The future doesn’t exist until it occurs. Or to put it another way, every future simultaneously exists, and yet none exists until it is observed. And so, when the future does unfold all of those possible futures collapse into the single event that occurred.
To use an analogy from quantum mechanics, the wave form of all the infinite future realities, each with its own probability, collapses into one particular event; and all those other possible futures become a thing that never did exist.
From our ancient pre-history we have attempted to pre-empt the unknown that had yet to occur, and to bring a preferred future into reality out of all those possible futures. It is a desire to control the collapse of this wave form and to know where this event would bring us before it occurred. To have the eye of the oracle is to divine reality; to create a single certainty out of the infinite paths possible – for they all exist until time collapses their possibility.
Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the witches on the heath, whose counsel to Macbeth is obscured by equivocation, paints a tense psychological peril. The supernatural nature of this scene is what gives the witches the ability to transcend time but also what makes Macbeth a hapless witness in a sea of unknown danger. To gain control of the, future Macbeth surrenders control to the supernatural forces of the seers.
The Aisling and the soothsayer, the oracle, the scientist and the theorist: These are amongst the conduits that throughout time mankind has attempted to tilt reality to his will, and give him a sense of control. But it is a dangerous game, for the prophesy might mislead the attendant to their ruin. The cases of the Sibyl and Feidelm show that the oracle is an avatar of the attendants’ will. She pushes them on the path of their prior proclivity.
It is said that a ragged old woman once came to the palace of Tarquin, the last king of Rome. She had nine books and offered to sell them for a fabulous price. He laughed at her and sent her away. She burned three of the books. The next day she returned and demanded the same price for the remaining six books and again was sent away, though with less assurance than the first time. On the third day Tarquin, unsettled by the strange ominousness of the mysterious old woman, bought the final three books for the same price that she had demanded for the nine. She then vanished.
Upon inspecting the books, it was determined that the old woman was none other than the Sibyl, and that the books contained the future history of Rome.
These priceless books of the Sybil were closely guarded in the temple of Jupiter and consulted in times of great peril, only when all other alternatives proved unfruitful. Then specially appointed consuls would pore over the prophesies of the Sibyl to try and decipher her telling of the future, and steps would be taken to appease the angered gods.
In the Ulster epic, The Táin, Medb consults with the seer, Feidelm, to ascertain the risks and chances of failure before embarking on a great raid of the kingdom of Ulster. Fidelm speaks a dark prophesy foretelling bloodshed; which Medb, keen for spoils and glory, interprets as signs of her own victory.
She asks of Feidelm :
“O Fedelm Prophetess, how do you see our army?”
“I see red on them. I see crimson” said Fedelm
And Medb answered:
“I care not for your reasoning, for when the men of Ireland gather in one place, among them will be strife and battle and broils and affrays, as to who shall lead the van or bring up the rear.”
Medb does what she was determined to do anyway, and uses the words of the seer as justification by interpreting them in the most favourable way to her.
There are no certainties in this real world, and there are no solutions; only alternatives. But still, the desire to predict future events is an ontological question that has plagued mankind in the mythological age of uncertainty, and even more pressingly in the present age that craves certainty. The paradox is that as we have become more imbued with rationality, we have craved certainty and find uncertainty increasingly disorientating. The more we understand the mechanisms of the world the more unnerving and disorienting it has become.
But the desire for a fine grained explicit explanation of all is an error when it leads to a focus on the explicit and a neglect of the broader world. The correct balance between an explicit and fine grained comprehension of the world before us, and a more intuitive appreciation containing a broad contextual understanding of the same, is necessary to remain functional in the world.
It’s a critical question, for to go too far on either side of this balance brings its own questions and dilemmas. When this balance is swung too far in either direction we become dysfunctional and this presents an existential threat to our being.
This (optimal) balanced perception of being, comes from a necessity of the real world; a requirement for a successful and integrated being to be able to narrow their focus on things that require their utmost attention, while also being able to maintain a broader awareness of the entire world and its patterns. To be able to pay focused attention to the narrowest, most urgent thing, but simultaneously to be aware of the broader world; including how this narrow demand can influence the broader context.
Consider a bird searching for a grain of rice in a heap of sand. To serve its need to feed itself and maintain its vitality it benefits from a type of specialised thinking and perceptual categorisation it uses to differentiate the minute differences between the textures of the rice and the sand. It makes high resolution categorical observances to reject what is not required and focus in on what is useful and giving of sustenance.
But if all the bird’s attention is on this high resolution task, with its uniquely narrow focus, the bird then might become the food of some other creature that is also searching for nutrience. If the bird doesn’t maintain the low resolution, intuitive appreciation of its environment, but becomes uniquely focused on this narrow thing, it becomes unaware of the other dangers that are always present at some level. The bird, exclusively focused on finding food, may just become the food of another.
This same balance between the macro and the micro, which is so important in an individual’s perceptual awareness are essential to life. We can see how an individual who has these two levels of awareness out of balance can become dysfunctional.
For example a person who is disorganised and scattered because they can’t focus, becomes unable to operate because they can’t start or finish a task. But similarly the opposite of that – someone who is so completely focused on some narrow part of the world before them that they become completely unaware of everything else and unable to interrelate on a broader spectrum – has similar challenges of integrating into the world. It’s the over-narrow focus and the inability to have a broader intuitive awareness of the world around.
The mind bifurcates along these same lines between the analytic and the intuitive. We have proof of this from Ian McGilchrist’s extraordinary work combining psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. We have clues of it from the shape of the brain divided into a left and right hemisphere. From McGilchrist’s work we know that each side works in extraordinarily different ways, combining to create the type of balance that we see in nature and in the goals of all the greatest philosophical traditions. It may rightly be said that wisdom is the correct balance between these two perspectives, between fine grained categorisation and broader contextual pattern recognition.
What can happen to an individual can happen to a society. A society that focuses too narrowly on the classification of things – that overemphasises specialisation and classification of things, and breaking down reality into taxonomical subsets – can neglect the requirement for the broader appreciation of how the world interrelates.
The modern liberal drive – derived from the age of enlightenment – to understand everything without leaving anything to intuition, and disregarding a need for spirituality, is an indication of this. This can go badly wrong. We’ve seen society’s dysfunction at this level. It was evident in the materialistic totalitarian societies of the post-God 20th Century, where everything was to be classified and reduced to its working parts – parts which could be reassembled and reconstructed or disgarded according to theory.
The entirety of life: arts, science, spirituality, belief; was to be reduced to a rationalist paradigm. There were many names given to this paradigm, all were equally inflated with conceit and a fixation on classification.
The western obsession with this type of reductionist philosophy has brought its own dilemma. The liberal western obsession with specialised knowledge –with “trusting the experts”- which has in recent years led to a hyper focus on one very narrow threat to society while neglecting the broader danger of all other issues is indicative of the loss of spirituality and an unbalanced ontological outlook.
The prioritisation of one single threat and the obsession with its minute categorisation and identifying its precise effect, and eradicating that effect, has led to an unbalanced approach and a perceptual neglect of the broader world. It has led to a misalignment of the contextual relationships between everything in this complex inter-relational reality. The desire for certainty has critically undermined our ability to function. Consulting the modern oracle, has led us on a path of equivocation and – time will tell – possibly down the path of ruin.
Lorcán Mac Mathúna is a composer, musician, and producer. His latest project “Aisling” draws on the historical and mythological accounts of visions, omens, and prophesies and will be performed in Slí Cois Cheoil Sláine on Sunday Sept 4th in the Irish National Heritage Park, Wexford. 3pm