, as will clearly emerge as we progress, the tenor of this paper is not to limit the discourse, by denying Western models, but rather to expand it by considering alternatives which complement present understanding. This suggests an integrated conceptual model sufficient to the task of reconciling these different communicative realities. The paper concludes with a consideration of one such model that attempts to do this.
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Reclaiming silence There has been, in recent years, a renewed interest within Western communication discourse concerning the significance silence plays in how we communicate. The question has been asked, ‘Can communication be a silent—non-sensory—activity?’ Tehranian asserts that it most certainly can be, that everything human beings do has some communicative dimension to it, leading to the assertion that, “we cannot not communicate”.10 While we find within Western discourse an emergent acceptance of this concept, when placed within the larger domain of transcultural approaches to communication, we find that Western conceptions of silence carry rather a rationalist inflection, reflecting, arguably, their origins within the dominant approach to knowing.11 Hence, silence has often been considered important because it denied the voice of the other—women, minorities, alternative epistemic communities. This was silence as oppression—negative silence. While this has been a rich and important part of the journey to more fully understand communication, it cannot be said to capture the fullness of the communicative potency of silence. This becomes the inevitable conclusion once we place this insight alongside non-Western experiences of communication. The indigenous experience of silence reveals a great richness and depth. Lawlor reports that silence plays an important part in Aboriginal culture, being observed by newly initiated boys while living together for many days in seclusion following their circumcision initiations.12 Here only sign language is used for communicating. Widowed women, Lawlor further reports, “express sorrow publicly by maintaining vows of silence, even after remarriage, for months and sometimes years after the death of a husband”.13 He suggests that this parallels Indian yoga—that is tantra— where “vows of silence are believed to instigate rapid inner changes”.14 Maori culture likewise attaches great significance to the epistemological qualities inherent in silence. It is through deep silence—a deep inner stillness—that other knowing spaces open up. It was through the medium of silence that the deep communicability of the natural world was known to Maori, where the inner voice of nature becomes perceptible. It is an expanded awareness of the communicability of the entire natural world.15 This, however, is not something
that is intellectual, rather it is experiential and intuitional. It is a subjective realisation that comes through living with the rhythm of the land, hearing the ‘voice’ of the earth, the sky, the ocean, the rivers—knowing the interconnectedness of all things through experiencing the state of Oneness with all things—a state known to initiatic cultures. It is a voice that is heard through silence, a deep inner stillness; and it is in silence that its mana is retained. Silence and the transcendental In Eastern traditions we likewise find a tremendous richness attached to silence. Taoist thought, for example, posits that the highest knowledge—the Tao “... can neither be seen nor heard”16—silence taking up, where sensebased communication leaves off. In Vedic culture, the communication of meaning is considered to be only weakly linked to language, its fuller expression lying beyond language. Interpersonal communication stands as secondary to intrapersonal communication which is itself consummated only in transpersonal communication—“in which oneness of the world is unambiguously perceived”.17 As such, ‘truth’ is not considered to relate closely with either language or rational logic, being more fully realised in the intuitive realm— something experienced inwardly. Ralph Waldo Emerson was also sensitive to this point: “Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it”.18 In Buddhist cultures the highest form of knowledge—absolute knowledge—is believed to be intuitional in nature, and the means by which it is communicated is through the medium of silence: “true communication is believed to occur only when one speaks without the mouth and when one hears without the ears”.19 This point is well attested in the silence evinced by the Buddha when asked “Does God exist?”, to which he gave no reply. When asked, “Then God does not exist”, he chose again not to enter into the limited spaces of verbal communication, thus privileging silence over sense-based communicative forms. Speaking to the same issue, tantric philosopher P. R. Sarkar asserts: The world of spirituality is far subtler than the world of intellectual ideation. The cruder aspect of the mental world comes within the power of expression of the indriyas [sensory and motor organs], but the spiritual world is totally beyond the scope of externalization. The subtler the feeling, the greater the difficulty in expressing it... Hence, the scriptures say
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that Brahma [the Supreme Entity], will never be polluted by words... the spiritual world is beyond the scope of verbal externalization.20
While it is possible within Sarkar’s cosmology for that Supreme Entity to be subjectively experienced—Eastern spiritual culture has attested to this for millennia—it is not possible for that experience to be objectively communicated to others. Thus he writes: The human intellect cannot say anything final about the Supreme Entity because human beings cannot perceive [that Entity] through the vibrations of body, mind and speech... The Guru tries to say something about the Supreme Entity but cannot because the moment he tries to explain the Supreme he comes within the scope of verbal expression. The disciple has the capacity to hear a discourse about the Supreme Entity, yet cannot because the discourse comes within the temporal factor. That’s why I say that the absolute cannot come within the scope of relativity. Under this circumstance the preceptor becomes dumb and the disciple becomes deaf.21
Layers of consciousness and communication Asserting, in the manner of indigenous and Eastern traditions, that whole worlds of communicative phenomena exist beyond the scope of the sensory and motor organs, is not to suggest that such subtle worlds cannot be known. For Sarkar (indeed, for Eastern transcendental traditions generally) reality is held to extend hierarchically across many vibrational spaces. Within this conception sensory and rational experience correlates with a vibrational field that is apprehensible via the sensory organs and rational consciousness. More subtle vibrational fields require for their apprehension a more subtle consciousness. Hence, we find in ancient and modern tantric tradition the notion that human beings possess a layered consciousness which extends from the ‘crude’, instinctual mind through, ultimately, to the transcendental or superconscious mind. Hence, we find in ancient and modern tantric tradition the notion that human beings possess a layered consciousness. This idea of multiple levels of being is not unknown within Western accounts. Habermas, for example, delineates three levels of consciousness at which human beings exist, and which are amenable to three different types of enquiry: the cognitive–instrumental, moral–practical and the aesthetic–expressive dimensions.22 Tehranian advances four very similar layers of
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human consciousness: ‘practical consciousness’, ‘instrumental consciousness’, ‘critical consciousness’ and ‘communicative consciousness’.23 Sarkar’s alternative model, however, looks rather different. He uses sanskrit terminologies of tantric discourse to denote five distinct levels of consciousness at which human beings exist. Each of these strata are amenable to a particular type of knowing. The first of these levels is the material or conscious layer of being, which is made knowable through reason and sense-inference. The second level is the subtle layer of being which correlates with rationality, logic and the intellect. The third, forth and fifth levels are collectively termed the causal—relating to the supramental, the subtle-subliminal and the subtle cosmic minds, respectively. These three higher layers of consciousness are not amenable to sense-based or intellectual investigation requiring, instead, the use of intuitional capacities. In this manner, for Sarkar, the self is understood to exist vertically and simultaneously across many different epistemological spaces, thus concurring, somewhat, with Nietzsche’s hypothesis that “The subject is a multiplicity”.24 We find within Aboriginal culture a similar acceptance that human consciousness extends beyond the domain of the conscious and subconscious states accepted within Western tradition. Indeed, the very notion of the Dreamtime is premised upon a layered approach to consciousness, where human beings possess a ‘dreaming consciousness’. This is reflected in the practice of ritual where participants enter states of trance consciousness, such as the circumcision ceremony where ‘death itself is confronted’, opening the way for one to be reborn into a higher—initiatic—consciousness. The sleep state also forms part of the Aborigine’s tapping into higher consciousness: Sleep is but one entrance into the Dreaming. The Aborigine’s education begins in developing awareness during sleep and during the hypnotic state. Becoming increasingly lucid in sleep—to the point of being able to act consciously in the dream world and to bring symbolic messages received while asleep into the awakened world—is the beginning of the initiation process for every tribal person.25
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Myth and ritual as communicative agencies
An expanded communicative community
It is due to the realisation that verbal expression and rational intellection suffer substantial communicative limitations that recourse is taken to myth, symbolism and ritual. These become the means by which deeper realities are experienced—not through the descriptive and objective medium of analytical language (an ‘intellectual’, rational experience)—but through the synthetic and mythic medium of ritual (a participatory and ‘meta-rational’ experience), as well as symbolic meaning. In connection to the myth and metaphor of Aboriginal Dreaming, Lawlor makes the following insightful comment:
Implicit in much of the foregoing is a clear challenge to the Western conception of the communicative community. Within Sarkar’s tantric worldview, Western society has been animated by the ideal of humanism, as has, it can be contended, its conception of the communicative community. Here the communicative community embraces all other human beings and gives communicative rights to the polities from which they come. Sarkar, in his elaboration of the ethical system he calls ‘neohumanism’, seeks to substantially expand these boundaries whereby the sentiment of human love and affection is now to be directed towards all beings—animate, inanimate and supersensible. Thus is the way opened for expanding the communicative community to embrace all beings, all lifeforms, all existentialities. Sarkar’s ontology of consciousness, wherein even inanimate phenomenological forms gain existential (rather than merely utilitarian) value, is substantially shared with Eastern and indigenous cultures. Thus we find in Chinese tradition the notion that: “all things are ultimately one, for all come from the same ch’i”.30 The old songs of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, tell of this same oneness: tjukurrtjana, that fundamental stream of being from which all differentiated expression arose.31 For Maori it is wairua, “the non-material, inseparable, metaphysical linkage of everything”.32 It is this idea of interconnectedness that so baffles the German philosopher and communication theorist, Jurgen Habermas. Indeed, to the rational and analytic mind these subtle realities remain cloaked in mystery. For Habermas these are merely symptoms of the “totalising power of the savage mind”.33 Even while Habermas asserts a commitment to “emancipation”—an “ideal speech situation”—it is not one in which indigenous and mystical cultures can share. Gregory Bateson, in contrast, displays a greater subtlety of thought, recognising both the limitations—the dogmas—manifest in the indigenous world, as well as their profound strengths. For Bateson, it is this loss of the sense of fundamental interconnectedness that marks Western ontology from the non-West:
A dreaming story is not necessarily factual or moralistic; rather, it is designed to open thoughts beyond conventional horizons and make visible the patterns underlying the history of the cosmos, earth, and humankind.26
As Lawlor further reports, it is through myth, symbolism and ritual that the Aborigines sought to capture the “internal–external reciprocity between humans and the creative forces of nature”.27 To live and experience the Dreaming is about “maintaining a sensitivity to an invisible, metaphysical prototype”. Gregory Bateson was sensitive to this indigenous worldview and their accompanying communicative genres (such as ritual) in their capacity to capture deeper meaning as “ritual statements of unity, involving all the participants in an integration with the meteorological cycle or with the ecology of totemic animals”.28 Ritual likewise plays an important part in the communicative culture of Maori. The simple act of entering into the meeting house is, at the mythic level of the culture, to enter into the ‘body’ of an ancestor. Thus one symbolically merges with—passes under the shelter of—that illustrious personality. We find a similar metaphor used in Aboriginal myth where the ancestor entered into may be a totemic animal, such as in the Rainbow Serpent stories “in which initiates are swallowed and disgorged... [illuminating] how in ritual, initiates enter an ancestor in order to be born again”.29 In tantra the only being with which one seeks to merge is the Supreme Being, and this takes place in the ideative realm, a profound communicative practice that unleashes tremendous spiritual energies which can become demonstrably manifest within the initiates psychic and even physical structures.
I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious than all the minor insanities that characterise
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those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity.34
Given the interconnectedness principle of these ‘older epistemologies’ along with the idea of higher and lower states of consciousness, which they likewise share, it ought not be surprising that communicative possibilities are held to exist beyond the domain of the human family. One such example of nonhuman participants within the expanded communicative community would be what Hindu tradition refers to as devas—non-physical, intelligent life-forms with which communicative possibilities exist. Sarkar invokes another term: luminous bodies. These communicable beings appear to have equivalence in many other cultures, such as the jinns of Islamic tradition, angels of the Christian tradition and atua of Maori culture. In relation to Aboriginal culture, Roland Robinson tells the following story: Leodardi, an Aboriginal singer and dancer at Milingimbi, told me that he did not compose his song– dances. They were given to him by spirits in the bush. These spirits, ritually painted, emerged and danced and sang as he stood silently watching them. Leodardi ‘caught’ the song, the dance, and the painting, and brought the song dance back to his tribe.35
A similar story is told by the Maori scholar and political leader, Sir Apirana Ngata. In his Nga Moteatea collection of traditional Maori songs, several are reported to have been given by ‘kehua’ or supernatural beings.36 Tantric tradition likewise admits of the possibility of communicative interchange between the human and non-human worlds. Sarkar relates a number of episodes from his own life. In one such encounter he relates an experience in a forest where he heard beautiful instrumental music: “I was sitting there alone when that intoxicating melody, that rapturous sound, came floating over the forest...”. Presently he happened upon the owner of these subtle sounds: “a young man about my age... His body was like a motion picture, a play of light and shadow”.37 What again distinguishes tantric tradition, however, is the placing of this type of communicative practice within the context of the spiritual. For Sarkar, human communication, when all is said and done, is only truly consummated when communication with Self is attained. It is a rare communicative moment, when the dualism of ‘I–Thou’ gives way to merger in the transcendental Source. All other communicative interactions—whether with
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physical or non-physical participants—ought not to disturb that deeper communicative journey. Thus, does the communicative community ultimately come to embrace the Supreme. Mantra and the communicative community As we have seen, there is within indigenous cultures a clear openness to expand the communicative community to embrace non-physical life forms. To walk onto the Maori marae (the forecourt fronting the meeting house) amidst the incantative wailing of old women is for the living to walk with the dead, for both have been summoned and both can quite discernibly be present. In this respect, there is clear evidence that the architects of the Maori language were aware of the science of sound vibration—the mantra of tantric tradition. In the West this knowledge belonged to the earth or pagan religions, which were, of course, ruthlessly extirpated by the zealots of Christian orthodoxy, culminating in the spectacle of the European witch hunts. The same necrotic tendency manifested more recently in the rapacious drive by European cultures for colonies, leading to the suppression of indigenous mystical wisdom: witness such anachronistic legislation as New Zealand’s Tohunga Suppression Act, 1907, which criminalised the Maori shaman. There is still, in the West, however, a memory of the communicative potency of mantra and incantation. These we find in the story books of children where tales of charms and spells abound. Towards communicative integration While the foregoing appraisal has tended towards dichotomising the world into consciousness-based and material-based approaches to communication, this is, of course, a simplification. Just as Eastern and indigenous communicative cultures are not only spiritual and silence based, Western communicative cultures are not only material and instrumental based. The deeper need of the moment is for an alternative conceptual map of human knowledge that acknowledges the epistemological ‘unity in diversity’—the coherent multiplicity of knowing spaces—and which includes different communication paradigms. What follows is an attempt at providing the outline of such a framework, one that does
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allow the subtle to exist alongside the material, the mundane to share space with the supramundane and the spiritual. As a mere outline the following model will raise many more questions than it will answer, however, it is hoped that it will provide at least an inspiration to others to refine and evolve this idea further. Figure 1 diagramatically seeks to capture the range of epistemological and communicative spaces that opened up in our review of Western and non-Western approaches to communication. In this model, communication is acknowledged to exist in a range of different strata and spheres. After tantric and indigenous tradition we can understand these to exist as vibratory fields. Hence, it becomes possible within this model to place a broad range of transcultural communicative phenomena within one or other of these interconnected vibrational spaces. In the light of our preceding consideration of Western, indigenous and mystical cultures, we are obliged to acknowledge four different spheres within which human communication can proceed. Sarkar provides the clearest articulation of these various spaces, to which
we can apply the following terminologies: the mundane, the supra-mundane, the psychospiritual and the pure spiritual.38 We will see from Figure 1, that each of these spheres (with the exception of the purespiritual) are depicted in our diagram as being comprised of different strata, what we have termed the lower stratum, the middle stratum and the higher stratum. This is to acknowledge the qualitative differences that exist between communicative phenomena occupying the same sphere. For example, a communicative interaction with an ATM—an Automatic Teller Machine—consisting of a simple question– answers interchange, (‘Do you want a receipt’, Yes or No) and the relative sophistication, say, of a highly rational discussion of theoretical physics, might both be happening within the mundane sphere, however, there would clearly be a qualitative difference between the two. Hence, the above model provides three delineations by which qualitative differences can be negotiated. Further subdivisions within each sphere (again excluding the pure-spiritual, and this time, the higher stratum of the psycho-spiritual sphere) would again emerge as necessary to
Figure 1. A layered approach to communication—multiple communication fields spanning the mundane, supra-mundane, psycho-spiritual and pure-spiritual spheres.
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further differentiate communicative acts within respective stratum. These further subdivisions—what we might call ‘aspects’—can be termed ‘integrated’, ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’. Negative-aspect communication could be defined as communication proceeding from the ego which has the effect, intended or otherwise, of asserting a ‘power-over’ relationship with other participants disposed towards self-gain. These are, of course, highly subjective categories; however, within this model subjective experiences are accorded considerable validity. Hence, manipulative communication guided by a sense of obtaining something for one’s self would fall within this negative aspect. An avidya tantric using hypnosis to extort money from another could be said to be occupying the lower (or even higher) stratum of the supra-mundane sphere in its negative aspect. The scene in the recently re-released movie Star Wars where Darth Vader holds up his thumb and forefinger leading to the death of one of his subordinates could likewise be considered as depicting a supra-mundane, negative-aspect communicative episode. The earlier quoted example of Leodardi, the aboriginal singer who ‘caught’ his songs from spirits, points towards a type of supra-mundane communication, in its neutral or integrated aspect. The same could be said for the visionary insights of thinkers such as Darwin and Einstein who, reports Anandamitra, acknowledged that intuitional flashes (communication from the supra-mundane sphere) played a far greater part than did rational logic (mundane sphere) in evolving their ideas.39 Psycho-spiritual communication concerns the movement of the mind from the psychic to the spiritual plane. The use in many Eastern spiritual traditions of mantra, wherein the concentrated mind of the meditator intones a certain potentized sound vibration disposed towards lifting the mind from a conscious to superconscious state, would be an example of psycho-spiritual communication in, we could say, its positive (integrated) aspect. The intoning of the mantra is clearly a psychic process, however, the destination (that towards which the mantra is disposed) is the pure-spiritual. Hence, it pertains to the psycho-spiritual sphere. In contrast, the yogii who’s unit mind merges into the non-qualified state of pure Consciousness—transcending the boundaries of knower and known, transcending the psy-
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chic plane altogether—can be said to be undergoing a ‘meta-communicative’ experience in the pure-spiritual sphere. At this level, communication (in the sense contemplated in this paper) ceases—the duality of subject and object having been transcended. While mind can internally experience ‘the Other’—all of that outside of itself up until the psycho-spiritual sphere—such that a communicative exchange can potentially take place (including the purely internal exchanges within an individual), in the pure-spiritual sphere this ‘dialogue’ ceases. Hence, it is fitting to describe this state—it being the culminating point in the communicative journey—as being ‘meta-communicative’.
A multiplicity of communication fields The present model, in its abbreviated and undeveloped form, identifies twenty-seven different communicative spaces from which human communication can proceed and be received (across four spheres, three strata and three aspects). A more elaborate model would include, potentially, many more such fields. Clearly, a good many points emerge which this brief elaboration leaves unaddressed. For example, where the communicator is acting out of, say, the lower stratum of the mundane sphere in its negative aspect (engaging in, say, verbal abuse), the question arises as to the different possible places in which one could receive the interaction. Everyday life shows us that negative or abusive communication typically leads to a similar response. This model clarifies the many other spaces that are potentially available by which the receiver in the above communicative episode could receive the exchange. The example of Buddha remaining silent when questioned by his disciples regarding the existence of God suggests that the communicative space occupied by the disciples (which privileged the verbal) was very different from the space in which Buddha was situated (which denied the verbal). A good deal of apparently ‘failed communication’ can be traced to the different communication fields in which the communicating parties are situated, each of which privileges different communication practices. This accounts for a good deal of the difficulty indigenous peoples (with clear roots in the supra-mundane) have communicating within more rational and mundane
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Western spaces. The present model provides novel insights as to why this could be so. Learning from the other As we come together across cultural, subcultural, civilizational and gender boundaries to create new futures we need to be aware that consigning that collective process exclusively to any one sphere (typically the mundane), is to perpetuate a form of cultural and communicative violence. This seriously mitigates against transcultural involvement and the pursuit of a potent unified diversity. At a time when we desperately require an alliance with the Other—a harmonious blending of all progressive voices—we can scarce afford to ignore this point. This is not, therefore, merely a request to accommodate the communicative needs of the mystical and the indigenous. Many other spaces need to be negotiated to include such communities as the elders of all cultures, children, youth, the marginalised and incarcerated, those with disabilities and women. Viable communicative spaces need to be evolved and processes explored whereby meaningful connections can be established between these disparate communities. What will not suffice at this critical juncture will be continued separatism and receding behind the veil of a ‘negative’ silence. While it may be true that this ideal of a diverse, but unified, communicative community speaking—and not speaking—in many different tones, in many different rhythms, from many different communicative spaces, may well be without precedent in human history, it need not deter us. The times that are upon us are in many and profound ways without precedent: these are, indeed, epoch making times. The future is ours to make: a personal comment As futurists have long contended, if we do not make the future it will be made for us. We are all well aware of the tremendous resources (material and human) wielded by those vested interests arrayed across this planet for whom ‘preferred futures’ means—emphatically— more of the same. And yet, in the light of what has preceded, it can meaningfully be said that most of those resources are of the mundane sphere—being material and instrumental
(psycho-rational) in nature.40 Just as the subtle and spiritual spheres are vastly greater in their communicative expansiveness than the mundane (see Figure 1), so too are the potencies they yield forth. It is not at all, in this model, a quantitative question—it is far more a qualitative one. Very few people consciously and concertedly acting out of an integrated subtle and spiritual space can, in this model, exert a profoundly disproportionate impact on things. However, history graphically reminds us that human beings have the capacity to wield this tremendous potency in absolutely negative ways—the hypnotic oratory and occult symbolism41 of Adolf Hitler being the best known in recent times. This ought to dramatically alert us to the need to remain ever within integrated rather than ego space as we carry out our work—so much more so when we enter into the subtle spheres. It is well arguable that we do not have unlimited amounts of time to move into these new spaces, to take up these new ways of working, these new ways of communicating. The crisis of the West demands inspired action now.
Notes and references 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7.
8. 9. 10.
Elgin, D., Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness. William Morrow, New York, 1993, p. 14. Hayne, A., Review of ‘Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era’, http://www.lib.wmc.edu/pub/ researcher/issueXI-2/hayne.html. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1993. Bateson, G. and Bateson, M., Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. MacMillan, New York, 1987, p. 52. Harman, W., Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century. Knowledge Systems Inc., Indiana, 1988, p. 9. Fisher, W., Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Action. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1988. Stevenson, T. and Lennie, J., Anticipating applications for digital video communications: two scenarios for Australia. Technology Studies, 1995, 2(1). Hamelink, C., Emancipation or domestication: toward a utopian science of communication. Journal of Communication, 1983, 33(3), 75. Jones, R., Didier Eribon: Michel Foucault. Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory, 1993, 22(6), 435. Tehranian, M., Technologies of Power: Infor-
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11.
12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17.
18.
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mation, Machines and Democratic Prospects. Ablex Publishers, Norwood, 1990. Saville-Troike, M., The place of silence in an integrated theory of communication. In Perspectives on Silence, eds. Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike. Ablex Publishing, Norwood, 1985, p. 12. Lawlor, R., Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Inner Traditions, Vermont, 1991, p. 193. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid. An example to illustrate this point took place when I attended a traditional Maori funeral several years ago. As the motorcade arrived at the Meeting House and the several hundred people gathered to move onto the marae (forecourt) for the formal speechmaking, a tremendous wind rose up. For the entire period of the orations (over an hour) scarcely a single word was heard, being swept away into the yonder valley by the wind. For the next two days the same scenario unfolded—with each party of visitors to be welcomed, this same wind rose up. Intuitively many of the people present understood that this had great symbolic meaning, some intuiting that it represented the Maori psychospiritual state of disharmony known as ‘hau-rangi’—where the mind (rangi) is likened to the wind (hau), moving about vigorously in a state of instability. The deceased had suicided. The question being asked was ‘Who will be the one to stop the wind?’. It was intuitively understood that only a person whose words carried great spiritual mana would be sufficient to the task. Late on the second day, a small group of manuhiri (visitors) arrived. Again the wind started. The words of the first of the two speakers for the visiting party suffered a similar fate as those who had preceded him. However, as the second speaker rose holding his talking stick and intoning a traditional chant, the wind dramatically and instantly stopped. This Maori elder, well known around the island for his simple and traditional spiritual wisdom, carried, in his words—and his tears—the potency of truth. This episode, perhaps, was to remind the living, and especially the eldership, that more than anything it is spiritual truth, and simplicity that our young seek after today. See also Brailsford, B., The Song of Waitaha: The Histories of a Nation. Ngatapuwae Trust, Christchurch, 1994. Lao Tse, Tao Te Ching, http://www.cnd.org/ BIG5... osophers/Lao—Zi.txt.html. Dissanayake, W., The guiding image in Indian culture and its implications for communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 156. Emerson, R. W., The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays. Henry Frowde, Oxford, 1906, p. 177.
19. Yum, J.-O., Korean philosophy and communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 85. 20. Anandamurti, S. S., Subhasita Samgraha, Part 21. Ananda Marga Publishers, Calcutta, 1994, p. 31. 21. Sarkar, P. R., Ideation on Brahma, file i& w10th.txt. In The Electronic Edition of the Works of P.R. Sarkar, Version 4.0. Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1993. 22. Habermas, J., Modernity—an incomplete project. In Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Pluto Press, London, 1983. 23. Tehranian, M., Communication and theories of social change: a communitarian perspective. Asian Journal of Communication, 2(1). 24. White, D. and Hellerick, G., Nietzsche at the Mall: deconstructing the consumer. WWW: http://www.ctheory.com/a-nietzsche—at— the—mall.ht, 1995. 25. Lawlor, op cit, ref. 12, p. 50. 26. Ibid., p. 151. 27. Ibid., p. 49. 28. Bateson and Bateson, op cit, ref. 4, p. 55. 29. Robinson, R., Legend and Dreaming: Legends of the Dream Time of the Australian Aborigines. Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1966, p. 9. 30. Chung-Ying Cheng, Chinese philosophy and human communication. In Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. D. Lawrence Kincaid. Academic Press Inc., San Diego, 1987, p. 27. 31. Lawlor, op cit, ref. 12, p. 266. 32. Richie, J., Becoming Bicultural. Huia Publishers, Wellington, 1992, p. 67. 33. Habermas, J., The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Beacon Press, Boston, 1984, p. 45. 34. Bateson, G., Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Wildwood, London, 1979, p. 18. 35. Robinson, op cit, ref. 29, p. xii. 36. Ngata, A., Nga Moteatea (The Songs): A Selection of Annotated Tribal Songs of the Maori with English Translation. A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1961. 37. Sarkar, P. R., Shabda Cayanika, Part 2. Ananda Marga Publications, Calcutta, 1996, pp. 125– 126. 38. The mundane broadly corresponds with the physical plane and the knowledge associated with it. Supra-mundane literally refers to ‘that which is beyond the mundane’—it is the subtle and psychic plane. Sarkar invokes the term ‘psycho-spiritual’ to denote that plane where there is movement from the psychic towards the spiritual plane. The pure-spiritual is the plane of pure Consciousness, beyond mind. 39. Anandamitra, A., The Spiritual Philosophy of Shrii Shrii Anandamurti: A Commentary on
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Ananda Sutram. Ananda Marga Publications, Denver, 1981, p. 142. 40. It is arguable that an exception to this would be the advertising, marketing and mass media industries which could be said to access in certain instances, subtle subliminal levels (the supra-mundane). Since this is typically disposed towards personal gain—financial profit—this type of ‘manipulative’ communication could be said to fall within the negative aspect of the supra-mundane sphere. In this model their is no longer a simple linear relationship between sender and receiver, nor merely a polysemic relationship, which, in emphasizing multiple meanings, still remains at a cognitive level. The multiple field theory model advanced in this paper acknowledges the energetic— vibrational—level that is also at work. Since, ontologically, within this model, everything is vibrational, we can come to understand communication as being the creation of vibrational spaces. It is not, therefore, simply the ‘message’ that is at work (the cognitive level), but also, the vibrational space that the message and the medium through which the message is conveyed, opens up. In a very real sense, public and private space becomes colonized by the vibrational frequencies of these type of mass communications. Or, put the other way around, human societies exist within ‘vibrationally colonised’ spaces—energetic fields that extend from the individual, household, community, regional, national, cultural and civilisational levels. In current formal models we can look to Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields as being relevant here, Jung’s collective unconscious or more probably, Sarkar’s theory of microvita. We can speculate that these energetic fields are microvitic structures that exist at
many layers (from micro (individual) to macro (civilisational) levels). For example, a typical Western university could be understood to have a particular type of microvitic structure encapsulating it. This would be generated by the type of mental, behavioural and cultural activities that take place within that space. Hence, to enter onto a university campus is to enter into a specific microvitic/energetic field. That space has been colonised by a dominant ‘archetype’ on the subtle (energy) level. The pervasiveness of this subtle structure will work to colonise the ‘individual space’ of those who enter within that energetic field. For this reason there will be a tendency towards ‘conformity’ in the mental stratum, including the modes of communication (rational–mundane). Where a person possesses an individual vibration vastly different from the dominant macro-field (the university in this case), there will be an inevitable tension; indeed, the tendency will, theoretically, be towards capitulation or conformity. Intuitively aware of this hypothesized level of reality, indigenous people such as Maori, have for a long time understood the need to conduct negotiations with Government in ‘Maori space’, where the dominant microvitic structures will privilege the supra-mundane. To this extent, we could expect very different outcomes from a futures workshop held in a university, as opposed to one held with, and in the traditional space of, the local indigenous community. 41. It is not widely known in the West that the symbol utilised by the Nazis—the swastika—is an ancient spiritual symbol utilised by numerous cultures, including those of the Indian subcontinent. It is widely seen throughout Asia and signifies permanent spiritual victory. The word itself is from Sanskrit.
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