21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

extend to the solar system (especially if life were to be discovered elsewhere, such as around a thermal vent in the oceans beneath the ice that covers Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus). We could even extend to the galaxy and the universe. All of the above are matters of cosmology, astro-physics, geology, biology and psychology. They are conventional science, but the emergent factors — James Lovelock’s Gaia theory at the bio-sphere level, for instance — have a lot to tell us, and leave a lot for us to explore. This is a kind of holism and deeper meanings that are built in from the bottom up. We don’t need to look for supernatural explanations, and yet there’s plenty here that might be worthy of the term ‘sacred’.

Consciousness itself, of course, is often seen as an emergent quality of our purely physical brains. What emerges — from all these different levels — has effects back down the chain, so to speak. So we get the impression of ‘higher powers’ influencing our lives from afar. And maybe that’s more than just an impression — maybe what emerges at the really big scales has a profound effect on us, but at the moment we are just not able to understand or describe this properly.

The centrality and importance of the soul — now so often neglected by our modern dualistic societies — is well expressed by Thomas Moore:

‘Throughout history the soul has been discussed in a trinitarian context where mind and body find their humanity in a third place, the soul, where behaviour and belief are deepened in imagination, and where emotion and mind join in intelligent, deeply felt values.’

67