Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science

Leonardo

Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and ScienceAuthor(s): Mike KingSource: Leonardo, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1998), pp. 21-31Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576543 .

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GENERAL ARTICLE

Concerning the Spiritual

in Twentieth-Century Art and Science

Mike King

What are you doing young man? Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours? These ostensible realities, politics, points? Your ambition or business whatever it may be ? It is well-against such I say not a word, I am their poet also, But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake, For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpableflame, the essen- tial life of the earth, Any more than such are to religion.

-Walt Whitman, 1852

The title of this article comes from Wassily Kandinsky's Con-

cerning the Spiritual in Art [1]; by expanding it to include science, I am clearly attempting to cover a rather large area of human endeavor. However, I will investigate only two of the

possible three relationships between art, science and the spiritual: that between the spiritual and art and that between the

spiritual and science (the third area, the interaction between the arts and sciences, is well-documented in Leonardo, for ex-

ample). The focus will be on investigating the proposition that science, toward the end of the twentieth century, appears to be more receptive to the spiritual than are the arts. This idea may come as a surprise, but in recent years one of the few articles

published in Leonardo that explicitly deals with the spiritual in- troduced Buddhism via physics [2]. An additional motivation for investigating the three disciplines together is my feeling that science or, to be more precise, scientists are often in need of the artistic or poetic vision in order to engage with the spiritual. Too often the scientist assumes that religion only relates to questions about the fundamental nature of existence; this is one possible response to existence, but I am suggesting that the artist makes another type of response-an emotional one- that may have a closer affinity to the spiritual impulse.

Art and science seem to complement each other: there are fewer mutually antagonistic areas of thought between them than between art and the spiritual or between science and the

spiritual. Both the title of this article and the Whitman quote above imply that the spiritual is somehow antecedent to both the arts and sciences. This assumption guides much of the discussion here, but I will return to this later to see how rea- sonable such an assumption is.

Mike King (lecturer), London Guildhall University, 41 Commercial Road, London El 1IA, United Kingdom. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

THE SPIRITUAL: SOME DEFINITIONS The "spiritual" is one of the trickiest areas of human under-

standing to taxonomize, especially in any way that involves definitions that can be universally understood. It is even harder to find reliable terms that might be

meaningful to both artists and scientists, but without an attempt

ABSTRACT

A recent proliferation of writings on the spiritual by scientists suggests that this is an appropriate time to reevaluate the spiritual in twentieth-century art. The author looks at three artistic groupings- Wassily Kandinsky and the Bauhaus school, the Abstract Expressionists and the contemporary electronic arts-and traces the influences of various spiritual movements on them. The author then turns to the spiritual in modern science, observ- ing that quantum theory has been the main starting point for many physicists to write about religious ideas. Several issues are exam- ined: whether science at this junc- ture is more receptive to the spiritual than are the arts; whether art can mediate between science and the spiritual; and whether the spiritual is antecedent to both the arts and science.

we will make no progress. Hence, I shall use a simple catego-

Fig. 1. The Spanish architect Gaudi used an articulated model of a cathedral suspended upside down to help guide him in its design, in particular, to work out the stresses on components. This could also be seen as an attempt to capture the spiritual sense of "grace," that is, whatever stands in opposition to "gravity" [60]. (Photo courtesy of Amplicaciones y Reproducciones Mas [Arxiu Mas])

LEONARDO, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 21-31, 1998 21 ? 1998 ISAST



rization that I hope will be useful: a dis- tinction between the religious, the occult and the transcendent. Here the spiritual will be used as a broad term that covers these three distinct areas. The "reli-

gious" is intended to convey traditional and organized religious spirituality such as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism; the "occult," an esoteric preoccupation with such matters as the paranormal, reincarnation, clairvoyance and disembodied

beings; and finally the "transcendent" as

dealing with a shift in personal identity from the physical and temporal to the infinite and eternal, with mystical union or with nirvana.

Clearly the boundaries between the

religious, the occult and the transcendent (as defined here) are blurred as well as value-laden in different ways for different communities. The boundaries are also crude-we need to recognize the finer distinctions, for example, between the religiousness of Christianity and Hinduism; between the occultisms of William Blake and Rudolf Steiner; and between the notions of transcendence within Buddhism and in the work of Krishnamurti. For now it is hoped that these terms will provide us basic tools with which to begin probing the

spiritual in art and science.

THE SPIRITUAL IN MODERN ART Whereas art of previous centuries tended to reflect mainstream religious concerns, and indeed for much of history could hardly be separated from religion, the art of the twentieth century strikes out on its own, reflecting secular concerns. This was not a sudden departure, of course; events that transpired in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for the change. Ro- manticism replaced God with nature as subject matter for painters, and Nietzsche summed up the cultural shift in the words of his imaginary Zarathustra: "Could it be possible? This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is deadr' [3]. This is not to say that Christian thought is not

present in Western art in the twentieth century; one only has to think of the ex-

ample of Gaudi, the Spanish architect, for example (Figs 1 and 2). However, Western artists who deal with traditional religious subjects have probably become the exception in this century, rather than the norm.

Examining the spiritual in modern art

the less widely understood occult and transcendent spiritualities. Second, an art that does not generally deal with traditional Christian symbols of crucifixion and so on and that often deals instead with other types of symbolism, abstractions or the totally abstract, may not im-

mediately appear to have a spiritual dimension. This difficulty is compounded by the writings of twentieth-century artists or, perhaps, by the lack of such writings. For even where the spiritual is central to a piece of modern art, it may be conveyed entirely in a visual language, and the scholars of science and theology generally are not trained in the visual arts. Con-

versely, artists may not be widely read in the spiritual and may be unfamiliar with spiritual literature that deals with the very issues with which they are grappling. Some artists may indeed be suspicious of the possible restraining influences of

spiritual traditions or movements. The twentieth century has seen the de-

velopment and promotion of "alterna- tive" forms of spirituality, some of which

Fig. 2. Gaudi's Ex- piatory Church of the Sacred Family em- bodies a conventional religious form of spirituality while breaking many architectural con- ventions. (Photo: F. Catalia-Roca)

have had a significant impact on modern art. The key spiritual movements in Eu-

rope at the beginning of the century included Theosophy, founded by H.P. Blavatsky and H.S. Olcott; Anthroposo- phy, founded by Rudolf Steiner; and the work of G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D.

Ouspensky. Steiner and Gurdjieff made the arts central to the lives of their students [4] whereas Theosophy aimed to establish a "brotherhood" capable of un-

derstanding and disseminating occult

knowledge and, later, to prepare for the new "world teacher" (a conflation of the second coming of Christ and the Bud-

dha) [5]. There is not enough space here even to introduce the teachings of these three movements, other than to say that all three have an occult leaning. Gurdjieff and Theosophy share some transcendental elements; Anthroposo- phy and Gurdjieff include strong Chris- tian themes.

In examining the spiritual in twenti-

eth-century art I am indebted to art histo- rian Roger Lipsey for some ground-

X I It... {' u~~~~~~~~~~~4

becomes a difficult undertaking for two reasons. First, when we leave conventional religious spirituality we are left with

22 King, Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science



breaking work. One of the premises of his work (based on Piet Mondrian and

Kandinsky's thinking) is that the arrival of the abstract in modern art was a factor that allowed a new exploration of the

spiritual. He also states that Theosophy was among the important spiritual influences of the time. Lipsey is known for his work on the late Ananda Coomaraswamy, an authority on Asian religious art and curator of Indian and Muhamadden Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts [6]. Lipsey's book An Art of Our Own-The

Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art [7] is a

thorough and fascinating updating of Coomaraswamy's interests into the twentieth century, starting with Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The ten- sion between the spiritual and artistic is

implied in Lipsey's title and in the fol-

lowing quote in Lipsey's book from Constantin Brancusi:

In the art of other times there is a joy, but with it the nightmare that the reli- gions drag with them. There is joy in Negro sculpture, among the nearly ar- chaic Greeks, in some things of the Chi- nese and the Gothic . . . oh, we find it everywhere. But even so, not so well as it might be with us in the future, if only we were to free ourselves of all this.... It is time we had an art of our own [8].

The "all this" that Brancusi wants us to free ourselves from is the religious baggage of previous centuries. In modernism and later art movements, the twentieth century does have an art of its own, but Lipsey is interested, as we are, in where the spiritual lies within it. If the modern artist rejects traditional religion, what is the source of the spiritual? In the first decades of the century the answer is the occult, in particular, the occult teachings of Theosophy and An-

throposophy (although the work of

Gurdjieff may also have played its part [it is likely that Brancusi, for example, met Gurdjieff and may well have absorbed some of the influences of his school]) [9]. The transcendent was also a strong influence. One of the books to have the greatest influence on Brancusi

wasJacques Bacot's 1925 translation of the thirteenth-century Tibetan Buddhist work The Life of Milarepa [10].

Lipsey's introduction asks what the

spiritual is and what in particular it might be in art. He says: "Spiritual re- mains an old-fashioned word of vague meaning. Yet it is this word that Kandinsky seeded into twentieth-cen-

tury art, and apart from any individual, it still speaks. It requires a positive response from us" [11]. Lipsey points out that many intellectuals of his generation

?fc- :!." JBIBiiin f_'^^^^ ^ 5__

Fig. 3. Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 33 (Orient), oil on canvas, 88 x 100 cm, 1913. Many of Kandinsky's Improvisations paintings are assumed to be influenced by Theosophical ideas. While the painting in its entirety does not resemble any one of the Thought Forms images, the more organic shapes in Thought Forms can be seen as the elements of a visual grammar used by Kandinsky to construct the abstractions of this period. (?1998 ARS, New York)

were profoundly influenced by one of the inevitable conclusions of nine-

teenth-century religious failure:

Beyond, there may be a void: whole sections of modern literature address the perception of a profoundly unwelcoming void. The generation of which I am a part explored the void at the earliest possible age, under the influence of Existentialist literature. We sat on park benches trying to validate Sartre's compelling description of metaphysical nausea [12].

The idea of a void is a key concept in the spirituality of the transcendent, particularly in Buddhism, but is deeply prob- lematic in the West, particularly to the artist. The differences in response to the void may be in part because of the

greater value placed on the individual in the West and because Christian practices tend to be devotional, emphasizing wor-

ship of an external being, while Bud- dhism tends to be transcendent, emphasizing inwardly directed meditation. While Lipsey does not explore this idea much, he does draw an interesting meta-

phor from Sufi thought (Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam): the contrast between "eyes of flesh," which perceive only the material world, and "eyes of fire," which perceive only the spiritual. He

goes on: "For such eyes [eyes of fire]

nothing is lonely matter, all things are

caught up in a mysterious, ultimately divine whole that challenges understand-

ing over a lifetime..... Eyes for art strike a balance between these sensibilities" [13].

The early part of Lipsey's book traces some of the spiritual developments on the artists of the twentieth century. He focuses on Theosophy and Anthroposo- phy, but only mentions the work of

Ouspensky (a close associate of

Gurdjieff's) in the section on Russian

painter Kasimir Malevich, saying: "Suprematism [the abstract painting method launched by Malevich] can be viewed in part as an artist's response to the world-view and implicit challenge of Tertium Organum" [14]. Tertium Organum, a major work of Ouspensky's, was pro- duced before he met Gurdjieff, but

many of the preoccupations in it, such as the idea of eternal recurrence and the existence of a fourth dimension, carry over into his later work. Tertium

Organum's influence may well have been most noticeable among Russian artists.

Malevich, for example, adopted the con-

cept of a higher dimension and included references to the fourth dimension in the titles of some early paintings [15].

The strength of Lipsey's work is in its

thoroughness and insight into the lives,

King, Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science 23



Fig. 4. Illustrations from Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms, purportedly depicting auric forms of thoughts and emotions. Kandinsky was said to have been influenced by these

images. (? Theosophical Publishing House, Madras, India)

concerns and work of twentieth-century artists. However, his notions of the spiritual are not fine-grained enough to deal with the subtlety of the phenomenon, especially given the difficulties outlined earlier. By starting with the crude boundaries of the religious, occult and

transcendent, I hope to build on

Lipsey's work and take it further. The influence of Theosophy on

Mondrian and Kandinsky, plus the spiritual interests ofJohannes Itten, contributed to making the Bauhaus a focus for those with an interest in the spiritual in the 1920s. However, various forces con-

spired to diminish the spiritual aspect of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus lay at the heart of twentieth-century modernism- it was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Germany and, considering the interests of many of those involved, could have developed into an artistic version of Plato's or Ficino's Academies.

(Ficino founded a Renaissance "acad-

emy" based on his translations of Plato and Plotinus; it had something of a "cultish" overtone [16].) It could be said that World War I and the Russian Revo- lution turned the current of idealism

(sparked by Theosophy, etc.) from the

spiritual to the direction of the social

[17]. At best, this swing had a demo- cratic impulse, but the materialistic em-

phasis of socialism and the drift towards fascism in Germany eventually laid to

rest the spiritual aspirations of many of the Bauhaus artists (the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933).

Johannes Itten was employed by Gropius in the early years to teach at the Bauhaus but eventually left as directions

changed. Lipsey comments:

He [Itten] viewed the Bauhaus as a "se- cret, self-contained society" with spiritual goals. In his classes, he offered students the opportunity to practice relaxation, breathing, and concentra- tion exercises intended, as he later wrote, "to establish the intellectual and physical readiness which makes inten- sive work possible." . . . Itten precipi- tated the crisis of 1922 by embodying the esoteric and romantic aspects of the Bauhaus so militantly that he threatened to sever the school from its moorings in mainstream society [18].

Itten himself made the following comments about the spiritual underpinning of his work in Design and Form, one of the coursebooks to emerge from the Bauhaus:

I had studied oriental philosophy and concerned myself with Persian Mazdaism and Early Christianity. Thus I realized that our outward-directed scientific research and technology must be balanced by inward-directed thought and forces of the soul.... It is not only a religious cus- tom to start instruction with a prayer or a song, but it also serves to concentrate the students' wandering thoughts. At the start of the morning I brought my classes to mental and physical readiness for in-

tensive work through relaxing, breathing, and concentrating exercises. The training of the body as an instrument of the mind is of the greatest importance for creative man.... Besides relaxation, breathing is of the greatest importance. As we breathe, so do we think and so is the rhythm of our daily life. People of great, successful accomplishments always have a quiet, slow and deep breath. Shortwinded people are hasty and greedy in thought and action [19].

These extracts show much of Itten's

thinking and character, and the reac- tions to them may illustrate the problem that artists have with the explicitly spiritual. (The library copy of Design and Form from the arts faculty of my univer-

sity has a simple penciled comment in the margin close to the last point made in this extract: "Suspicious.") Frances Stonor Saunders, in Hidden Hands, con- cluded that the Mazdaznan experiment was a disaster [20], and it is true to this

day that classes on spiritual practices are

rarely part of the curriculum in mainstream art colleges.

Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art was a turning point for modernism. It was published in 1911 and was deeply influenced by Theosophy. Kandinsky had "snapped up" a copy of Thought Forms [21] (a work by the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater

purporting to show pictures of the auric form of thoughts and emotions) in 1908 and joined the Theosophical movement in 1909. Kandinsky's Improvisations series from around 1916 (Fig. 3) is considered to be directly influenced by the illustrations in Thought Forms (Fig. 4) [22].

Kandinsky himself only devotes a few

paragraphs to Theosophy in his book,

apparently quoting from Madame

Blavatsky's The Key to Theosophy:

Theosophy, according to Blavatsky, is synonymous with eternal truth. 'The new torchbearer of truth will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organiza- tion awaiting his arrival, which will re- move the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path." And then Blavatsky continues: "The earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now," and with these words concludes her book [23].

Kandinsky shows in Concerning the Spiri- tual in Art the dilemma that makes the

appearance of the spiritual in the arts so fitful in the twentieth century: the apparently hierarchical nature of spiritual

teachings. In the chapter called "The Movement of the Triangle," he likens so-

ciety to a triangle with a few spiritual or




artistic geniuses at its apex: as one goes down, there are a greater and greater number of artists of lesser and lesser value; movement toward the triangle's apex represents "progress." This image fits well with Theosophy (Theosophy's spiritual teachings are hierarchical, in-

volving novices, initiates, adepts and masters), but with the rise of socialism after 1917 it exposes an elitist view of art that sat uncomfortably with the new order. The shock of World War I must also have shaken the faith of men like Kandinsky in Blavatsky's prediction of a heaven in the twenty-first century, and in the later Bauhaus years he tempered the spirituality of his earlier period to fit the more materialistic and machine-oriented aspirations of his students.

Mondrian was at the Bauhaus for only a brief time, but he was just as deeply influenced by Theosophy as was Kan-

dinsky. A triptych of Mondrian's called Evolution (Fig. 5) is an example of this

period (it is the dominant piece among similar work hidden, unshown, in the Gemeente Museum in Amsterdam [24]). His later and better-known work contin- ued to explore one of the Theosophical themes, that of geometry.

Paul Klee was a teacher at the Bau- haus for a time and shared with

Kandinsky a friendship with Thomas de Hartmann, a musician and close col- laborator of Gurdjieff's. Kandinsky met de Hartmann between 1908 and 1912; de Hartmann met Gurdjieff in 1916.

Eventually both de Hartmann and his wife gave up everything to follow Gurdjieff. Klee's notebooks, however, do not reveal any deep spiritual preoccupations, and I have not found in them any mention of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky or, even, de Hartmann [25]. Nonetheless, Lipsey comments:

Paul Klee (1879-1940) ... is the author of one of the century's few unerr- ing statements on the spiritual in art. With Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art and Brancusi's aphorisms, Klee's 1924 lecture "On Modern Art" is all one need know to be certain that twentieth- century art conceived ideals that in their religious dimension would have been recognizable to Meister Eckhart and in their workshop dimension to Leonardo [26].

The last sentiment in this passage, concerning Eckhart and Leonardo, could be seen as an aspiration at the heart of the present essay. (Eckhart was a Dominican friar of the fourteenth cen-

pean spirituality; Leonardo da Vinci represents greatness in European painting.) However, I think Lipsey is a little optimis- tic, particularly with respect to Klee's 1924 lecture, which makes no direct reference to the spiritual at all. Lipsey's en- thusiasm for Klee in this context is probably based on Klee's wider writings and the content of his paintings.

The second influential group of twen-

tieth-century painters that drew heavily on spiritual influences in one form or another was the American group known as the Abstract Expressionists. Coming to

prominence after World War II, they included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and

many others. A cursory glance at the

writings of these artists does not reveal

explicitly spiritual references in their

writings, but there is evidence of a spiritual concern running through their work. Lipsey comments on an exhibition called "The Spiritual in Abstract Art: 1895-1985" [27], in which the last two

paintings, one by Reinhardt and another

by Rothko, had the most impact on him. He says: "These works at once 'settled' the exhibition, brought it home; one could feel again that there is a modern

spiritual, and these works demonstrated it" [28]. We are presented here with a

quite understandable subjectivity, shown

again in this quote from Lipsey:

Although Barnett Newman (1905- 1970) took keen interest in traditional spiritual ideas, possessed a sense of scripture, and contributed cogently to

the endless murmur of conversation among American artists of the period, he never succeeded in giving eloquent pictorial form to his insights [29].

A series of Newman's paintings called the Stations of the Cross contain variations on vertical lines and delineations, and which, despite the religious reference in the title, are not easily accessible as spiritual in content. The spiritual nature of Rothko's work may be more obvious, a

point endorsed by the creation of a "Rothko Chapel" in 1960 by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where a

group of his paintings was shown in a room reminiscent of a small chapel, so as to encourage the visitor to enter a state of contemplation or meditation.

Figure 6 shows one of Rothko's well- known color-field pieces, and Fig. 7, his donation to the Tate Gallery in London.

We should not be discouraged, however, by the difficulties in pursuing the

spiritual in the writings of artists or by our subjective responses to their art. I believe that our whole conception of the

spiritual can be softened and expanded by the visual arts: much more work is needed to understand it, however. The work of the Abstract Expressionists has a spirituality that is firmly in the transcendent category; mainstream religious ideas are only nodded at, and the occult- ism of the earlier part of the century has vanished. Lipsey points out that Reinhardt, for example, was a friend of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, read Coomaraswamy and attended Buddhist

Fig. 5. Piet Mondrian, Evolution, oil on canvas (triptych), side panels: 178 x 85 cm, center panel 183 x 87.5 cm. This painting is cited as an example of the impact of Theosophy on Mondrian's work [61]. (?1998 ABC/Mondrian Estate/Holtzman Trust)

r .........

tury whose mysticism brought him into conflict with the Catholic church. Eckhart represents greatness in Euro-




scholar D.T. Suzuki's talks on Zen Bud- dhism, all of which point to an interest in the transcendent rather than in the occult.

CONTEMPORARY ART: THE ELECTRONIC ARTS, BODY ART AND CYBERSPACE The transcendent also is present in the electronic arts and in body art, in the sense of a transcendence of the biological organism; many indeed speak of a

post-biological world or of the "obsoles- cence of the body" [30]. This is the theme of the work of performance artist Stelarc. This Australian artist works with mechanical and electronic devices that

provide an interface to computer-con- trolled movements of his own body, prostheses and industrial robots: his own muscles send or amplify their movements to control mechanical systems, and he in turn allows computer-medi- ated control over his own body via elec- trical impulses of about 40 volts (Fig. 8). His visually stunning performances raise

questions regarding the transcendence of the body, surrender of personal will and the acceptance of pain. In an inter-

Fig. 6. Mark Rothko, Three Reds, oil on canvas, 68 x 38.5 inches, 1955. This painting, with no awkward associations with the occult, presents a clear example of Lipsey's thesis that abstract art represents a new departure in the art of the spiritual. (?1998 ARS, NY, and DACS, London)

Fig. 7. The Rothko room in the Tate Gallery, London. Many who are not normally inclined to the "spiritual" are affected by these pieces and seek out works that have a similar presence. (?1998 ARS, NY, and DACS, London)

: i

view, however, he was rather wary of the direct spiritual implications of his work; he told me that even though he has

practiced yoga for 20 years, he does not want direct parallels to be drawn.

It is worth comparing the work of Stelarc with that of Fakir Musafar, another contemporary figure exploring the limits of the human body. Musafar is less reticent than Stelarc about discussing the spiritual-indeed he has criticized Stelarc for his silence on this area [31]. Musafar's work turns us back to the occult (as defined here): it has its roots in

out-of-body experiences, shamanism and fetishism. According to Musafar, an over-

whelming spiritual experience at the age of 17 (after fasting and a form of self-im- molation) led to a conviction that he had lived before in a completely different culture and time and that the erotic and the physical were deeply linked to the spiritual. He comments:

That beautiful experience colored my whole existence. From that day on I wanted everyone to have that kind of liberation. I felt free to express life through my body. It was now my media, my own personal "living canvas," "living clay." It belonged to me to use. And that is just what I have done for the past thirty years. I learned to use the body. It is mine, and yours, to play with! [32]

Musafar is significant as an artist who

occupies the spiritual territory of the fakir, usefully defined for us by Gurdjieff as one whose path is through the body rather than through the mind or heart [33]. The physical feats of the fakir, such as lying on a bed of nails, or the more extreme postures (asanas) of hatha

yoga, are only the outward signs of a

spiritual search conducted through dis-

ciplining the body. Among the artists discussed here are

those who inhabit the virtual territory of cyberspace. Figures 9 and 10 show ex-

-

amples of computer art with explicitly spiritual components by students at Lon- don Guildhall University. Christine Hubner's work (Fig. 9) shows an interest in the older spiritualities of Pythagoras, while Jason Jaroslav Cook's (Fig. 10) is indicative of a genre of computer art that relates to "club culture," generally associated with the drug ecstasy.

Whether the spiritual in cyberspace will have its emphasis on the transcendence of the body or more on the collec- tivization of mind and consciousness is

yet to be seen. These questions are more

fully explored elsewhere, but some key issues can be outlined here. There is considerable interest in the ideas of

twentieth-century Jesuit priest and pale- ontologist Teilhard de Chardin in connection with the Internet, in particular his idea of the "noosphere" [34]. De Chardin described the noosphere as a

growing "layer of ideas" around the

planet, physically embodied in the conscious brains of humans. The concept of the noosphere evolved from the concept of the biosphere (organic life), which had in turn evolved from the concept of the geosphere (the geological surface of the planet). By extension of these ideas, the Internet, with its vast repository of cross-referenced human knowledge, is seen as a recent embodiment of the

noosphere. These ideas are developed in the writings of Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg [35] and Paul Groot [36]. The work of

Roy Ascott is also relevant here: Ascott is a pioneer of cybernetics and telematics in art. In a recent presentation at the Tucson II "Towards a Science of Con- sciousness" conference, Ascott wrote:

We are moving towards the spiritual in art in ways in which Kandinsky could hardly have imagined. Telepresence will be accompanied by teleprescience, and cybernetic systems will integrate with psychic systems, mutating into




Fig. 8. Stelarc, Eventfor Anti-Copernicus, performance, 1985. Although Stelarc's work has contin- ued to push the frontiers of our understanding of the interface between body and mind as me- diated through technology, this early image captures much of the intellectual probing and visual drama of his current performances. (Photo courtesy of Stelarc)

what could be called psybernetics. A noetic infrastructure is forming within the telematic domain which could lead to a spiritual awakening [37].

THE SPIRITUAL IN MODERN SCIENCE As mentioned earlier, one of my motiva- tions in exploring issues of spirituality and art and science was a curiosity about a strange phenomenon: the recent will-

ingness of scientists to write about God as if God were an outcome of their science. Books (mainly by physicists) have

appeared recently with titles such as The Mind of God (Paul Davies) [38] and The God Particle (Leon Lederman) [39], or with subtitles such as Science, Religion and the Search for God (Kitty Ferguson) [40] and Modern Cosmology, God and the Resur- rection of the Dead (Frank Tipler) [41]. Others in print relate science, usually the "new physics" that arises from quantum mechanics, to spirituality. It is rea- sonable today to say that the notion of

subjectivity became central to science with quantum mechanics (this is en- shrined in a minimal kind of way in what is known as the Copenhagen Interpreta- tion) [42]. Whether spiritual ideas are or are not central to science is highly de- batable; writer Ken Wilber downplays such a connection, while a more cau- tious approach may be to suggest that the possibility of such a connection gave scientists an excuse to talk about the

spiritual. In addition to approaches based purely on quantum mechanics, there is another approach, called the

anthropic principle (developed by scientists such as John Barrow and Frank

Tipler [43]), which finds wider evidence for the central role of human existence or consciousness in the structure of the universe.

Although many scientists, through confrontation with quantum theory and other developments in physics, found themselves having to reevaluate science itself, and in many cases finding parallels in religion or mysticism, it was physicist Fritjof Capra who first brought the

parallels to popular attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics [44]. Gary Zukav, trained in the liberal arts rather than in physics, followed with The

Dancing Wu Li Masters in 1979 [45]. Both books are good introductions to the new

physics and to its parallels with mysticism, but neither of the authors presents an in-depth discussion on the spiritual. If we relate the works of Capra and Zukav to our simple taxonomy of the

spiritual, then the parallels they draw are mainly to the transcendent, with references here and there to the occult.

Wilber wrote his first book The Spec- trum of Consciousness in 1973 while a

graduate student [46]. He has been a

prolific and maverick author since that

point on topics spanning the spiritual, the scientific and the psychological. His

reading in the spiritual is broad and

deep and as a result gives a much subtler

interpretation of the parallels between

physics and mysticism than that offered

by Capra and Zukav. Indeed it may be just their work of which he is complain- ing in his preface to Quantum Questions:

The theme of this book, if I may briefly summarize the arguments of the physicists presented herein, is that modern physics offers no positive sup- port (let alone proof) for a mystical worldview.... It is not my aim in this volume to reach the new-age audience, who seem to be firmly convinced that modern physics automatically supports or proves mysticism. It does not. But this view is now so widespread, so deeply entrenched, so taken for granted by new-agers, that I don't see that any one book could possibly re- verse the tide [47].

Wilber wishes to tread a more delicate

path than those interested in un-

founded, mystical New Age ideas or than do conventional scientists who dismiss

any connection between science and

spiritual thought. Wilber's work is more

engaged with the psychological or psy- choanalytical than with the topics discussed here, but he presents us with an

interesting possibility for the integration of seemingly opposing fields-the spiritual, the artistic and the scientific-

through his concept of levels of consciousness. His idea is that contradictions exist between the fields because different

phenomena belong to different levels of consciousness. In other words, it is inap- propriate to tackle spiritual questions from the perspective of a materialistic science because spiritual phenomena occur on a higher level of consciousness than do scientific phenomena.

Wilber's Quantum Questions is a good source of the writings of some of the key scientists on the spiritual this century, perhaps as useful as Lipsey's An Art of Our Own is on the spiritual in art. How-

ever, in the 10 years since Wilber's work was undertaken, science and the spiritual have generated a quite new debate,

bringing physics and mainstream reli-

gion closer together. John Polkinghorne, a theoretical

physicist who was recently ordained into the Church of England, has written for

many years on science (with the emphasis on quantum theory) and religion. His

premise is that both are "an inquiry into what is." Although his book Reason and

Reality includes a chapter called Quantum Questions, he seems unaware of Wilber's book of the same name and the main

proposition in it [48]. Polkinghorne ar-

gues for a form of complementarity between religion and science. For example,




Fig. 9. Christine Hiibner, Tribute to Pythagoras, digital image, 1996. (left) Beginning-Past. (center) Middle-Present. (right) End/Begin-

ning-Futulre. The series deals with the Pythagorean ideas of spirituality and geometry, while using the modern technologies of computer

graphics in the production of the imagery. (Photo courtesy of Christine Hiibner)

both theology and science are concerned with the origins or genesis of the universe and life; for both this becomes a le-

gitimate inquiry, and the traditionally "exclusive" accounts can in fact be ac- commodated by seeing them as comple- mentary to each other while appropriate to differing contexts of human activity. Valuable as Polkinghorne's work is, how-

ever, it restricts itself to a narrow band of

congruence between science and reli-

gion: that of the "inquiry" leading to ex-

planation. (The main problem is that his work does not touch on the devotional; for devotees, whether ecstatic or sober in their love of the divine, are not only pursuing an inquiry, but, more, a relation-

ship.) For Polkinghorne revelation is the

religious equivalent to the explanation that results from scientific inquiry, but in the work of Paul Davies, revelation is mis- trusted.

Davies is a British-born physicist, cur-

rently working in Australia, who won the

Templeton Prize for Progress in Reli-

gion in 1995. This prize, worth approxi- mately $1 million, has previously been awarded to Mother Teresa, Alexander

Solzhenitsyn and Billy Graham, and went to Davies in recognition of his

work, which includes the books God and the New Physics [49] and The Mind of God (a reworking of the former title, some 9

years later) [50]. The title of the latter book comes from the last sentence in A

BriefHistory of Time by Stephen Hawking, another modern physicist [51]. The

Templeton Prize, larger than any prize in physics, is given to a living person who has shown "extraordinary original- ity" in advancing humankind's under-

standing of God or spirituality [52]. Davies's spiritual interests lie clearly in

traditional religion: there is little of the

occult or transcendent, and Davies's discussion of theology, though perhaps broad for a scientist, is limited compared to that of Wilber, for example. What is it then that has made Davies's books best

sellers, and attracted the Templeton Prize? Davies is a scientist with no faith in the supernatural, as this quote shows:

I have always wanted to believe that science can explain everything, at least in principle. Many nonscientists would deny such a claim resolutely. Most reli- gions demand belief in at least some supernatural events, which are by defi- nition impossible to reconcile with science. I would rather not believe in supernatural events personally [53].

Davies's books introduce the new

physics (relativity, quantum theory and their more recent developments) in a lu- cid style, with a running commentary on the theological implications. He takes a

very different route than do Capra and Zukav by dealing with mainstream Chris- tian theological problems and even seems a little hostile to Eastern thought:

The popularity of "holistic science" in recent years has prompted a string of books, most notably Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, that stress the similarity between ancient Eastern philosophy, with its emphasis on the holistic interconnectedness of physical things, and modern nonlinear physics. Can we conclude that Oriental philosophy and theology were, after all, superior to their Western counterparts? Surely not [54].

Although The Mind of God concludes with a brief section on mysticism, Davies avoids the topic on the whole, and perhaps this is his popular appeal: a dialogue about mainstream Western religion. He

provides an update, via the new physics, on the arguments for the existence of

God, most of which look even less con-

vincing to me than those of the days of the old physics. He nods at some of the

metaphysics emerging from new physics, including the anthropic principle and ho-

lism, but is not enthusiastic about straying from materialistic science. However, his

position is weakly anthropic, as the clos-

ing section in The Mind of God suggests:

What does it mean? What is Man that we might be party to such privilege? I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an acci- dent of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here [55].

This might seem encouraging to the

conventionally religious person, but in fact Davies emphasizes science, rather than religion, as a powerful tool in the search for spirituality, as the closing re- marks in his previous work show:

I began by making the claim that science offers a surer path than religion in the search for God. It is my deep conviction that only by understanding the world in all its many aspects-re- ductionist and holist, mathematical and poetical, through forces, fields, and particles as well as through good and evil-that we will come to understand ourselves and the meaning be- hind this universe, our home [56].

Frank Tipler, physicist and author of The Physics of Immortality-Moder Cosmol-

ogy, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, represents an extreme reaction of the scientist to the spiritual possibilities of his

discipline. However, I think the book is




an important landmark and should not be ignored-in fact it would make a useful touchstone for a modern liberal edu- cation: its breadth and challenge require a broad educational base from which to mount any attack on its central thesis.

Tipler's ideas can be summarized as follows: modern cosmology predicts the elimination of biological life as we know it, either through the "heat death" (the diminution of energy available to life, as shown by the laws of thermodynamics) in an ever-expanding universe or its con-

sumption in the inferno of the "big crunch" (the final singularity of the universe as it contracts again). In any case, organic life on Earth has only some billions of years to go before the sun wipes it out. However, the anthropic principle requires that consciousness (which is a

property of life) is central to the cosmos and therefore the future evolution of life must be such as to ensure the existence of life (in some form or other) for

eternity. From this premise Tipler de- duces that we shall all be resurrected by God in the far future to live forever. He further claims to have the scientific

proof for the existence of God and our

immortality. In the conclusion to his book, he states:

The Omega Point Theory [the name is taken from de Chardin's writings] allows the key concepts of the Judeo- Christian-Islamic tradition now to be modern physics concepts: theology is nothing but physical cosmology based on the assumption that life as a whole is immortal. A consequence of this assumption is the resurrection of everyone who ever lived to eternal life. Phys- ics has now absorbed theology; the divorce between science and religion, between reason and emotion, is over.

I began this book with an assertion on the pointlessness of the universe by Steven Weinberg. He repeats this in his latest book, Dreams of a Final Theory, and goes on to say ". . . I do not for a minute think that science will ever provide the consolations that have been offered by religion in facing death."

I disagree. Science can now offer precisely the consolations in facing death that religion once offered. Religion is now part of science [57].

To show that his premises lead to his

(startling) conclusions, Tipler makes a number of radical assumptions along the way. First, he claims that life, includ-

ing the personality of every person that ever existed, can exist as a digital simula-

tion; second, that robot "probes" can colonize the universe (thus disseminat-

final collapse in an asymmetrical way (harnessing the features of chaos

theory) in order to provide huge amounts of usable energy; fourth, that this collective intelligence (called the

Omega Point) will be benign enough to collect all possible data regarding each one of us and initiate our eternal simulation on vast computers; and, finally, that the last infinitesimally small period of time before the final singularity will feel

"subjectively" to us like an eternity. Each of these major assumptions then

requires another group of assumptions to make them work: for example, that colonization of the universe will be achievable through matter/anti-matter engines (no one knows at this point how to build one) and that the mind is com-

putable so that we can be "uploaded" into computers (Roger Penrose, for one, disagrees with this idea [58]). Our resurrection then depends on the fact that living persons now (and in the past) can be photographed billions of years in the future from the light-rays bouncing off the edge of the universe, which will

give the Omega Point sufficient information to run an exact simulation of us, preferably choosing us in our prime. Tipler does recognize that there could be a practical difficulty with this (we cannot even photograph an entire planet within our own galaxy, not even as a spot

Fig. 10. Jason Jaroslav Cook, State, digital image, 1996. Cook's work is influenced by modern dance culture and cyberspace icons. .. The term state is a Ij Sufi one (Sufis are -~~ an Islamic sect) and is used in opposition

i--

to station; the first is IiSi ;,

involuntary, while il the second is to be .i.i......... attained. (Photo ..

courtesy of Jason Jaroslav Cook) J / s 1i E~~~~~~~~_."""

of light), so he suggests instead that the cosmic computer could reconstruct us all knowing that we are "completely defined" by the four-billion-odd genes in our bodies. This may unfortunately mean resurrecting an inconceivably large number of people who never existed, but Tipler can be generous: he has

already shown that the Omega Point has infinite computing power at its disposal.

As if all the scientific odds did not make his theory improbable, Tipler also has to show that various religious and cultural attitudes to immortality are

wrong. The most important of these are eternal recurrence-the idea (popular- ized by Nietzsche) that everything in his-

tory is repeated an infinite number of times [59]-and reincarnation, both of which require lengthy discussions of

philosophy and religion to dispose of.

Tipler supplies a Scientists' Appendix to The Physics of Immortality, which he claims mathematically proves various elements of his theory. His strategy is to

argue small points tightly and scientifi-

cally and then make huge (but

downplayed) leaps between them, thus

stringing together some plausible science in the service of an implausible conclusion. It is an enjoyable read, how-

ever, and it deserves a refutation. While I believe that the anthropic

principle deserves a place in modern

ing intelligent digitally encoded life) before its collapse has gone too far; third, that this intelligent life can engineer the




thought, it is undermined in this work

by Tipler's attempt to avoid his own, and others', mortality. The really interesting part of his work and that of a growing number of other scientists is their will-

ingness to use (some would say hijack) the language of religion. In terms of the

categories of spirituality developed above, it is religious rather than occult or transcendent.

CONCLUSIONS

While it is clear from the writings of scientists cited here that something is hap- pening in the sciences with explicit reference to the spiritual, and while there have not been the same numbers of artists writing on spiritual topics, it may be

premature to assume that science is more receptive to the spiritual than are the arts. The development of quantum theory has brought science up against the brick wall of the subjective, and from there a path to the spiritual is cer-

tainly possible, if not inevitable. We also have seen a continual, if less obvious, engagement with the spiritual in the arts of this century, starting with Kandinsky and the Bauhaus, through the Abstract

Expressionists, and into the modern electronic arts. One might say that the

equivalent event in the arts of this cen-

tury to the discovery of quantum theory in physics has been the development of abstract art. However, the beginnings of abstract art coincided with an explicit concern with the spiritual, whereas the

impact of quantum theory has taken

roughly 50 years to emerge from the

Copenhagen Interpretation to the

popular spirituality of Capra and Zukav. We have seen also that artists write dif-

fusely, if at all, about the spiritual; rather, they leave it to be found directly in their work. Some modern scientists, on the other hand, have taken to writing profusely about the spiritual.

In both the arts and sciences there are, however, considerable tensions and

antagonisms toward the spiritual. Per-

haps the mutual antagonism between science and religion is precisely because of an instinct that (as Polkinghorne puts it) both can be "an inquiry into what is." To the extent that science and religion com-

pete to give us a rational account of the universe and its origins there will probably be no reconciliation: the efforts of

Polkinghorne, Davies and Tipler are not

always convincing. The work of Tipler is also a clearly predatory move on the ter-

ritory traditionally considered religious. There are also clear antagonisms in the

arts concerning the spiritual; mainly from the free-thinking artist's spirit against the perceived tyranny of organized religion (e.g. Brancusi's "nightmare," discussed earlier).

The considerable number of recent

writings on spirituality by scientists is an

important phenomenon, however, and deserves further study. The impulse arises from, or was released by, quantum theory, but it is hard to see how a real

synthesis between science and religion will emerge. A sympathetic complementarity would, however, be a great step forward in bringing the scientific and

religious communities together, though the danger has to be recognized that some scientists are merely trying to appropriate the territory of the spiritual with little real sympathy for it. While

contemporary artists write little about

spirituality, it seems that the spiritual is an important undercurrent of influence in the arts. Whether this entered with abstract art, or whether abstraction

merely changed the nature of the spiritual influence from being mainstream

religious to occult and transcendental, needs clarification.

What of the idea, stated at the beginning of this article, that the spiritual is antecedent to both science and art (as Whitman would have it)? The anthropic principle allows that consciousness is at least on an equal footing with matter, but some spiritual traditions place it as antecedent to matter, while most of science places it as an emergent property of matter. To say that the spiritual is antecedent to science is therefore not eas-

ily or widely supportable. It is easier to assert that the spiritual may be antecedent to art.

There may be a fruitful line of inquiry as to whether the arts can successfully mediate between science and the spiritual. Lipsey's quote from the Sufis re-

garding "eyes of flesh" and "eyes of fire"

may be relevant: perhaps the artist is best attuned to move from one to the other during the course of his or her work. One might also suggest that science needs the poetic in order to allow a better understanding of the spiritual and that the religious needs the poetic to avoid the dogmatic and reactionary.

References and Notes

1. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977).

2. Dominic Boreham, "The Conceptual Framework of My Computer Assisted Drawings: Reflections on Physics, Buddhism and Transactional Psychology," Leonardo 25, No. 2, 119-127 (1992).

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Lon- don: Penguin Books, 1969) p. 41.

4. For Anthroposophy, see Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1964). For Gurdjieff, see G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World-Early Talks of Gurdjieff as Recollected by His Pupils (New York: Viking Arkana, 1975) pp. 179-187.

5. For the aims of Theosophy, see CJ. Ryan, H.P Blavatsky and the Theosophical Movement (San Diego, CA: Point Loma, 1975) p. 61. For the preparation for world teacher, see p. 337; see also M. Lutyens, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (London: Rider, 1991) p. 8.

6. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, History of Indian and Indonesian Art (New York: Dover, 1965).

7. Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own-The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (Boston, MA, and Shaftesbury, U.K.: Shambhala, 1988).

8. Lipsey [7] p. 244.

9. Fritz Peters, Boyhood with Gurdjieff (Santa Bar- bara, CA: Capra Press, 1980) p. 48.

10. Lipsey [7] p. 236.

11. Lipsey [7] p. 7.

12. Lipsey [7] p. 8.

13. Lipsey [7] p. 17.

14. Lipsey [7] p. 143.

15. Lipsey [7] p. 144.

16. Philip Lee Ralph, The Renaissance in Perspective (London: G. Bell, 1973) p. 175.

17. Lipsey [7] p. 202..

18. Lipsey [7] p. 202.

19. Johannes Itten, Design and Form, the Basic Course at the Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964) p. 11.

20. Frances Stonor Saunders, Hidden Hands (Lon- don: Channel 4 Television, 1995) p. 9. "Mazdaznan" is a derivation of Mazdaism, better known in the West as Zoroastrianism, a religion whose main prophet was the historical Zarathustra, a man quite unconnected with Nietzsche's imaginary figure of the same name.

21. Saunders [20] p. 8.

22. Saunders [20] p. 8.

23. Kandinsky [1] p. 13.

24. Saunders [20] p. 6. Saunders criticizes this painting, describing it as a "new age 'get well' card." At the time of the painting of Mondrian's Evolution Triptych it was fashionable to join such so- cieties as the Theosophists. The painting is an odd- ity in the progression of Mondrian's work.

25. Paul Klee's diaries appear to cover only the period from 1898 to 1918. See Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1964).

26. Lipsey [7] p. 174.

27. Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Ab- stract Painting 1890-1985, exh. cat. (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986).

28. Lipsey [7] p. 326.

29. Lipsey [7] p. 301.

30. Stelarc, "On the Future of the Net, Phantom Bodies, Fractal Flesh and Collective Strategies," in Michael Roetter, ed., ISEA '96 Proceedings (Rotterdam: ISEA, 1997) p. 16.

31. Fakir Musafar, "Body Play," in Adam Parfrey, ed., Apocalypse Culture (Portland, OR: Feral House, 1990) p. 105.




32. Musafar [31] p. 115.

33. P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous- Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London, Melbourne and Henley: Arkana, 1978) p. 44.

34. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Readers Union Collins, 1961) p. 182. See also: Mike King, "Concerning the Spiritual in Cyberspace" in Roetter [30] pp. 18-25.

35. Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, "A Globe, Clothing It- self with a Brain," Wired (June 1995) pp. 108-113.

36. Paul Groot, "Teilhard and Technognosis," Mediamatic8, No. 4, 37-43 (1996).

37. Roy Ascott, "Noetic Aesthetics: Art and Telematic Consciousness" in Consciousness Research Abstracts, Proceedings of the "Tucson II" Conference (special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies) (Tucson, AZ: Univ. of Arizona, 1996) p. 171.

38. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (London: Penguin, 1993).

39. Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, The God Par- ticle-If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Ques- tion? (Toronto, New York, Sidney, London, Auckland: Bantam, 1993).

40. Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, Science, Religion and the Search for God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).

41. Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality-Mod- ern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (London: Macmillan, 1994).

42. Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (London: Fontana, 1979) p. 62. The Copenhagen Interpreta- tion says that quantum theory is about a correlation between subatomic phenomena and our experience of them, where conditions of the experiment, including the experimenter, cannot be separated from the observations. This means that no definite picture can be given of quantum phenomena without reference to the observer. In other words, the "objectivity" that science maintains within the mac- roscopic world is not applicable to the quantum world. Einstein did not accept this view, but was un- able to provide a scientific refutation.

43. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See also J.A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe (American Institute of Physics, 1995).

44. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, 3rd Ed. (Lon- don: Flamingo, 1992).

45. Zukav [42].

46. Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, 2nd Ed. (Wheaton, IL; Madras, India; London, England: Quest Books, Theosophical Publishing House, 1993).

47. Quantum Questions-Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (Boston, MA and London: Shambhala, 1985) p. ix.

48. John Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality-The Re- lationship between Science and Theology (London: SPCK, 1994) p. 85.

49. Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (London: Penguin, 1990).

50. Davies [38].

51. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Toronto, New York, Sidney, London, Auckland: Bantam Press, 1988).

52. Guardian (9 March 1995).

53. Davies [38] p. 15.

54. Davies [38] p. 78.

55. Davies [38] p. 232.

56. Davies [49] p. 229.

57. Tipler [41] p. 338.

58. Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind-A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).

59. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (London: Penguin, 1979) p. 99.

60. I have borrowed these terms from philosopher Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1992) p. 1.

61. Saunders [20] p. 4.

Glossary

anthropic principle-the idea that the presence of human beings is required for the universe to exist. This idea is found in the weak case that finds the statistical improbability of the existence of humans significant to, although not necessarily proof of, the notion that humans were specifically created by God to have special status, and in the strong case that holds the universe exists solely for the benefit of human beings.

Anthroposophy-a spiritual science founded on the inner experiences of its founder, Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophy's name and mission both derive in part from Steiner's reaction to what he saw as deficiencies in Blavatsky's Theosophy: princi- pally, an over-reliance on Oriental teachings.

aura-a pattern of non-physical light or visible energy surrounding a human being, which clairvoy- ants claim to see.

cyberspace-the virtual world of images, sounds and sensations created through digital technologies, often accessed via the Internet and the World Wide Web.

holism-a perspective that posits the necessity of seeing systems such as living organisms as interre- lated on the largest possible scale, as opposed to the classical analytical perspective that breaks systems down into parts.

new age-a descriptive term for beliefs or practices, generally applied to spiritual movements originat- ing in psychotherapy and the human potential movement. The new age movement is sometimes unfairly assumed to be over credulous and to in- volve substance abuse, astrology and the occult.

nirvana-the extinction (as of a flame) of mental afflictions and of suffering based on them; often interpreted as an exalted spiritual state in which one perceives the ultimate dimension of reality.

telematics-a term coined by Roy Ascott to denote an art practice solely resident in cyberspace.

Manuscript received 4June 1996.




Documents

Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science