3.6. The Art of the Spiritual: Blake, Besant, Steiner, Mother Meera

While the spiritual enters art through each artist that is spiritually inclined, artists by definition give their lives to primarily to art. The great mystics and religionists on the other hand primarily give their lives to God, or to their particular spirituality if it is not framed in terms of God. People who are primarily spiritual do occasionally produce works of art, Mother Meera being a contemporary who does so, and whose paintings are reproduced in book form. The Steiner movement is unusual for a spiritual movement in its emphasis on art, as we have seen, but the style is strangely reminiscent of Mother Meera. So also is that of Blake. William Blake is the exception to the discussion in this paragraph so far, in that the spiritual and the artistic were not separate in his life, and one not subordinate to the other. The common visual elements in Blake, Steiner and Meera relate to the representation of spirits or disembodied beings or energies, using flowing wavy forms.

The imagery of Besant and Leadbeater's thought-forms share some of these visual elements, though the purpose of their production was more illustrative than artistic, and they were produced by different artists under the instruction of these theosophists. All four groups of imagery do share in addition an occult overtone, as defined earlier, though the spiritualities in each case differ widely. The common, and occult, theme is that of a hierarchy of disembodied beings or angels, which leave the conventions of established religion far behind. In Meera's case the occult dimension of her work and personal experience are downplayed in favour of what is defined here as the transcendent, and in Blake and in Theosophy the transcendent is also strongly present. In Steiner it is absent.

3.7. Colour: Gravity and Grace

The phrase 'gravity and grace' are taken from the book of the same name by Simone Weil, an exact contemporary of Sartre's; a philosopher, but with a deeply spiritual bent. Gravity and Grace is a collection of her brief statements, aphoristic in nature, and gathered under rather arbitrary headings for want of any other organising principle. The book opens with this statement: "All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception." [15]

Her work is profound but largely pessimistic (her intellectual maturation took place as a Jewess in exile from Nazi France), as some of these quotations on art show:

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it. It imitates the anonymity of divine art. In the same way the beauty of the world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same time and is neither the one nor the other separately [16].

In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there really is the presence of God. There is as it were an incarnation of God in the world and it is indicated by beauty.

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

Hence all art of the highest order is religious in essence. (That is what people have forgotten today.) A Gregorian melody is a powerful a witness as the death of a martyr [17].

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and athleticism, the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc. ... Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. ... Is therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo ... (but without an echo, no art) [18].

Her views on art, though instructive, are too pessimistic too be useful here and will be left aside in favour of the more widely useful concepts of gravity and grace. We can think of these as 'lenses' through which we can look at any phenomenon in one of two possible ways. Gravity corresponds the 'lens' of materialism, a seemingly growing influence which worried Steiner and the peak of which came perhaps with the first world war: this war seemed to halt the first flow of 20th century artistic interest in the spiritual (noticeably at the Bauhaus, but also in Weil's thinking). Grace corresponds to the 'lens' of the spiritual, but grace is in fact a specialised term in the spiritual, so caution is needed. Grace is specifically beyond the human will, though it does not necessarily imply a belief in an external God or other deity: it can be prayed for or prepared for, but it arrives from its own necessity, not ours. Both artists and scientists are deeply in need of it for their own disciplines; Arthur Koestler, for example, in The Act of Creation skilfully traces its role in art and science (though he does not use the word grace).

In the world of gravity colour is a wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, the heart is an organ that pumps blood, and stars are hydrogen/helium fusion reactors that consume themselves. In the world of grace colour is emotion, the heart is the axis of love, and stars are the 'forget-me-nots of angels.' This may be dismissed by some as romanticism, but reminds us again that artists and scientists alike, if they are to accommodate the spiritual, have to give up a single world view. This is particularly true in the world of colour. We have seen how Steiner views colour as a 'space' more appropriate to painting than perspective; occultists generally describe their experiences, for example auras, in terms of colour. Goethe produced a massive volume on colour which has little to do with conventional scientific understanding of the subject, and this tradition extends into the twentieth century in the work of Johannes Itten (one of the founder-members of the Bauhaus), amongst others.

3.8. Quantum Theory and the Anthropic Principle

Returning to science again we note that the discovery of quantum theory in the twentieth century has initiated a trend in modern science to restore man to the central place in the universe denied to him by the early science of Galileo and Kepler. The high-point of the 'clockwork' view of the universe came with Newton, and this reductionist view is widely held today as the scientific paradigm, even in the biological sciences (see below). Quantum theory has changed this to some extent, suggesting to some that man, or in particular, consciousness, is as essential to the existence of the universe as the universe is essential to the existence of man. This is termed the anthropic principle and is found in the work of Tipler and Barrow [19], and also in the work of John Archibald Wheeler [20]. The less radical interpretation of quantum theory is called the 'Copenhagen Interpretation' and merely states that the observer cannot be excluded from the experimental investigation of sub-atomic phenomena. The most-cited quantum example is Schrödinger's Cat Paradox, which can be understood from the Copenhagen Interpretation to resolve the life or death of an imaginary cat only at the point of observation (in another interpretation known as 'many worlds' it can be understood in terms of parallel universes). The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined a single photon being directed through a half-silvered mirror (a mirror that allows 50% of light energy through, and 50% to be reflected). The mirror is arranged in such a way that if the photon (a single quantum of light energy) passes through the mirror it triggers a photo-sensitive device which kills an unfortunate cat kept in an opaque box. Because of quantum indeterminacy there is nothing in the history of any part of the experiment that will allow us to predict whether the photon goes straight through or is deflected, and it cannot split in two by definition. Hence the only way that we can know whether the cat is alive or dead is by opening the box: this is not just a problem of ignorance, but one that goes to the heart of science.

The Anthropic principle does not rest on quantum theory alone however, but points also to a range of laws and numerical constants that, if they deviated to the smallest fraction from their existing values, would make life impossible. Although these ideas have come from physicists, some theologians or philosophers of religion, notably Richard Swinburne, have picked up on them as helping to revive ancient 'proofs' of the existence of God.

The Anthropic principle may not strike one in the first instance as having much to do with spirituality, certainly not of the religious type defined above. However, parallels can be made with the transcendent category, via notions of wholeness or union, and we see that this theme emerges with Capra and Zukav in the seventies (see below), along with occult implications. More recently physicists are drawing on the same physics to support the more conventionally religious concepts such as God, resurrection, and immortality. Let us look first at the early development of the spiritual in artistic movements in the 20th century.

4. The Spiritual in Modern Art

Where art of previous centuries reflected mainstream religious concerns, and indeed for much of history could hardly be separated from religion, the 20th century, from a basis in Nietzsche's thought onwards, strikes out on its own. 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 example of Gaudi, the Spanish architect, for example. However, artists who are 'conventionally' religious are probably the exception.

Examining the spiritual in modern art becomes a difficult undertaking, perhaps for two reasons. Firstly, when we leave the conventional religious spirituality we are left with the less widely understood occult and transcendent spiritualities. Secondly, an art which does not generally deal with the old religious symbols of crucifixion and so on, and is often dealing with abstractions or even the totally abstract, may not immediately be perceived to have a spiritual dimension. This is compounded by the writings of the 20th century artists, or perhaps more by the lack of them. For where the spiritual is central to a piece of modern art, it may be entirely conveyed in a visual language, and the scholars of science and theology are not trained in the visual. Conversely the artist is generally not widely read in the spiritual, and may be unaware of resonances across cultures and epochs with his or her work, and may indeed by innately suspicious of possible restraining influences in spiritual traditions or movements.

In examining the spiritual in 20th century art we are confronted with such problems, but are however indebted to art historian Roger Lipsey for some ground-breaking work. One of the premises of his work (and based on Mondrian and Kandinsky's thinking) is that the arrival of the abstract in modern art allowed a new exploration of the spiritual. He is also clear that Theosophy was amongst the important spiritual influences of the time. The 'Hidden Hands' programme made this point about Modernism:

Kandinsky, Paul Gaugin, Constantin Brancusi, Theo van Deusburg, Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius (for a while) Robert Delauney, Aleksandr Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Boris Pasternak, Aleksander Blok, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot all were great pioneers of Modernism, and all were involved in Theosophy and its unpronounceable spin-offs, such as Anthroposophy, Christosophy, Theozoology and Aisophy. In fact, from fin de siècle Paris to 1950's New York (Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were both one-time disciples of Eastern gurus), a fascination with magic, the occult and the supernatural were integral to the Modern spirit [21].

The barely-veiled scorn for Theosophy etc. in this passage is not surprising in the mid-nineties, but would have been a surprise for the artists and writers mentioned of the period.

4.1. An Art of Our Own - Roger Lipsey

Roger Lipsey is well-known for his work on the late Ananda Coomaraswamy, an authority on religious art of previous eras. Lipsey's book An Art of Our Own The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art is a thorough and fascinating updating of Coomaraswamy's interests into the 20th century, starting, as does this paper, with Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The tension between the spiritual and artistic is immediately present in the choice of title, for it comes from a quote from Brancusi:

In the art of other times there is a joy, but with it the nightmare that the religions drag with them. There is joy in Negro sculpture, among the nearly archaic Greeks, in some things of the Chinese 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 [22].

The 'all this' we need to free ourselves from, and which 20th century Western artists and writers have done so thoroughly is the religious baggage of previous centuries. In modernism and later art movements the 20th 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, using the terminology of this paper, is in the occult. In particular it is in the occult of Theosophy, but as we have seen, Anthroposophy and Gurdjieff's work have also played their part (it seems very likely that Brancusi for example met Gurdjieff, and may well have absorbed some of the influences of his school). We also find that the transcendent is a strong influence. Using Brancusi as an example again, we find that one of the books to have the greatest influence on him was Jacques Bacot's 1925 translation of the thirteenth century Tibetan Buddhist The Life of Milarepa.

Lipsey's introduction asks of course what the spiritual is, and what in particular it might be in art, giving firstly a broad outline of the issues as we have done here. He goes on: "All of this duly noted, spiritual remains an old-fashioned word of vague meaning. Yet it is this word that Kandinsky seeded into twentieth-century art, and apart from any individual, it still speaks. It requires a positive response from us." [23] Lipsey points out that many intellectuals of his generation were profoundly influenced by the inevitable conclusion of 19th 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 ..." [24] The void is a key concept in the spirituality of the transcendent, particularly in Buddhism, but is deeply problematic in the West, particularly to the artist. While Lipsey does not explore this much, he does draw an interesting metaphor from Sufi thought; 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 nothing is lonely matter, all things are caught up in a mysterious, ultimately divine whole that challenges understanding over a lifetime. ... eyes for art strike a balance between these sensibilities." [25] This idea, that the artist stands between heaven and earth and somehow mediates between them, will be returned to later.

The early part of Lipsey's book traces, as we have done above, some of the spiritual developments on the artists of the twentieth century. He focuses on Theosophy and Anthroposophy, but only mentions Ouspensky (a close associate of Gurdjieff's) in the section on Kasimir Malevich, saying: "Suprematism can be viewed in part as an artist's response to the world-view and implicit challenge of Tertium Organum." [26] This major work of Ouspensky's was produced before he met Gurdjieff, but many of the preoccupations in it carry over into his later work. Its influence may well have been most noticeable amongst Russian artists.

The strength of Lipsey's work is in its thoroughness and insight into the lives, concerns, and work of 20th 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. In this essay, by starting with the crude boundaries of religious, occult and transcendent, I am pointing to a way to build on Lipsey's work and take it further. Let us look at a brief selection of the key players in 20th century art, looking both at Lipsey's research and at ways to refine it.

4.2. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, and Itten: The Bauhaus

The influence of Theosophy on Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, plus the spiritual interests of Johannes Itten, contributed to making the Bauhaus a focus for the spiritual in the 1920s. Steiner's and Gurdjieff's work had no comparable outlet in Europe, but in fact various forces conspired to diminish the spiritual aspect of the Bauhaus. It lay at the heart of twentieth century Modernism, and 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. (It even sometimes had the 'cult' overtones of Ficino's Renaissance Academy.) It is generally considered that the first world war and the Russian Revolution turned the current of idealism (sparked by Theosophy et al.) from the spiritual in the direction of the social. At best this swing had a democratic impulse, but the materialistic emphasis of socialism, and the drift towards fascism in Germany, put paid to the spiritual aspirations of many of the Bauhaus artists (it was closed by the Nazis in 1933). Lipsey has this to say: "It is a matter of lasting astonishment that the Bauhaus began with a medievalizing, romantic self-image and emerged in a few short years as the principal artisan of design principles that are the essence of 'modern' and the hallmark of the century." [27]

Johannes Itten was deliberately employed by Gropius in the early years to teach at the Bauhaus because of his strongly mystical dimension, but left eventually as directions changed. Lipsey comments:

He viewed the Bauhaus as a "secret, self-contained society" with spiritual goals. In his classes, he offered students the opportunity to practice relaxation, breathing, and concentration exercises intended, as he later wrote, "to establish the intellectual and physical readiness which makes intensive work possible." ... Itten precipitated 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 [28].

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

I had studied oriental philosophy and concerned myself with Persian Mazdaism and Early Christianity. Thus I realised 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 custom 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 intensive 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 [29].

These extracts show much of Itten's thinking and character, and the reactions 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 university has a simple pencilled comment in the margin close to the last point made in this extract: 'Suspicious'. The 'Hidden Hands' team commented: "Itten was a zealous campaigner for a pseudo-religion called Mazdaznan, which its adherents claimed was derived from the teachings of Zoroaster in Persia. Itten wandered around in monk-like robes and instituted a strict regime of meditation, colonic irrigation and vegetarianism (during Itten's tenure, observers noted, "everything at the Bauhaus smelt of garlic." [30]) They go on to claim that the Mazdaznan experiment was a disaster.

Let us turn back now to Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art as a turning point for Modernism. It was published in 1911, and was deeply influenced by Theosophy: he had 'snapped up' a copy of Thought Forms in 1908 and joined the movement in 1909. Kandinsky's Variations series is considered by Frances Saunders to be almost indistinguishable from the illustrations in Thought Forms [31]. The thesis of the 'Hidden Hands' documentary is that the contemporary art scene is embarrassed about the early spiritual influences on Modernism, but it seems that even twenty years ago the editors of the Dover edition of Concerning the Spiritual in Art only give a passing mention to Theosophy, and disregard it altogether under 'further reading'. Kandinsky himself only devotes a few paragraphs to it, apparently quoting from 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 organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove 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 [32].

Kandinsky shows in Concerning the Spiritual in Art the seeds of the spiritual dilemma that makes the appearance of the spiritual in the arts so fitful in the 20th century: the apparent hierarchical nature of it. In the chapter called 'The Movement of the Triangle' he likens society to a triangle with those few spiritual or artistic geniuses at its apex, and, as one goes down, a greater and greater number of artists of lesser and lesser value; the triangle moves upwards, thus representing 'progress'. This image fits well with Theosophy, 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 the first world war must also have shaken the faith of men like Kandinsky in Blavatsky's prediction of a heaven in the 21st 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.

Piet Mondrian was only briefly at the Bauhaus, but was just as deeply influenced by Theosophy as Kandinsky, though to the 'Hidden Hands' team only to his detriment as an artists. They print a triptych of Mondrian's call Evolution as an example of this period (it is the dominant piece amongst similar work hidden in the Gemeente Museum, unshown). His later and better-known work continued to explore one of the Theosophical themes, that of geometry.

Paul Klee was another teacher at the Bauhaus for a time, and shared with Kandinsky a friendship with Thomas de Hartmann, musician and close collaborator with Gurdjieff. Kandinsky met de Hartmann between 1908 and 1912, before de Hartmann met Gurdjieff in 1916, and for whom both he and his wife gave up everything. Klee's notebooks, like those of many artists, do not reveal the kind of spiritual preoccupations that we find in those of a man like Krishnamurti, and I have not found so far any mention of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, or even de Hartman [33]. Lipsey comments:

Paul Klee (1879-1940)Swiss-born, mature in art by 1914, Bauhaus master in the great years of the institution, renowned for works of originality, wit, and depthis the author of one of the century's few unerring 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 [34].

The last sentiment in this passage, concerning Eckhart and Leonardo, could be seen as an aspiration at the heart of this essay. However, I think Lipsey is a little optimistic, particularly in respect of Klee's 1924 lecture, which makes no direct reference to the spiritual at all. I suspect that the spiritual in Klee's work has to be approached via the work itself, and I have no suggestion at this point for an easy method for so doing.

4.3. The American Abstract Expressionists

Another influential group of 20th century painters that drew heavily on spiritual influences in one form or other was the group known as the American Abstract Expressionists. Coming to prominence after the second world war in New York, they included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and many others. A cursory glance at the writings of these artists leave one again in doubt as to the extent of any explicitly spiritual references in their writings, but overall there is strong evidence for a spiritual concern running through their work. Lipsey is similarly hesitant, though not sceptical. His comments revolve around an exhibition called "The Spiritual in Abstract Art: 1895-1985" (Los Angeles, 1986; Catalogue Editor: Maurice Tuchman) in which the last two paintings, one by Ad Reinhardt and another by Mark Rothko had the most impact on him. Lipsey 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." [35] 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." [36]

We should not be discouraged however either by the difficulties in pursuing the spiritual in the writings of the artists, nor by our subjective responses to their art. I believe that our whole conception of the spiritual can be fruitfully softened and expanded by the visual arts: much more work is needed, that is all. The American Abstract Expressionists have a spirituality that is firmly in the transcendent category (as defined in this essay); the mainstream religious is only nodded at, and the occultism of the earlier part of the century has vanished. Lipsey points out that Ad Reinhardt for example was a friend of Thomas Merton, read Coomaraswamy, attended Suzuki's talks on Zen Buddhism, and was literate in Buddhism.

4.4. Stelarc and Musafar: towards a spiritual in cyberspace

I would like to conclude this brief section on modern art with a mention of the electronic arts and the virtual territory that they inhabit: cyberspace. The post-modern, eclectic, and rule-free world of the electronic arts may produce at worst a New-Age pap, but at best there is a genuine freedom of thought and spiritual aspiration. Once again one has to look very hard to find explicitly spiritual references, but this should be no obstacle. We see for example a transcendent theme again, this time a transcendence of the biological organism; many indeed speak of a post-biological world, or of 'obsolescence of the body'. This is the theme of the work of performance artist Stelarc. This Australian artist works with mechanical and electronical devices that provide an interface to computer-controlled movements of his own body, prostheses, and industrial robots: he uses his own muscles to send or amplify their movements to control mechanical systems, and in turn allows computer-mediated control over his own body via electrical impulses of about 40V. His visually stunning performances raise all kinds of questions regarding transcendence of the body, surrender of personal will, and the acceptance of pain. In interview however he is rather wary of the direct spiritual implications of his work; even though he practised yoga for twenty years he does not want direct parallels to be drawn, and one can only respect this.

Fakir Musafar is another performance artist, working mainly without electronics, but is much less reticent than Stelarc about the spiritual - indeed he criticises Stelarc for his silence on this area. Musafar's work turns us back to the occult (as defined here): it has its roots in out-of-body experiences, shamanism, and fetishism. An overwhelming spiritual experience at the age of seventeen (after fasting and a form of self-immolation) led to a conviction that he had lived before in a completely different culture and time, and that the erotic and bodily 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! I wrote a poem after the experience. It said:


Poke your finger into Red,
Feel the feeling through.
And when the feeling is no more,
Feel no-feeling too! [37]

This poem has a resonance for me with the following meditation from the Vigyana Bhairava Tantra (Lord Shiva's 112 methods of meditation):

Devi, imagine the Sanskrit letters in these honey-filled foci of awareness, first as letters, then more subtle as sounds, then as most subtle feeling. Then, leaving them aside, be free [38].

Musafar is significant as an artist who occupies Gurdjieff's territory of the fakir, that is one who's path is through the body rather than through mind or heart. The transcendent implications in his poem, and the occult nature of his out-of-body experiences reminds one again that we cannot apply these categories too strictly however.

Whether the spiritual in cyberspace will have its emphasis on the transcendence of the body, or more on the collectivisation of mind and consciousness is yet to be seen. There is considerable interest in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin in connection with the Internet; in particular his idea of the noosphere. De Chardin is interesting in his own right as a Jesuit priest and palaeontologist: his life's work represents an attempt to reconcile the scientific and religious, but lack of space prevents a detailed presentation of his ideas. Let us turn instead to the way in which the spiritual is emerging in the work of the scientists of the 20th century.

5. The Spiritual in Modern Science

We have seen earlier how the spiritual has gained an entrance into modern science through quantum theory and the Anthropic principle, though both may be seen more as a humanistic than spiritual development. The scientific community has not reacted in a homogeneous way to these developments however, as the following sections show.

5.1. Reactions to Quantum Theory: Einstein and Bohm

It is a reasonable assertion today to say that the subjective entered science with quantum mechanics. Whether the spiritual does or does not is a question that is highly debatable; Wilber denies it (see below) while a more cautious approach may be to suggest that it gave the scientists the first real excuse to talk about the spiritual. What is not always appreciated is that even the first premise was not so easily reached, and we find in particular that Einstein resisted it, and in a more subtle way so did the physicist David Bohm. Einstein's comment on quantum theory, that "God does not play dice," is well known, but in fact it came from a profound distrust of chance, both in his personal life and in physics, and he spent the last 30 years of his life unsuccessfully trying to find the 'hidden variables' behind quantum theory that would bring it back to the fold of a deterministic science. No one would pretend that Einstein's occasional use of the word 'God' represented a profound engagement with the spiritual, and the conversations between him and Rabindranath Tagore are often cited to show how Einstein wanted to cling at all costs to the idea of an 'objective' universe out there, against Tagore's Hindu metaphysics.

David Bohm, on the other hand, had a life-long interest in mysticism (as his conversations with Krishnamurti show). His best-known work Wholeness and the Implicate Order is dense and opaque to most lay readers; nevertheless it represents an attempt to complete Einstein's project to find the 'hidden variables'. Bohm steers clear of the physics-supports-mysticism view, yet his work is much more than the incidental interest of a physicist in mysticism: it is a clear manifesto for the synthesis of the two.

References for Part 2
[15] Weil, S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p.1
[16] Weil, S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 136
[17] Weil, S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 137
[18] Weil, S. Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1992, p. 138
[19] Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986
[20] Wheeler, J.A., At Home in the Universe, The American Institute of Physics, 1995
[21] Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 6
[22] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 244
[23] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 7
[24] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 8
[25] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 17
[26] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 143
[27] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 201
[28] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 202
[29] Itten, Johannes, Design and Form, the Basic Course at the Bauhaus, London: Thames and Hudson, 1964, p.11
[30] Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 9
[31] Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 6
[32] Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1977, p. 13
[33] Paul Klee's diaries appear to go only from 1898 to 1918, see: Klee, Paul The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1964
[34] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 174
[35] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 326
[36] Lipsey, Roger, An Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988, p. 301
[37] Musafar, Fakir, 'Body Play', in ( Adam Parfrey, Ed.) Apocalypse Culture, Portland, Oregon: Feral House, 1990, p. 105
[38] Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree, The Book of the Secrets 2, Harper Colophon Books, 1975, p.199