In Western culture, as in science, mechanical materialism and mystical thinking are two sides to the same coin, two seemingly contradictory ways of framing the world trapped in the same economistic metaphor. Both reduce the relationships of complex “wholes” to the loop of deterministic or cause-and-effect sequences of events, the mystical as determined at a higher order of complexity by God, and the mechanical materialistic by events happening at a lower level of complexity — that of our genes, in the world of the “parts”.

Each arises, in turn, as an equally futile attempt to nail down causality. Karl Marx eloquently described this double-dipped determinism in examining religion. “The basis of irreligious criticism,” Marx wrote, “is that men and women make religion — religion does not make them. This state, and this society, manufacture religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because this is an inverted world. Religion is the generalized theory of this world, its encyclopediac compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn component, its general ground of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence, in as much as the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that kind of world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering, and at the same time the protest against it. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world; it is the spirit of spiritless conditions; it is the opium of the people.

“The abolition of people’s illusory happiness,” Marx concludes, “is required for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions. Religion is only the illusory sun that revolves around human beings so long as they don’t revolve around themselves.” [Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critiqueof Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.]

Michael Rossman picks up where Marx left off — “the spirit of spiritless conditions, the heart of a heartless world,” an “expression” of real suffering as well as,at the same time, a “protest” against it — this time in the guise of New Age thinking. Unlike many marxists, Rossman is far from discounting anecdotal reports of powerful spiritual experiences; instead, in his book New Age Blues, he comes at it from the other direction, contrasting the exhilaration and power felt in those wondrous “spiritual” moments — which Marx described as opiate, in the double sense of that word — with the disappointing mundane-ness of Christianity, Judaism, and other organized monotheistic religions. For Rossman, these represent “a dull reiteration of the failure of human imagination to grasp what is truly strange — for example, a consciousness that is more than a projection of our own current social perceptions and relations. I confess, I do shiver in delicious and genuine ter­ror, like a kid hearing ghost stories, when I am told by other bright-eyed researchers of pyramids of light again over Jerusalem, and of the plans of higher intelligence to save a few of us in the chaos I feel in my bones is coming. Yet somehow I distrust all accounts, from the Bible down to Uri: they seem to me like meeting the creature from Arcturus and finding that its native tongue is English, though with a slight accent due to the sounds being produced by mandibles. A bit unlikely, and more, a bit disappointing. I would hope that our imagination and comprehension are capable of more, though it may well be that by their nature they are not.” [Michael Rossman, New Age Blues: On the Politics of Consciousness, Dutton, 1979.]

The dominant reductionist way of seeing the world limits and shapes even anti-reductionist or mystical thinking. It gives rise to both mechanical as well as mystical determinisms, through which we linearize the complex interaction between the whole and the parts, the whole within the parts, and the whole as also itself a part. We are totally unprepared to accept the implications of such “dialectical” a process as “the self- development of the totality” in anything more than words. And so, we find ourselves perpetually racing to catch up with changes that are already oc­curring, forever chasing that bus down the avenue of luck