What Gary Lachman Taught Me About Surrendering To Myself
Gary Lachman, Rejected Knowledge: A Look At Our Other Ways of Knowing, 2015
A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to attend a reading group in Arnhem with a dear friend, hosted by the interdisciplinary philosophy platform “future based”. The evening was filled with the laughter of strangers, sitting muddled up on the floor of an industrial looking alleyway house, swirling their minds around modernity and the (apparent) separation between mind and body. The event was centred around medieval witch hunts and the knowledge that was denounced and lost, which inspired many discussions about the underlying assumptions and motives that led to the killing of wise (mostly) women, and the idea that the only valid way to scientific discovery passes through the calculating, rational mind of a Western man.
Descartes´ separation between mind and body, so we quickly agreed, finds its most dominant expression in the way emotions are seen as separate from and subjected to the control of the mind. This theme is present from Aristotle to modern day self-proclaimed alpha males who stress that true power lies in conquering your own emotions, their synonym for weakness.
As the group consisted of mostly women, the gendered dimension of this separation was discussed with great passion and intimacy, moving from a “speaking about” to a “speaking from within”. In Western modern knowledge production and modes of thinking, but also in many spiritualities or religions such as Hinduism, women, emotions, and nature are muddled up into one entity that encompasses wilderness, impulsiveness, untamedness, and must be risen above in order to reach true enlightenment. Nature and humans are thus gendered into opposites, and organized along the lines of a control-obsessed rejection of emotions as valid knowledge.
I was lucky enough to read and discuss texts by various incredible authors that night, but there was one that stood out especially and stuck with me for many days after. Our conversation became deeply personal to me when we discussed an excerpt of the book “…” by Gary Lachman, bass-guitarist of the band Blondie. Lachman writes in such a poetic way that his mere composition of words is already beautiful to me.
Lachman argues that we have entered a new mode of relating to the world, which is defined by us placing ourselves outside of it. Rather than recognizing our interconnectedness to the world we exist in, we have created a distance that places us into a position of observation and separateness. The world, in this case, is everything natural around us, that we dissect, observe, explain, disconnect, and hide away from through what Lachman calls “the scientific mode” or “the new tradition”.
This objectification of nature treats it as a soulless machine, it reduces it to mechanical processes.
Probably the most fundamental way in which these two kinds of knowing (“know how” and “know why”) differ is that in the new scientific mode, we stand apart from the world. We keep it at a distance, at arm´s length. It becomes an object of observation; we become spectators separated from what we are observing. With this separation the world is objectified, made into an object. What this means is that it loses, or is seen as not to have, an inside. It is a machine, soulless, inanimate, dead. We object to this when it happens to us, when we feel that someone is not taking into account our inner world, our self, and is seeing us as an object, as something without freedom, will, completely determined. But it is through this mode that we can get to grips with the world and arrange it according to our needs. Whether we are scientists or not, this is the way in which we experience the world now, at least most of the time. There is the world: solid, mute, oblivious, and firmly “out there”. And “inside here” is a mind, a puddle of consciousness in an otherwise unconscious universe.
Lachman argues here that we treat nature in such a way that would feel deeply wrong and hurtful if directed towards ourselves in the same cold, objectifying manner. As already mentioned, nature and emotions, our very own nature inside, have historically been and still are equated with one another.
What Lachman misses here is that this objectification of nature does not only stem from the need to justify our domination over it, but also comes from a place of fear. We dissect nature into its parts and atoms and mechanisms and chemical compounds and whatnot, we understand every tiny process behind majestic phenomena that could only be grasped through myths back in the day. Dissecting nature allows us to subject it to a conception of primitiveness. That which we understand becomes less threatening, less unpredictable, less wild. It makes nature nothing but a web of calculated mechanical gears and us less small against its forcefulness.
The flipside of this is that we rob ourselves of a sense of awe and the chance to surrender to being but a fraction in an infinite mosaic beyond comprehension. Wonderment and giving up control share a deeply intimate relationship, something that is not compatible with a mode of being that requires constant control and alertness.
The new scientific mode of standing outside is an incomplete comprehension of the world, it is fundamentally lacking something, and I believe that people feel this. Currently I am partaking in a project at Valkhof museum, where I am helping to conceptualize and curate an exhibition about black holes. This has given me the chance to speak to various astrophysicists and astronomers. The surprising number of these scientists having turned to art confirmed my thought that this purely scientific, cold mode of observing the world is fundamentally lacking something. Engaging with space in this way allows for a sense of wonder to return that cannot be expressed by numbers, statistics, and scientific reports, and it places the human back into a relation with their surroundings.
Lachman claims that we would fiercely reject such a denial of our inner world. I have experienced this differently, in fact, I see the need to control and tame nature even more prominently in the way we engage with (or shy away from) its expression within us.
Throughout the last year I have greatly dealt with this myself, and Lachman´s text made me wonder how the intellectualization of emotions as an escape from their forcefulness is in any way different than hiding from the same force of our surroundings through Lachman´s new scientific mode.
If we cannot separate ourselves from nature, it also means that we cannot separate the way we engage with ourselves inside from the way we engage with the outside. Even upholding such categories becomes obsolete. Surely, I can explain why I have difficult feelings in a rationally appealing manner, I can choose from an endless number of names to describe them, read self-help books and relate every negative pattern back to some childhood event, but where in all of this do I just feel? Where exactly do we hold still and experience in our new scientific mode?
Human beings are a kind of microcosm, a little universe, and we contain within ourselves vast inner spaces, that mirror the vast outer spaces in which our physical world exists. In the rejected tradition, the whole universe exists within each one of us, and it is our task to bring these dormant cosmic forces and realities to life. If in the new scientific tradition we have begun to explore outer space, in the rejected tradition we turn our attention inward and explore inner space.
Exploring inner space in this rejected tradition cannot be successful if done in the same manner that lies at the basis of its initial rejection. Instead of exploring to understand with our mind, we must be willing to give up the false sense of control this rational modus operandi grants us and surrender to the nature within ourselves, even if that means to just sit down and cry. You will be surprised at how many might come to sit next to you.