The Ghost in the Machine

Alienation of the Spirit
D.Suzuki, The Sacred Balance

The movement away from the natural world was made possible by a quite remarkable train of thought--the ideas that shaped our civilization. Today we take those ideas so much for granted that we see them not as ideas (which can be rethought, revised, discarded) but as reality. Many thinkers trace the origin of our particular and violent fall from grace, our exile from the Garden, back to Plato and Aristotle, who began a powerful process of separating the world-as-abstract-principle from the world-as-experience - dividing mind, that is, from body and human beings from the world they inhabit. In the process they laid the groundwork for experimental science.

Through Galileo, who identified the language of nature as mathematics (an abstract language invented by humans), and Descartes, who learned to speak that language powerfully, the modern world emerges. Descartes' famous definition of existence ("I think, therefore I am") completes a new myth about our relationship to the world: human beings are the things that think (the only things, and that is all they are) and the rest of the world is made up of things that can be measured or thought about. Subject or object, mind or body, matter or spirit, this is the dual world we have inhabited ever since - where the brain's ability to distinguish and classify has ruled the roost. From this duality came the ideas we live by, what William Blake called "mind-forg'd manacles", the mental abstractions that seem too obvious to question, that construct and confine our vision of reality.

Mind within body--the ghost in the machine--that is what our culture teaches us we are, what we accept as obvious, normal and real.

Eventually the body must weaken and die - the machine wears out. When it does, the ghost must disappear. These are the consequences not of mortality but of the way we think about it. Divided from each other, we try to make contact beyond our own limited selves, struggle to construct and maintain a community in a world designed around the individual, search for lasting connection. Separated from the natural world, we are lonely, destructive and guilty - but our solutions to environmental destruction are crafted within the frame of mind that created the division and isolation. "Saving nature" because it makes economic sense, because the natural world may contain drugs to heal human ills or even because doing so is "natural justice" - these are all arguments from the Cartesian world, where mind acts on the world, observing, analyzing, quantifying. Above all, they are arguments, and in every argument there is a winner and a loser.

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- W. B. Yeats

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