A Moment In Timelessness

Towards the Millennium lecture by Ben Okri, given at the Edinburgh Book Festival, 1997

The millennium is an illusion; but it is a useful and powerful illusion by which we can become more real. It is not a moment marked out in time by the universe, by nature, by the seasons, or by the stars. It is a moment we have marked out in timelessness. It is therefore a human moment; it is us making a ritual, a drama, a tear on eternity; we are domesticating the infinite. Therefore it is a moment in which the mind of a large section of humanity contemplates and is faced with the larger questions of time, death, new beginnings, regeneration, cycles, the unknown.

Beyond being an artificial calendrical event, it is a moment in which we allow uncontemplated regions of time to project itself into our consciousness. This can induce either terror, or the most profound mental liberation; much like confronting death paralyses some people, fills others with despair, makes others poison themselves with nihilism, and releases in a fortunate few a quality of enlightenment, a sense of the limited time we have here on earth to live magnificently, to be as great and as happy as we can, to explore our potential to the fullest, and to lose thereby our fear of death because we have gained a greater love and reverence for life and its incommensurable golden brevity.

So it is with the new millennium; for in truth the millennium is both a gigantic death and an enormous birth.

Certain illusions are useful only if we use them as symbols to help us get to reality - to our true reality. This is the power of all noble initiations and rituals: they enable us to pass from the illusions of our lesser selves to the reality of our greater selves, our greater powers. They free us from our smallness, what Camus called Òour humiliated consciousnessÓ; and they liberate us into being what we really are, what we sometimes suspect we are, what we glimpse we are when in love, something mysterious and magnificent, capable of creating civilisations out of the wild lands of the earth and the dark places in our consciousness.

We are, in small ways, the figures of the myths and legends that we ourselves have invented. Our myths, our heroic legends are the concealed autobiography of the human race, and its struggles through darkness to light, and through darkness again.

The mind of humanity, in the flesh, cannot live long with the notion of the reality of timelessness. This is possible only in the spirit. That is why rituals, the origin of theatre, have a beginning. Which is why, poised at the threshold of an unknown, unwritten, unforeseen act of the continuing human drama, it is important that we gather ourselves together, that we clear our minds, that we make ourselves present to ourselves and to our age, that we be awake, that we be focused, that we concentrate, that we listen, and that we prepare ourselves in seriousness and with joy for what we are going to create, to bring about, in this mass co-scripting of the future.

The millennium is a material event. It is also a spiritual moment, an event that will have a monumental impact on the psyche of humanity. A spiritual event is one in which the blinding light of the real pierces through and rends asunder the unreal, the illusory; much as Paul was blinded on the road to Damascus by the liberating light of true seeing. The celluloid of illusion, of what appears to be the real world, is stripped away; and beneath it we see things as they could be; we see a better world; a new world; a world renewed. That is a spiritual moment. That is what the millennium could be, what we should let it be; it is the best excuse for clearing out the garbage in our consciousness and histories that we would have for another thousand years.

Every spring, we go through a spring cleaning; and feel better for it; Now we have the magnificent opportunity to go through a millennial cleaning; the whole of humanity, the whole of our nightmare history can be subjected to a grand cleaning; That is the millennium as a material event.

The opposite of a spiritual event is a nightmare event, the hallucinations that fall upon you when you resist revelation, when you resist epiphanies, when you close yourself off from enlightenment. Then what happens is that the mind multiplies the illusion of things, till they become not gods, but monsters.

The nightmare visions of Breughel, the horrible infernos of extreme drug users, are but the mental productions of illusions gone utterly out of control. Which is why apocalyptic visions are of great value to us: they show us what the world will be like if we donÕt open ourselves to the other side, to light, to freed thinking - liberating ourselves from the hell of illusions. They are moral signposts on the way to the inferno.

And so our choice is simple, and concurrent. Will the millennium be a nightmare event, or an event rendered ordinary by too much indifference and casualness, or will it be a transforming event? Will we allow ourselves to descend into universal chaos and darkness, a world without hope, without love, without moorings, without light, without possibility for the next generation, a world tumbling with mass murderers, serial killers, with everyone ranging around with minds spinning in anomie and amorality, with murder and rape and genocide as normality; or will we allow ourselves merely to drift into an era of more of the same, an era drained of any significance, or excitement, or wonder, a boring, and predictable era, flat, stale and profitless, with us drifting along listlessly, too bored and too passive to care about what strange things casually rear their heads in our days and nights, with everyone minding their business, till the worst things soon fester and devour everyoneÕs business, till we awake too late to do anything about what we have allowed to take over our lives while we cruised along casually, mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight?

Or might we choose to make it a spiritual event; a waking up event; a moment of world empowerment; when we would all, in private, pledge to be more amazing, more aware, more tolerant, more playful, more loving, more responsible, awake to our unmeasured possiblities and our unsuspected powers of mind and creativity.

This choice is ours. We rise or fall by the quality of the choice we make. But then the choice we make is utterly dependent on the light that we have, on the light that we use, and the light or the lies that we live by.

The millennium is not a political event. It is an evolutionary event; the great sudden leaps of consciousness, the spontaneous sudden descents into atavism might seem revlotuionary at the time - but they will merely be the seed, long hidden inthe earth, bursting forth into shoot; they will merely by the moent in which what was hidden, growing unseen in the deeper layers of history, suddenly combusts, brings forth its truest forms, revelas its real nature. the speed and usddenness of an appearance is really only the moment that we become aware of the change in a condition, a change that has been changing all along without our being aware of it.

That is why, under the powerful sun and fertile intensity of the millennial moment, many thoughts, plilosophies, forms, tendencies, regressions adavancements, combinations, contortions, bybirdisation, would burst forth and pour out noisily from all the innumerable oracles of humanity. There would be a tidal wave of them; many things from the old millennium, the old centures, would speed forth to frutiion, to hasty abortions, to early sunlights, to harsh dawns, many will be born too quickly, too soon, too crudely, too harshly, too violenty, too silently. Suddenly it would seem like there are too many gods, too many Delphis, there should be an unholy babbling of phenomena all over the vast spaces of humanity.

Everywhere there would be an excess of dreams, of forebodings, of art forms of interpretations, of prognostications, of rituals, of ways, of road, of signs, and wonders, of nightmares, and visions. Babel will be reborn amongst us.

Humanity only knows two responses to the unknown: awe, or noise; silence, or terror; reverence, or nightmare; humility, or paralysis; stillness, or speech; watchfulness, or myth- making; seeing clearly, or inventing what we see; standing, or fleeing; praying, or panic; reason, or falling apart; courage, or cowardice.

The millennium is an evolutionary event, a crucial moment in human evolution, precisely because of the critical mass of our mass minds facing so momentous a human invention. Humanity will be at its most radioactive; fusing and fissioning, giving off energies, like so many little solar systems. Hurling out so many seeds, like the fertile season in great forests. Out of these energies, out of timeÕs sifting of them, will come a new future, unrecognisable to us who live and breathe now.

Out of so many seeds and cross-fertilisations will come a new humanity which will owe much to this point of the cusp, to this moment in which we live, to now, here, as we move towards the new millennium. We are, to mix metaphors, at a precious moment in timeÕs ovulation. We are, to mix things further, at that rare intersection that magic favours, that history adores, that legend has no need to embellish because it is already a legendary moment in its own wonderful right.

How often have great minds in the past prayed and wished that they were in better favoured moments in time to unleash their best gifts on humanity? This is one such conjunction; it fills one with too much humility and amazement to behold. But we must behold it, with a calm mind, with clear aspirations, and with a smile in the soul that only fortunate people have who find themselves at the right time, at the perfect mythic conjunction that is also a living moment, a monent we are living through.

We are living in an enchanted time. With the right spirit, we might be able to enchant the future, and give a different meaning to our past.

Is time exhausted? No, time is yet young, and has timeless millennia ahead of it, way past the furthest dreams of humanity. Is nature exhausted? No, ask the oak-tree and the hollies and the flowers, the birds, fishes, and lions. They will continue for as long as the earth allows them. Is humanity exhausted? Indiviuals are, nations are, some civilisations are; but humanity isnÕt.

The hungry nations are hungry still, the starving people dream of food, the unfree fight for freedom, the oppressed plan for liberation, the small scheme for might, the invisible prepare for higher visibility. They are only exhausted who think they are: they are only exhausted who no longer have a reason to strive and dream and hope; they are only exhausted who think that they have arrived at their final destination, the end of their road, with all of theirs achieved, and with no new dreams to strive for.

The exhausted are those who have come to the end of their powers of imagination, who have limited their possibilities, who have thought themselves into dead-ends that they call the highest point of their cultures and their civilisations. Those who are exhausted have lost the greater picture, the greater perspective. They are trapped in their own universal lovelessness, their monumental selfishness. For them and their limited dreams, there is only chaos to come, disintegration, nightmares, apocalypses.

They can bellow about the end of history, but those of us who havenÕt tasted the best fruits of time yet, for whom history has been something of anightmare recently, we believe and know differently. We know that history is all there to be made in the future. Exhaustion is a mental thing, the absence of a spiritual viewpoint, which is to say a universal picture, a sense of new journeys, higher discoveries, universal justice, a better life for the widest number of poeple, a leavening of the great dough of humanity, the upliftment of the multitudes.

There can be no exhaustion where there is much to be hoped for, much to work towards, and where the dreams and the sufferings of our ancestors have not been realised or redeemed. The exhausted should therefore clear the stage for the new dreamers, the warriors of love and equality.

Have all the thoughts, possibilities, ideas, art forms of the last two thousand years been exhausted? Has Christianity really found its fullest fruition in great cathedrals, schisms, wars, orthodoxies, charities, and sundry churches? I do not believe that the fullest possibilities of Christianity have yet been realised in humanity. Has Bhuddism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, scientism, atheism, existentialism, and all forms of thoughts about the organisation of society, the spiritual possibilities of humanity, the technological and scientific ideas been fully realised and made to serve and aid and ennoble and feed humanity? I do not think so either.

Humanity has been so much like a child with too many useful toys, playing with each one that comes along, and discarding them when something better and newer appears in our midst. We have been, on the whole, dilettantes and amateurs with some of our greatest notions for human betterment. We have been like spoilt children; we have been like tyrannical children; we have been impatient, imperious, demanding proof of that which requires listening, tearing things down when they donÕt do what we want them to do when we should let them do what only they can do; being uncreative about what seems dark and terrifying; preferring only that which seems easy and effortless; listening to the numbers of followers rather than examining the efficacy or lack of efficacy of our ideas and philsophies; wandering down blind alleys of populism that led to concentration camps and genocide; refusing to admit our mistakes and vast crimes, denying the horrors of the slave trade, denying the reality of the gas chambers, tearing our hair out trying in futility to reconcile civilisation with genocide as if civilisation as we came to accept it really did mean the true universal goodness of the heart rather than the self-interest and self-mythologisation of a people.

No, neither the good in us, nor our capacity for evil are exhausted; and the new millennium will show just how young we were in our abilities, in our genius for good and evil - for all these strains, unexamined, unredeemed will find their higher fruition in the centuries to come. We carry with us, across the silver river of the new millennium, many ambiguous and deadly seeds, and many seeds of illumination too. We are the sum total of the history we have not examined; we are the carriers of historyÕs future diseases or cures. The sooner we admit our various crimes to others, to other peoples, to other creeds, to other genders, to other species, the better and the lighter human future will be. The more we deny, the more will be the horrors and the vengeances of time that will wait silently in the wings of the bloody drama of human future.

Many beautiful thoughts have not yet sprouted in our deepest hearts and minds, in spite of the fact that they have lain there, within us, waiting for over two thousand years. The heart of humanity can sometimes be a stony ground indeed. We speak the good words, but do not live them. We go through the beautiful rituals, but do not incarnate or embody them. We praise our capacity for reason, and are unreasonably intolerant of other peoplesÕ reasons, and validity. We deploy the finest attribute of the mind and spirit to makes ourselves the elect, cast our fellow travellers on this earth to outer darkness, and indifference. What a wonder is humanity, how marvellous its astonishing gift for hypocrisy.

How health is the human race? When the foot is swollen, the kidney ailing, one eye glaucous, the other eye short-sighted, the neck stiff, the spirit troubled, the hearbeat irregular, the head stuffy, the thougts narrow, but the whole taken together generally funtional, can we say that the body is healthy?

The human race is thus. These are some of the illnesses of the race: tyranny, starvation, religious and tribal wars, repression,m poverty, alienation, indifference, xenophobia, illiteracy,bad governments, epidemics. We must face the fact that, given the whole picture, the human race is not that well. We have also, it cannot be denied, accomplished great things. We have hourneyed to space and spied on the solitude of uninhabited planets, we have created mighty secular and religious structures, brought about fabulous technological inventions, found cures for horrible disease, solved some of the riddles of human geneitcs, probed the riddles of the wather, shed light on some of the aberrations of the mind, exploded the possibilities of communicaion, and tapped the awesome power of nuclear energy.

And yet, because of our pollutions,m the fragile bablance of life on earth is theatened. Its ingabitants die in refugee camps, go mad in ghettos, are brutalised in huge numners by their governments, and perish in festering wars. And yet hatreds boil away for reasons of history and for different interpretations of the same sacred texts that preach universal love.

We are amazing: so much gold has been re elad in the human spirit, so many wonderful philosphies of startling simplicity have been dreamt up and shared amonst us, and yet we live sill as if in PlatoÕÕs cave, watchin the sadow of otehr peoplÕs reality go past as if they had nothin goto do with us. And yet we live as if these thought, these dreams, these philsophies have notbeen uttered, and not been efficacious.

I contend that the human race has not yet reached the true condition of civilisation. Undoubtedly the qualith of life has imporved immeasurably over the last thousand years for many, but true civilisationis much more than the wellbeing or technoloical advancements of parts of the race. What we have called cilisations are merely stafes on the way to true world civilisation.