This moment needs your deep weirdness and your intellectual rigour

We're at a turning point in consciousness. Here's the history, and what you need to know now.

Whew! I’m sitting here a little stunned, a little wrung out, after writing this piece. I’d planned a little essay about dreaming and the early moderns, but it kept bringing in more and more things I didn’t know I’d been thinking. It’s ended up being a call to action that’s been secretly brewing in me for years. (And if you want to listen to it instead of reading, you can do that above.)

This is a big piece, and it’s still a little messy, and honestly, I’m excited by the mess, because it makes me think I might be on my way to understanding something I didn’t before.

I’ve also been thinking about how weird and not fully human it is to drop these pieces on you without context, so here’s a little more about where I’m at: I’m sitting in my office in Devon in the early morning. I meant to send this to you yesterday, but since it kept ballooning out in weird bulges, I’m a day late and I’ve been subsisting on peanut butter for the last 24 hours. In other news, the novel I’ve been working on for a few years is finally starting to feel like A Person with a body and legs, which is a lovely feeling. This week I’m reading a biography of John Dee, which you’ll find listed in the bibliography below. I have neglected my tomato plants and managed to grow a single tomato. I am forty and in the right place for the first time in my life.

Now here are some strange thoughts about the history and present moment of consciousness.

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Michelle Terry as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe

I’m going to ask you some questions that, depending on your disposition, might make you think I’ve got mush for brains. Here goes:

Are hallucinations part of reality, or fantasy?

How about dreams?

How about daydreams?

Ecstatic communion with the divine?

Gut hunches that turn out to be bang-on?

Insights gleaned in meditation or trance?

The strangely powerful telepathy we can sometimes feel with animals, trees, or landscapes?

Every society has an agreement about whether these experiences count as real, and so whether they have any value. If your society doesn’t seem to have an agreement about this—or at least, not one you’ve ever heard articulated—that’s probably because it dismisses them out of hand. Which is, of course, a very firm kind of agreement. Perhaps the firmest.

In their book Inside the Neolithic Mind, archaeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce describe each society’s tacit agreement about consciousness as a “consciousness contract”.

This essay will be a story about England’s consciousness contract—which, don’t you worry, has ramifications far beyond England. It’s a story about how that consciousness contract was rewritten in the sixteenth century, about how that rewriting delivered us to so much of the violence of the present day, about the evidence that we’re living through a rare opportunity to rewrite the contract again—and about how you can grasp that opportunity.

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Back in 1594, a strange, rambling pamphlet was published under the name “The Terrors of the Night.” It was by one of those writers who was a giant in his day but is now mostly forgotten: Thomas Nashe.

In this odd essay, Nashe discussed, among other things, the meaning and nature of dreams. “A dream,” he said boldly, “is nothing else but the echo of our conceits in the day.” He went further, comparing “the working of our brains after we have unyoked and gone to bed” to “the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into a dark shadow.”

Well! This might seem quite reasonable to many people today, but let me tell you, it was a bold thing to say in 1594. You only have to look at Shakespeare’s plays to see how hot a topic dreaming was then. And it was a hot topic because—though they would never have described it this way—early modern thinkers were in the process of rewriting the consciousness contract.

For thousands of years, dreams had been seen as communications from God, or indeed the gods. For Elizabethan physicians, they were also important diagnostic tools, hinting at all the unseen things that might be going on in a body. Or of course, maybe they foreshadowed the future, like they so often do in Shakespeare’s plays—think of Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia dreaming of her husband’s statue spouting blood, before he’s killed. Whichever way you looked at them, dreams mattered. Events that unfolded in altered states of consciousness, like dreaming, had long been known to carry important information about our lives in this realm of flesh and bone.

Then along comes Thomas Nashe, saying: Pish! Dreams are nothing more than mental glitches.

And of course it wasn’t just Nashe—he simply delivered a soundbite for a much bigger shift in thinking. A shift triggered by two earthquakes that shook England at just about the same time: the Reformation and the Renaissance.

It would be reductive to say that these twin movements simply shrank the consciousness contract, so that after the sixteenth century, English society only valued rational waking consciousness. (And I don’t have space here to offer the full nuanced picture of how these movements emerged from and then altered human consciousness. But if that’s what you’re looking for, I’d suggest reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, particularly the history in the second half of the book.)

What I will say is this (and I’m going to resort to bullet points here, to save you the 1,500+ very woolly words I wrote while groping my way to the point):

• Despite being sparked by Henry VIII’s libido as much as anything else, the English Reformation absolutely had the effect of making ritual and ritual objects suspect. When Henry dissolved the monasteries in the late 1530s, countless once-holy artefacts and buildings were destroyed, and with them, their ritual resonance. And what is ritual if not an age-old technology for altering consciousness in order to access expanded reality?

• We can see, then, that the Reformation had the effect of shrinking the consciousness contract; of positing that only rational waking consciousness is trustworthy.

• The Renaissance is trickier, because in so many ways it emerged from mystical and occult practices that presuppose an expansive, more-than-material reality. The original Renaissance men were invariably dabblers in Cabala, astrology, alchemy, and other practices straitlaced people would dismiss as “woo” today.

• And yet. Something complicated happened to these expansive forms of consciousness, and the human relationship to them, as the Renaissance unfolded. It wasn’t as simple as dismissing them; trashing all the alchemy equipment like Henry VIII trashing the monasteries. Instead, I believe that the Renaissance—the movement that in so many ways gave us the modern world—played out as an attempt to enslave these expanded forms of consciousness—and the expanded realities they opened—to the appetites of rational waking consciousness. So that even in those esoteric circles that held on to a very broad consciousness contract, a grasping kind of rationalism was still on the ascendant. In fact, rationalism was arguably more dangerous in those quarters, because it was harnessing the incredible power of imagination and altered consciousness, rather than denying it.

• What the hell am I wittering on about? Let’s get specific by considering Elizabeth I’s astrological advisor, John Dee. This quintessential Renaissance man brought astrology and occult practice directly into the Elizabethan court. He was terrifyingly well versed in just about every modality and written work that aimed to uncover the deeper mysteries of the universe. And when he brought those practices to Elizabeth, what did he use them for? The pursuit of deep wisdom in policy? Of cosmic justice? Of humility and submission to the laws of the natural world? Fuck no. He used them to encourage Elizabeth to get a wriggle on with her imperial expansion. He read the stars, and he invoked the Arthurian myths of England’s noble might, and he called upon all the learning and mystical power in his toolbox, and he said to the queen: Use this otherworldly power to build an empire.

• And sure, Dee used his occult learning to justify this strategy. But there’s no doubt in my mind that its origins were much more pragmatic, belonging to material reality. Elizabethans were starving. The royal household had perpetual money woes. John Dee had perpetual money woes. And those pesky Spanish and Portuguese were getting ahead of the game in commandeering the lands and riches of the so-called New World.

• So we see that in the sixteenth century, some movements directly shrank the consciousness contract. Others deployed expanded consciousness and more-than-material reality to service the needs of ordinary, “rationalist” waking consciousness. And the result? The dawn of centuries of empire and a consciousness contract that was increasingly a straitjacket.

• This confluence is no accident. The two come hand in hand. Colonialism is inherently an impulse of a shrunken consciousness and conscience.

• Think about it this way: in our most “rational”, cognitively reasoning states, we are necessarily detached from expanded feeling states, including mystic connection, cosmic insight—and also just plain empathy. The ability to feel with others; to share in their field of consciousness.

• Ultimately, then, the history of colonialism is a history of shrunken consciousness, and even more dangerously, of the enslavement of expanded consciousness to the rationalizing will.

• And this is the form of consciousness most of us in the Western world have been living under for nearly 500 years.

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Oof.

So what now?

Now,

after nearly 500 years of shrunken consciousness,

of ascendant “rationalism”,

of colonialism,

of violence and denial of spirit,

it seems the tables might be turning. It seems we might have a chance to rewrite our tacit consciousness contract, and with it, the way we inhabit the world.

What makes me say that?

Well, first, there’s the fact that we have the phrase “consciousness contract” at all. As I mentioned, this phrase came from the field of archaeology. From, in fact, a revolution in the field of archaeology. See, archaeologists had been studying prehistoric cave paintings for centuries and getting pretty much nowhere. They had used all of the scientific and semiotic skills of our rationalist, post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment age, and ultimately concluded that in fact, there was no way to ever know what the paintings meant, or what they were for.

Then in 2002, David Lewis-Williams published The Mind in the Cave, and revolutionized the field by suggesting that the cave paintings might belong to rituals revolving around altered states of consciousness; that this might be the key to understanding the earliest art and the origins of our species.

And in order to make that claim, he had to first step outside of the West’s limited consciousness contract—step far enough outside it, in fact, to see it, and to name it.

And that kind of separation is the beginning of real change.

This turning point in archaeology reflects a sea change that’s underway in so many fields right now. The obvious example is quantum physics, where a mechanistic view of the universe is famously giving way to an understanding that all this matter is underpinned by something mysterious and more than material. In fact, there are whole organizations, like the Galileo Commission, that are devoted to helping serious scientists bravely challenge the consciousness contract and study more-than-material reality.

And I really do mean “bravely”.

Because here’s where we all come in—all those of us who are alive today. Who have been chosen, for whatever reason, to live through this time.

After 500 years, rationalism is not going to surrender its crown without a fight. And it’s a formidable ruler, because it has cynicism on its side. It is ready and gleefully waiting to roll its eyes and pick apart any sloppy thinking or sloppy science, and use it to stop this revolution in consciousness in its tracks.

Worse, it’s not just “out there” in the seats of government or the books of Richard Dawkins. It is inside each of us, rubbing its hands and waiting to tear down any hunch we might have that the world is far more magical than we’ve been led to believe.

And the thing is, we can’t simply override it. It’s not inherently bad. In fact, it’s an important part of the consciousness contract. It’s there to make sure that what we discover about the more-than-material world is actually applicable in this material realm.

It just can’t be the only part of our consciousness contract.

Which is where our deepest weirdness and our highest intellectual rigour come in.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already in love with the mystery of existence. Maybe you interpret your dreams, or you’ve dabbled with plant medicine, or you meditate. You likely have faith in something bigger than human, whatever that might be.

That hunch you have is part of this moment. It’s the sea change in consciousness expressing itself in your consciousness. How else would the great consciousness make itself known, if not through each of our little shares of consciousness?

And we have a very important role right now. In order to honour this expansion of consciousness that’s playing out inside each of us, we have to indulge our deepest weirdness; we have to get skilled at hearing the urgings of our instincts and subconsciouses. We each have to celebrate and elevate our specific weirdness.

And we have to advance with absolute intellectual rigour. We have to bring the intellect along with us, meet its need for context and information and serious thought—so that our rational minds (and those of our neighbours) don’t pit themselves against us, and find a place to ambush us and take this movement down.

That is the only way this movement is going to work. The only way it’s going to change enough people to change the world.

And we badly need to change the world.

Which means that this rambling essay is, ultimately, a call to action.

Please, indulge your deepest weirdness and your deepest nerd. Seek out the serious thinkers and practitioners of the more-than-material realms. The people doing the research, the people whose imaginative capacity is matched by their rigour.

We need to read, to educate ourselves.

We need to bring the whole of our knowing along with us on this journey.

If you follow along here, I promise to keep sharing the thinkers who are helping me to understand all this. And I hope you’ll do the same in return.

It’s a great privilege to have been born in this moment—and we owe it to ourselves, to the future, and to consciousness itself to rise to the occasion.

Whew. Thank you for reading.

xx Ellie

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In case you’re interested, here’s a little bibliography for this piece. I’m sure there were lots of other pieces that made their way in here; I currently have forty-two thousand tabs open, and I’m not going to trawl them all. But these are the heavy hitters:

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

• Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age

• Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Mr. Dee

• David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave

• David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind