Where is the centre of the world? Once a mas­ter who lived in a holy place in Bengal, one almost unknown to the world, took leave of his home­ward-bound dis­ciple with these words: ‘So you are going back to that god­for­saken set­tle­ment?!’ This dis­ciple lived in Cali­for­nia, and San Fran­cisco is hardly an insig­ni­fic­ant little set­tle­ment… but what does it look like from the spir­itu­al vant­age point this teach­er held? Where is the centre of the world, and for whom?

Every great cul­ture has con­cerned itself with mark­ing the centre of the world. For the ancient Greeks, at the sac­red oracle of Delphi stood the omphal­os, the navel of the world. In Rome a stone tab­let marked the centre of the empire, and in Con­stantinople, in the church of Hagia Sophia, a marble inlay that sur­vives in the floor to this day marked out the centre of the Ortho­dox world. In Paris the centre of France lies in the pav­ing of the square before Notre-Dame Cathed­ral: a bronze mark­er show­ing kilo­metre zero. It is a mark­ing of the centre, too, when a town shows the dis­tances to other places on a sign­post, and in the same way lay­ing down cer­tain ten­ets marks out the car­din­al points of a given world­view.

Meas­ured from the centre, the dis­tance and pos­i­tion of any other point are clear, and in the light of the defin­ing ten­ets so are good and bad, use­ful and harm­ful, right and wrong. Yet one need only knock down the dis­tance post and order is over­turned, dis­tances can no longer be meas­ured, and the moral yard­stick becomes uncer­tain.

The mod­ern age is just such a fluid age, its centre unmarked, and even its points of ref­er­ence are often changed. So man grows con­fused, and set­ting out for­wards yet mov­ing back­wards is, for him, not a mys­tic­al insight but a forced and bewil­der­ing exper­i­ence. We live not in a centred age but in a net­worked one. It is true that touch­ing any one mesh sets the whole net trem­bling, but one can also eas­ily become entangled in this net. The gla­di­at­or whose weapon had fallen from his hand might still have had a chance, but the one over whom a net was cast had his fate sealed.

Faith in things bey­ond faith is the sign of strong, fruit­ful ages, where­as unbe­lief belongs to tired, bar­ren times. (Thomas Mann)

In enlight­en­ment there is no peri­phery, the centre is every­where. Exper­i­en­cing full­ness is a hol­ist­ic lived exper­i­ence, yet it brings no loss of centre. The shep­herd – a man who fol­lows this archa­ic call­ing – always kept his staff to hand, not only to drive off the dogs, but also to thrust it into the ground now and then, and so mark out the centre. The loss of the centre, and the fluid­ity that springs from it, present three symp­toms of ill­ness.

  • 1. Impar­ti­al­ity ought to be a fun­da­ment­al cri­terion of sci­ence, but it seems to be turn­ing out that it exists neither empir­ic­ally nor in prin­ciple. Not empir­ic­ally, because abstract situ­ations do not exist even under labor­at­ory con­di­tions, so in place of state­ments of fact there is only inter­pret­a­tion, and because of the quantum phe­nomen­on we claim there is no impar­ti­al­ity in prin­ciple either, for the observ­er him­self influ­ences the obser­va­tion. Sci­entif­ic impar­ti­al­ity, or non-par­tis­an­ship, is increas­ingly dis­tor­ted into a fluid neut­ral­ity.
  • 2. Moral neut­ral­ity means the death throes of won­der, and the death of fer­vour leads to spir­itu­al cyn­icism. The anti­dote is to call things by their names: an angel is an angel, and to cry thief at a thief is no sin!
  • 3. Finally, blur­ring good and bad, relativ­ising moral cat­egor­ies, is not the same as the mys­tic­al exper­i­ence of unity. Mys­tic­al exper­i­ence uplifts, relativ­ising drags down and eas­ily leads to emo­tion­al para­lys­is. It is spir­itu­al pro­vin­cial­ism when you drift towards the peri­phery instead of the centre, when you no longer reach out for the spir­itu­al sources at hand but settle for sub­sti­tutes, when faith is replaced by ideo­logy.