Nick Cook writes: To conclude, I need to return to where we began: to ‘A Matter Of Life and Death’.
Almost all the stories we love – particularly of the epic kind – follow the journey’s twelve waypoints, which starts with an ordinary person getting a ‘call to adventure’; his or her reluctance being assuaged by a wiser, older mentor; a series of trials that culminate in our hero acquiring a prize, or ‘boon’; the boon’s return to the ‘ordinary world’ and it then acting in such a way that the ordinary world is forever changed.
The Lord Of The Rings, The Matrix and Star Wars are all testaments to the power of monomyth – George Lucas, indeed, consulted Campbell on the original Star Wars script.
We resonate with these stories, because the characters in them – from the hero and the heroine to the fool and the arch-villain – are all archetypes: facets of our own psyches.
Expressed another way, the challenges faced by these heroes are mythic representations of the trials each of us faces and undergoes in life.
On a recent assignment with a ‘top ten’ consulting organization to deliver themes that its senior partners believed would be critical to business success in the coming decade, one of the biggest themes to emerge during our discussions was ‘purpose’. Unless companies developed a culture that engendered purpose, we were informed, 60 per cent of Millennials would walk out the door to seek alternative employment with an employer that more genuinely shared their values. Sixty-eight per cent of employees, we were also told, believed businesses didn’t do enough to instil a sense of ‘meaningful purpose’ in their culture. To develop this culture, they needed to be vulnerable, confessional, own up to past mistakes and show the next generation of talent that they were serious about recruiting and retaining them. Businesses that succeeded going forward, these consulting gurus all agreed, would need to ‘do good’ in addition to ‘doing well’. And if they didn’t – i.e. they merely paid lip-service to that ambition - heaven help them: there were any number of ‘hashtag movements’ out there to ensure that they got their name in lights - and for all the wrong reasons.
Being ‘authentic’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘purposeful’ – and, most importantly, ‘human’ - in the era of artificial intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are terms that are increasingly becoming hardwired into the playbooks of organisations and multinationals seeking to survive and thrive in the 2020s.
Alongside this, however, the world has never been more anxious.
According to the World Health Organization, one in four of us will experience a mental health problem at some point in our lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from a mental health condition, placing mental disorders amongst the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide. In the US, according to the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 43.6 million Americans – more than 18 per cent of the population over 18 years of age – suffer from mental illness in any given year; almost ten million – 4.2 per cent of the adult population – will suffer from a seriously debilitating mental illness. Elsewhere, the stats are no better. Phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as general anxiety and depression are the order of the day for large swaths of the population75.
And this was before Coronavirus. Emerging from the pandemic, we still have any number of potentially cataclysmic events to look forward to, most of them of our own making.
Thanks to exponential advances in technology and medicine, every day brings news of what we’re able to do to change our physical bodies – either so we can adapt to an increasingly hostile world, or so we can live longer and/or smarter; or merely to make us look better. This is the transhumanist route many see as humanity’s future. What it ignores, however, is the part of us we have discussed in these pages; the part that plugs us into the sea of connection and information that is our real world - integrating the part we’ve ignored for too long; the part we don’t see in the mirror.
As ‘stories in physical form’, to quote Suzanne Giesemann, we have the power at any given moment to decide what our stories are going to be – and, if we want to, in this moment or any other, to change them. We can also look back and see that what we’ve achieved to get to where we are – no matter what those achievements are - harbours all the elements of the mythic stories Joseph Campbell tells us are the interplay of our archetypes as we struggle to understand who we are and why we’re here.
The testimony of our witnesses, along with a growing body of scientific evidence that consciousness is primary, ought to tell us that every life on the planet is part of an interconnected story that matters – and that these stories – our stories – imprint forever in the fabric of existence. This, I believe, is a far better narrative than the transhumanist one and, at a subliminal level, is one that it is hardwired into us all; the proof of it being held in the stories we resonate with that tell us this is so - including those that come to us from the great religions.
At the end of A Matter Of Life And Death, Peter, of course, triumphs before the court, because, whilst the law of the universe is ‘immutable’, nothing, the court is told, is stronger than love.
In amongst all the pieces of remarkable testimony given by our expert witnesses here, we have been confronted with actual, physical evidence that this may indeed be so.
For, in the ‘giving and receiving of light’ – a light that is shared in the moment of physical death via a connection that appears to be based on an unbreakable bond between the essence of two or more people – we are offered clues to a form of entanglement, a foundational pillar of quantum mechanics, that may prove to be the true substrate of existence.
That this light appears only to people who have this bond is not at odds with the view that it is also a symbolic message from the universe – a message that ‘life goes on’.
The screen that we experience as reality is ‘one mind’, Suzanne Giesemann tells us, but it also arises as individual minds. For these two statements to square with one another we and the screen - the ‘one mind’ - have to be that same limitless intelligence.
Why would an intelligent, sentient, self-aware, loving universe put itself through all the trials and tribulations of life as we experience it, with its suffering and its beauty and everything in between?
The answer, perhaps, is that it is the only way it has of experiencing itself.
And, thus, maybe, when you strip away all the science, this is why existence ‘is’: so that it can know itself, learn and evolve.
As well as being a measurable communication from the universe, the light, I believe, is a sign of the hope that is given to us all.
74 The Hero With A thousand Faces,
Joseph Campbell, Princeton University Press, 1949.
75 https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/mental-health-and-mental-disorders#4
Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.
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