Richard Smoley on how consciousness creates the world
Shiva plays dice with Parvati and loses every game. In a book published in 2009, Richard Smoley takes this Hindu myth and the Samkhya philosophy that lies behind it and develops a single account of consciousness, causality, justice and faith. This article follows his argument from beginning to end.
In the autumn of 1978, Richard Smoley arrived at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, with a Harvard degree in classics and the intention of reading Greats, which combines ancient literature, history and philosophy. The philosophy he was taught there began from the assumption that God is a crutch for the weak, that mind is the brain or something the brain does, and that morality reduces to maximising pleasure and minimising pain. He calls it the “nothing but” philosophy.
In his first week he was handed a leaflet about the Oxford Kabbalah group. For two years he spent his Wednesday evenings in an attic room at Magdalen College, where a tax official, a university land agent, a psychiatrist and a few others studied the Tree of Life by candlelight and ended the evening with bread, cheese and red wine. Nobody present knew a great deal. Smoley nevertheless felt the presence of a cosmos as wide as the night sky. When he opened the philosophy journals, he felt nothing of the kind.
He went on to spend eight years editing Gnosis, an American journal devoted to the Western esoteric traditions, and wrote several books on esoteric Christianity. The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe (New World Library, 2009) is his attempt to resolve the Oxford dilemma. He believes our civilisation faces the same choice he faced as a student. On one side stands a materialist philosophy with academic prestige. On the other stand profound esoteric teachings that remain largely overlooked. His proposal for joining them comes from an unexpected source: Samkhya, the oldest of the classical Indian philosophical schools.
Two Camps with Unfinished Arguments
The book opens in a Nazi prison. In June 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge that humanity had come of age. Science, art and ethics had already managed without the “working hypothesis” of God, and the same was beginning to apply to religious questions. A century and a half earlier, Laplace is said to have told Napoleon that his account of planetary motion had no need of that hypothesis.
The gaps in our explanations have been closing ever since. Today even the moral sense can be explained in evolutionary terms. Smoley cites experiments with the ultimatum game, in which one player proposes a division of a reward and the other can only accept or refuse. Chimpanzees accept every offer, since something beats nothing. Human beings refuse offers they consider unfair, even at a cost to themselves. Some researchers regard this willingness to punish unfairness as the trait that made large societies possible.
Smoley thinks both camps have run aground. Theologians faced with a universe that works without God tend to take refuge in paradox. Bonhoeffer himself ends by saying that we live before God in a world without God. Materialists have a different problem. Writers such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins insist that natural processes proceed without the participation of mind, yet cannot describe them without words like intention, purpose and strategy. They explain that these are figures of speech. Smoley asks what sort of theory leans at every step on a metaphor it officially denies. The larger gap is consciousness itself. Nobody has shown how conscious experience arises from matter that has none.
The liberal compromise fares no better. Replacing a personal God with an impersonal Ground of Being, as Bishop John Shelby Spong proposed, gives up the consolation believers find in a God who cares for them. It gains no ground against the sceptic either, since in a closed chain of causes a ground of being is as superfluous as a divine creator. The testimony of the mystics gets set aside as a collection of private anecdotes. Smoley adds one that is hard to set aside. In 1988, A. J. Ayer, the leading logical positivist of his generation and a convinced atheist, suffered a cardiac arrest lasting four minutes. Ayer later said that he had seen a red light and understood that it governed the universe. He remained an atheist, though he conceded that his certainty that death is the end had been slightly weakened.
One Definition
Smoley’s way out begins with a single definition: consciousness is that which creates a relation between self and other.
Consciousness so defined admits of degrees. When awake, we experience ourselves as someone here facing a world there. In dreams the same division holds between the dreamer and the dream. Even in dreamless sleep the body goes on distinguishing between itself and the pathogens it fights. Animals mark themselves off from their surroundings, and so do plants and individual cells, which defend their own existence with great persistence. Smoley sees no reason to draw a line anywhere. A hydrogen atom responds to an oxygen atom in a particular way. In a basic sense it recognises something outside itself and enters into relation with it. He quotes Thomas Edison, who said in an 1890 interview that in his view every atom possesses a measure of primitive intelligence. He also points to Indian philosophy, which has long described consciousness as faintly present in the mineral, dormant in the plant and fully awake in the human being.
The argument does not rest on physics. Anything that exists as a separate object must maintain a boundary between itself and everything else. Maintaining that boundary is the most basic form of the relation between self and other. Human consciousness thereby stops being an anomaly that appeared out of nowhere and becomes one degree on a continuous scale. Smoley expressly declines the help of quantum theory. He cites Larry Dossey and Lawrence LeShan, both sympathetic to his general view, who warn that quantum vocabulary is applied far beyond what it can support. A metaphysical claim, in his view, has to be defended with metaphysical arguments.
The Myth
To examine the relation between consciousness and the world, Smoley turns to a story well known in India. Shiva and his consort Parvati spend an eternity in each other’s embrace. A yogi named Narada interrupts them and offers something still more pleasant than love: a game of dice. They play, both cheat, and the outcome never changes. Shiva may win a round, but he loses every game. In the end he stakes his own attributes, the trident, the crescent moon and the earrings, and loses those too. When he refuses to concede defeat, Parvati leaves with everything, including his loincloth.
Shiva is untroubled. He withdraws into the forest and lives as an ascetic, absorbed in meditation. It is Parvati who suffers the separation. She disguises herself as a beautiful tribal woman and seeks him out. Shiva, torn from his meditation, desires her. After one further separation the two are reconciled and reign together again.
Smoley reads Shiva as consciousness in the widest sense, the seeing “I am”. Samkhya calls it purusha. Parvati is prakriti, everything that is seen: sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, the whole of experience, inner and outer. Their unbroken embrace is the state before manifestation, in which there is no other and therefore no world. Narada stands for separation and the game for the unfolding of the universe.
Shiva has to lose, because pure consciousness has no attributes. It only sees. Any attribute we might ascribe to consciousness has already been observed, and whatever has been observed belongs on the side of the seen, with Parvati. Every throw of the dice therefore strips him of more of what he had. At the same time he loses nothing, since none of those attributes was ever his. His withdrawal into the forest stands for the capacity of consciousness to detach itself from its contents, which many forms of meditation cultivate. The reunion at the end matters just as much: consciousness returns to experience and lives with it without drowning in it.
Smoley invites the reader to test this. We can turn our attention to the room, then to the body, and finally to the thoughts and moods passing through the mind. All of this can be observed, and is therefore in some sense other. In that which observes we find no attributes at all. Ramana Maharshi taught that the question “Who am I?”, pursued far enough, leads to enlightenment. Smoley describes enlightenment as the direct recognition that consciousness is common to everything and that the boundaries around “my” consciousness are largely artificial. He thinks it often arrives without drama, and that people who expect the heavens to open miss it. Joy and pain continue afterwards, though we no longer take them at face value. Practice then shifts from seeking the insight to stabilising it.
What We Call Real
The claim that the world consists of experience has a Western history, chiefly in Berkeley and Schopenhauer, and it has always met the same objections. If to be is to be perceived, what happens to a tree when nobody is looking at it, and what was the universe doing for billions of years before the first eye opened? Berkeley answered by installing God as the permanent observer. Schopenhauer made the whole world depend on the first creature capable of seeing. Smoley finds both answers contrived and locates the difficulty in their shared premise, that only a mind like ours can count as a perceiver. If recognising and responding belong to everything that exists, the world was never without a witness.
He then asks what we ordinarily mean by “real”, and finds five criteria. A real thing is accessible to the senses from every side. It is stable. Other sane adults can perceive it too. We meet it in the waking state. And it fits what we already take to be possible. A ghost fails several of these at once, which is why reports of ghosts are doubted even by those who were present. Within the physical world these criteria serve us well. They also exclude most of what we experience: thoughts, dreams, images, ideas. Smoley offers money as an example. In 2008, trillions of dollars that existed only as values assigned to certain debts vanished overnight, and large firms collapsed with them.
The English word “real” comes from the Latin res, a thing. Our civilisation has gradually come to treat things as the only reality worth attending to. Dickens gave the attitude a face in Mr Gradgrind. The opposite error, found in Plato and in Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, grants reality only to what never changes and calls everything else illusion. Smoley prefers a third formulation from the Indian tradition: the world is Shiva’s experience, and Shiva’s experience cannot be unreal. Stones follow their own laws, and dreams, images and glimpses of the transcendent follow theirs.
A Dualism Worth Keeping
The philosophical frame for all this is Samkhya, one of the six classical schools of Hindu thought, traditionally paired with yoga. Its name means enumeration or analysis. Its legendary founder is the sage Kapila and its basic text the Samkhya Karika of Ishvarakrishna, dating from the classical period, sometime between 300 and 600 CE. Samkhya is called dualistic, a word with a poor reputation. Smoley distinguishes its dualism from that of Descartes, who separated mind from body, and from that of the Manichaeans, who divided the cosmos between light and darkness. The two principles of Samkhya are the seer and the seen.
Purusha, the seer, is a witness: free, uninvolved and inactive. Prakriti, the seen, is unconscious and never at rest. Its movement shows itself in three modes, the gunas. Rajas is activity, tamas inertia and sattva balance. Smoley links them to Gurdjieff’s three forces and to other sacred triads, the Christian Trinity among them. Through the presence of purusha, prakriti appears to be conscious, and we mistake the stream of our thoughts for who we are. Even a little experience of meditation shows otherwise. Thoughts can be observed, and so are not the one observing. With longer practice the impulses to act can be observed as well. They arise, gather and subside within prakriti, while the witness does nothing. Samkhya calls liberation kaivalya, isolation: the complete detachment of consciousness from what it experiences.
Smoley revises the tradition at two points. Samkhya teaches that there are many purushas, since beings are born, act and die separately. He answers that births, deeds and deaths all belong to prakriti and prove nothing about the witness. What remains is a single consciousness that believes itself to be many because it identifies with many streams of experience. Advaita Vedanta holds this view, but brings a difficulty of its own. If everything is brahman and brahman is pure knowledge, that school cannot say how ignorance ever arose. Smoley also notes that Vedanta, for all it says about unity, preaches detachment as strictly as Samkhya does.
His own conclusion is that the difference between seer and seen cannot be argued away. Consciousness has no characteristics of its own, so every possibility is open to it, including the possibility of mistaking itself for what it sees. The Greek image of this is Narcissus, who drowns in his own reflection. The Kabbalah says that the universe exists so that God may behold God. Everything seen is in this respect an object, and an object as such does not see. Knowing therefore brings not-knowing with it. Here Smoley finds the root of what Hindus call maya and Buddhists samsara. He reads the dismembered Osiris and the crucified Christ in the same way: consciousness scattered into multiplicity and rising again, because it cannot be destroyed.
Causes as Sequences of Events
The fourth chapter contains the most demanding argument in the book. In 1739 David Hume observed that we never perceive one event producing another. We see heat following flame with regularity, and the mind supplies the necessity of the connection out of habit. Causality is “constant conjunction”. Smoley illustrates this with rows of digits in which a three appears repeatedly at a fixed distance after a five. We learn the pattern and use it to make predictions. Nothing in the row tells us that the five produces the three, or that the pattern will hold tomorrow. Science is the perfected art of detecting such patterns. Its laws are, as Karl Popper taught, hypotheses that have so far survived testing. Kant concluded that causality is one of the forms through which the mind orders experience, and that what things are outside those forms is unknowable.
Smoley then sets the cave from Plato’s Republic beside Hume. The prisoners there honour whoever best remembers which shadows usually follow which, and can guess what comes next. Two of the most famous passages in Western philosophy say the same thing: what we call knowledge of causes is skill in predicting sequences of events.
Two things follow. God cannot be found as a link in the chain of events, because a nearer and simpler link can always be supplied. Once electricity was understood, Zeus was no longer needed to account for thunder. And the chain as a whole does nothing to explain why it exists at all. On that question Smoley returns to Samkhya, which describes a different kind of causality: the steps by which a world arises for consciousness, and arises anew in every moment.
The first step is buddhi, the discrimination between self and other. Smoley compares it to the Kabbalistic Binah, whose name kabbalists derive from the Hebrew word for “between”. We sometimes catch it in the first seconds after waking, when there is clear awareness, a here and a there, and as yet no problems. A moment later we remember who we are, what we owe and what we fear. That is ahamkara, the sense of “I”, in which open awareness takes the shape of a personality. From it proceeds manas, the ordinary mind, whose stream of thought largely serves to hold that “I” together. Once the world is divided into self and other, only three responses to the other are available: move towards it, move away from it, or ignore it. Buddhism calls these desire, aversion and ignorance, its three poisons, and Smoley links them to the three gunas. The sequence runs so fast that we take its result for the self-evident fact of who we are. Meditation slows it enough for the separate steps to be seen.
Where is God in this account? God can be met as one’s true Self and as the Other. Ultimately God is the ground from which both arise. Meister Eckhart spoke of it, as did the kabbalists with their Ein Sof and the Hindus with brahman without attributes.
Associations and Dreams in Many Worlds
Besides the seer and the seen there are modes of seeing, and the fifth chapter describes them. Consciousness can narrow its field and widen it again, as when we raise our eyes from a book. It can distinguish things and it can notice their likeness. Recognition and memory depend on the second ability. It can also identify with what it experiences, and here the trouble starts.
Small changes in these settings produce very different worlds. In waking life something either is a tree or is not. In dreams the rule relaxes. Smoley recalls the opening of Anna Karenina, where Oblonsky wakes from a dream of singing glass tables and wine glasses that were also women. The dream belongs to what kabbalists call the world of formation and Western esotericists the astral plane. Its governing law is association. One image calls up the next, as anyone discovers who tries to hold an unchanging image of a rose in mind for five minutes. Freud and Jung, on Smoley’s reading, devoted their careers to mapping these chains, personal and collective. Gurdjieff considered them the bonds that keep people asleep while awake.
The connection with the previous chapter now appears. Hume’s constant conjunction is association in orderly form. The faculty that allows the mind to grasp physical regularities is the same one that keeps it wandering. It may also set the limits of what the mind is able to understand at all.
The esoteric traditions describe many planes of existence: the four worlds of Kabbalah, the realms of Buddhist cosmology, the heavens and hells Swedenborg visited, the many-layered universe that the Russian visionary Daniil Andreev described during his ten years in Stalin’s prisons. Smoley proposes a single variable by which they can all be ordered: the degree to which consciousness is identified with its experience. At one end lies liberation. At the other lies hell, where consciousness is so entangled in what it undergoes that no way out appears to exist, although even there a spark of conscious awareness persists.
How do these planes relate to one another? The traditions speak of correspondence. “As above, so below” is the usual shorthand for the principle contained in the Emerald Tablet. Smoley takes astrology as the classic case: an empirical art whose beginnings reach back to the sky-watchers of Mesopotamia, and which looks for connections between one set of events and another without claiming to know the mechanism. Jung’s synchronicity strikes him as an intermediate step between this older teaching and modern science. On his reading, Jung never quite decided whether the archetype causes the coincidence of events. Either way the result is the same. Correspondences, like causes, are patterns on Parvati’s robe.
The source of the pattern stays hidden. Smoley points to the silence from which thoughts emerge when the mind grows quiet, which Western esotericism calls the Abyss. He admits that he does not fully understand how consciousness could arise from a primordial loss of consciousness. The creation hymn of the Rig Veda ends in a similar spirit: perhaps the one who looks down from the highest heaven knows whence creation came, and perhaps he does not know either.
Is the Universe Just?
Unlike chimpanzees, human beings refuse an unfair bargain, and they apply the same measure to life as a whole. We need the universe to be just, and at first sight it is not. Smoley reviews the answers religion has offered. The Hebrew prophets explained the catastrophes befalling the nation as punishment for sin. When the punishment seemed disproportionate, they moved the settling of accounts to the end of time. The Book of Job answers the suffering of the innocent by declaring that divine justice is incommensurable with ours. Christianity added heaven and hell, and Smoley states the common objection plainly: no finite life can deserve infinite torment.
Karma looks more rational, since consequences match deeds. Smoley tests it with an example. An inquisitor who tortured Jews in Spain around 1500 dies an honoured man. Four centuries later he is born again as a Jew in Poland and murdered at Auschwitz. The law has been satisfied and the victim dies without knowing why. We would not call a court just if it executed a man without informing him of the charge. Karma, on Smoley’s reading, describes how one thing leads to another, and the Indian traditions themselves teach that the aim is to step out of the cycle.
His own picture of the afterlife derives from Swedenborg, for whom we go after death wherever our “ruling love” takes us. No tribunal assigns us a place; inner affinity does. Reincarnation and the heavens and hells may then all be true, as the various destinations of consciousness more or less entangled in its experience. He takes the evidence for the survival of consciousness seriously, including Ian Stevenson’s research into memories of past lives.
The moral foundation lies deeper than reward and punishment. If purusha is one, then the I at the centre of my being is identical with the I at the centre of every other being. The command to love your neighbour as yourself then states a fact, because the neighbour is myself. Smoley distinguishes transactional love, which keeps accounts, from the love the New Testament calls agape, which follows from recognising that identity. Meditation practised alone can close in on itself. He regards the ethical life as the more effective means of loosening the boundaries of the ego. The Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva, who refuses final liberation until all beings are free, expresses the same truth. If consciousness is single, nobody can be wholly liberated alone.
The Mountain of Gold
The chapter on faith opens with a Sufi story. Three men set out to find a mountain of gold. After a long journey they come to a mountain of copper, and one of them stays to mine it. The other two travel much further and reach a mountain of silver, where the second settles. The third goes on alone until his provisions run out. When the mountain of gold appears before him, he is almost dead of hunger.
Why does one pilgrim keep going? Smoley works through the usual grounds of faith in turn. Faith based on authority has weakened in an age that distrusts every institution. The rational proofs of God’s existence have not held up. Faith “because it is absurd”, from Tertullian to Kierkegaard, cannot tell us which absurdity to choose. William James’s will to believe lets us adopt what we hope is true, but leaves us exposed as new knowledge arrives. All four share one weakness: the human talent for self-deception.
He finds his alternative in the Letter to the Hebrews, which calls faith “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. Faith in this sense rests on experience. A person perceives, however dimly, a reality that draws them, and acts accordingly. Smoley gives two examples that could hardly differ more. The Sufi teacher Phillip Gowins, then a young man with no religious vocabulary, was flooded one night by waves of energy. He later promised to serve whatever forces govern the world. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who died at Auschwitz, saw the Virgin Mary as a boy. She offered him two crowns, one for purity and one for martyrdom, and he accepted both.
Scholars of the contextualist school, Steven Katz among them, argue that mystics see what their culture has prepared them to see. Smoley grants this in part, since a Catholic boy sees Mary and a Tibetan sees Chenrezig. He also points to experiences that contradict the expectations of those who have them. The best-known example is Paul on the road to Damascus. He uses colour as an analogy. People with normal sight see the same spectrum, yet languages divide it differently. Ancient Greek had so few colour terms that honey in Homer comes out “green”. Nobody concludes from this that colour is a delusion. Religious experience is likewise experience of something, and the mind clothes it in the images available to it.
The divine can appear on either side of the basic division. Met as the true Self, it is the “I” behind the ego. Ramana Maharshi said that God is always the first person. Met as the Other, it is the God of devotion, towards whom Ramana directed those who needed that path. Official religion has usually insisted on the second and punished the first. The Sufi al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 for saying “I am the Truth”. Smoley acknowledges the danger that the ego will appropriate divinity. He also describes a sequence of events he has encountered many times. Someone has a genuine experience of the divine, turns to a church for support, and is told to accept teachings that make no sense to them. In the end they discard the experience along with the teachings. The chapter closes with the remark that even the mountain of gold may not be the final destination.
A Civilisation Centred on Consciousness
Smoley does not want a new religion. The world has enough of them, and each new one deepens the discord. What he asks of the existing religions is the virtue they require of their members and rarely display as institutions: humility towards their own images and concepts. For Christianity this would mean accepting that God is wholly our true Self and wholly the Other. He reads the “I am” sayings of John’s Gospel as pointing to whatever says “I am” in every person, with the Father as the transcendent source beyond it. He notes that the Greek text of Luke 17:21 says the kingdom of God is “within you”, as the King James Version has it, whereas modern translations prefer “among you”. A Christianity that bars people from their own depths, in his view, hands them over to whatever authority comes along.
Science approaches the same centre from several directions. Depth psychology set itself the aim of bringing the unconscious into consciousness. Neuroscience and genetics investigate the physical conditions of conscious experience. Computer science asks whether a machine could have a mind. On that last question, writing in 2009, Smoley sided with John Searle against the advocates of strong artificial intelligence. He wrote that no machine had come close to passing for human in conversation, and dismissed warnings of an approaching technological singularity. This passage has aged. The principle beneath it remains his answer: any system that recognises and responds has the basic form of consciousness, much as an atom does, and the open question concerns its degree. What he asks of science is that it remove the boundary it maintains between human consciousness and every other kind.
He predicts that the investigation of consciousness will become the central purpose of the emerging world civilisation, much as older civilisations organised their lives around sacrifice to the gods, the expectation of the kingdom of God, or the spread of law and order. Since the eighteenth century the West has lived in a spiritual interregnum held together by economics, politics and technology, none of which supplies meaning. Smoley presents the turn towards consciousness as something already under way, and declines to call it progress. Evolution need have no purpose, and the gunas may act upon one another without beginning or end. Through all of it consciousness persists, cramped in each of us and unlimited in itself, like Shiva, who loses every game and is none the poorer.
Two Cosmic Lovers
Smoley’s myth has a counterpart in a modern account that emerged independently of any knowledge of Samkhya. Christopher Bache, professor emeritus of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University, undertook seventy-three high-dose LSD sessions between 1979 and 1999 and kept a detailed record of each. In LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven (2019) he describes a vision that opened in his twenty-second and twenty-third sessions. He calls it the Cosmic Lovers.
A Primal Unity divided into two Cosmic Beings joined by a love that was romantic in kind and cosmic in scope. One felt to him more like a She, the other more like a He. The feminine being plunged into the task of creating space, time and the physical universe. She knew in advance that in this work she would lose awareness of her own nature and remain unconscious of what she was for billions of years. The masculine being remained fully conscious outside space and time. The feminine accepted the separation voluntarily so that matter might arise, awaken gradually to self-awareness and become transparent to divine intention. Bache sensed that this phase was largely complete and that the Lovers were at last being reunited.
The structure overlaps with Samkhya closely enough to be compared step by step. Purusha is the seer: free, uninvolved and inactive. Bache’s masculine being remains fully conscious outside space and time. Prakriti is the seen, never at rest and in itself unconscious, appearing conscious only through the presence of purusha. Bache’s feminine being creates space, time and matter, and in that work loses awareness of her own nature. Samkhya presents the unconsciousness of prakriti as a defining feature of its system. Bache describes it as a decision taken in love and with full knowledge of the cost.
The embrace of Shiva and Parvati before the game answers to the Primal Unity from which both beings emerged. The dice game is the unfolding of the universe, and Shiva has to lose every attribute in it, because each attribute once observed belongs on the side of the seen. Parvati leaves with everything, down to his loincloth. Bache describes the same transfer in other words. The feminine being took on space, time and matter, that is, everything that has attributes, and the masculine was left with consciousness alone.
The plot of the separation matches as well. In the myth it is Parvati who suffers it. She disguises herself and seeks out Shiva, who is meanwhile meditating in the forest. After one further separation they are reconciled and reign together. Bache experienced the same story from the perspective of the being who pays the price of creation. Smoley reads Shiva’s withdrawal into the forest as the capacity of consciousness to detach from its contents, and treats the reunion at the end as equally important. Consciousness returns to experience and lives with it without drowning in it. Bache’s story culminates in the same place. In it, matter becomes transparent to its source.
Both stories understand creation as play. Narada offers Shiva and Parvati something more pleasant than love and they take up the dice. Bache recorded the words “You and I decided to create for the sheer joy of it.” Sanskrit has a word for this, lila, the divine game.
The difference lies in intention. Samkhya says nothing of love between the seer and the seen. Purusha has no attributes, so love cannot be ascribed to it either. The gunas act upon one another without beginning or end, and Smoley expressly declines to call the turn towards consciousness progress. Bache describes creation as an act of love and the separation as a price accepted for an end that can be named. One account has no direction. The other has a direction and is approaching its completion.
They part company over practice as well. Samkhya calls liberation kaivalya and leads towards the detachment of consciousness from what it experiences. In one session Bache underwent the opposite recognition. He identified with the feminine being who had set out to create the physical universe, and experienced that identification as remembering. He recorded that the task is to create consciously instead of unconsciously. Both accounts describe the same forgetting and prescribe opposite responses to it. One says step out of the cycle; the other says remember within it.
Neither author makes a metaphysical claim out of gender. Bache writes that the Absolute lies beyond all categories of He or She and is at the same time infinitely more than any It. If his language tilts towards the feminine, he attributes this to the story of creation that opened to him and to the love awakened in him by his reunion with that reality. He calls the deepest presence his Beloved. Smoley places God on both sides of the basic division, as the true Self and as the Other, and takes as the ground of both what Meister Eckhart spoke of, what the kabbalists call Ein Sof and what the Hindus call brahman without attributes.
Smoley argues metaphysically and leaves the testimony of the mystics on the margins, since he regards it as a collection of private anecdotes. Bache approaches the question through precisely the kind of testimony Smoley sets aside. His vision does not prove Samkhya. It shows that the same pair of principles surfaces even when a person does not arrive at it by reading. Orbis loquens devotes chapter 36 to Bache, and part of chapter 11 to the feminine face of Consciousness.
Reading Smoley Today
The strength of the book is its economy. The author applies a single distinction, between that which experiences and that which is experienced, across cosmology, epistemology, ethics and theology, and never needs a second principle. He writes with range and humour and says openly where his understanding ends.
There are weaker passages. His remarks on evolution and his defence of astrology will not convince a sceptical reader, and the main argument does not need them. The section on artificial intelligence reflects the time in which it was written.
Readers of the Quintessence Forum will notice how close Smoley’s position is to the analytic idealism that Bernardo Kastrup has since developed, and where the two diverge. Both hold that there is a single consciousness and that the multiplicity of individual selves is a matter of identification or dissociation. Smoley, however, grants a basic form of conscious awareness to every atom, which brings him close to panpsychism, a position Kastrup rejects. Smoley also comes from a different direction, by way of Kabbalah, Gurdjieff’s practice and the Indian schools, and he offers what academic idealism usually omits: an account of practice, an ethics and an interpretation of faith.
The book also invites comparison with the four-level model of Orbis loquens – The World That Speaks, which follows the Pythagorean Tetraktys from consciousness through information and energy to matter. Smoley never arranges his material into such a sequence, though its individual levels can be found in his text. The embrace of Shiva and Parvati before the game, when consciousness has no other, answers to the Monad. The first discrimination between self and other, which Samkhya calls buddhi and the kabbalists Binah, answers to the Dyad, since a distinction is the simplest unit of information. The three gunas, the modes of the ceaseless energy of prakriti that Indian thought calls shakti, answer to the Triad. The stable world of things accessible to everyone, the only one that satisfies his five criteria of the real, answers to the Tetrad. Smoley himself mentions the four worlds of Kabbalah, from Atziluth to Assiah, as one traditional form of this ladder.
For Smoley the levels are joined by correspondence: a regular likeness between events above and events below, together with the single consciousness present at every level. Orbis loquens assigns that connecting role to Quintessence. The two accounts differ in emphasis. Smoley orders the planes by a single variable, the degree to which consciousness is identified with its experience, and his interest lies in liberation from that identification. The four-level model describes how each level takes its form from the one before it, and, in keeping with the book’s title, understands the world as something that speaks to us.
For those of us who work in homeopathy, the chapters on causality and correspondence repay close reading. They describe relations between levels of reality that are regular and observable without a known mechanism, and they recall Hume’s point that every claim about causality rests in the end on an observed regularity. The central exercise of the book is simple and can be repeated at any moment. We notice what is experienced, and then ask what it is that notices.
