Fragments of Light: Introduction

The search for hope amid the crisis of our civilization

“Thou art a miracle of deafness," Pilar said, her big face harsh and broad in the candlelight. "It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist.

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

Many people in the contemplation of nature or communication with other living beings become aware of this force or something behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us… and they call it God or whatever, depending on their particular disposition…

Quote from “21-87” the documentary that inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars

This essay is also available in audio:

Is All Lost?

No-one needs to go to the cinema to see a disaster film any more. We are living in one.

Whatever your chosen genre of catastrophe, the world today has you covered: floods, war, famine, mass extinction, apocalyptic storms, injustice, inequality and greed are just some of the storylines on offer. Then just when it seemed things could not get any worse, AI appears, and it feels that films like the Matrix and Terminator have walked off the screens and into our lives.

If our history were a screenplay, we just hit what’s called the “All is Lost” moment. That’s when, around two thirds of the way through a story, the protagonist’s life goes to hell: he’s ruined his last chance at love or her mentor’s been killed; she’s turned to prostitution to fund her coke habit or the Emperor has discovered their plot and arrested and murdered their friends. Rock bottom.

And yet, as any good screenwriter will tell you, this is the moment before awakening, before the breakthrough when hope will be found, and the character finally accepts a truth they have been denying all along. The truth that carries salvation.

That truth, that hope, is what this Substack is all about. And it’s not just a Hollywood fantasy, I promise.

The Reveal

If you’re willing to humour me, you’re probably wondering which tenuous source of salvation I place my faith in. Is it carbon capture or breakthrough technologies, eco-activism or revolution or perhaps even a mass exodus to Mars. I’ll go along with anything, you think, but if he says Keir Starmer I’ll cry.

If you were over at our place having dinner, this is the moment I would take a deep breath, look over at my wife and ask with my eyes, “shall I go there?” She would sigh, shrug and smile: fuck it. Fuck it in its most glorious sense. The fuck it of why not, carpe diem, what more have we got to lose.

Ok, brace yourself… Suppose I told you that Star Wars was true?

And just like that, I’ve lost you. He had me going there, you think, I thought he was going to be serious, say something political, at the very least real. He broke his promise, no fantasy.  

I get it. Talk to me nine years ago and I felt exactly the same way. But something happened to me over that time that led me to look at Star Wars – and lots of other things – in a new light.

I encountered something. A source of hope, one that is difficult to name and almost impossible to define. Each of us meets it in our own way, specific to us, expressed through the imagery of our land or culture or the idiosyncrasies of our own heart. Yet, at heart, we speak to the same thing.

Our efforts to name it include the Universe, the Tao, the Otherworld, Mother Nature, the Collective Unconscious, the Atman, the Quantum Field, the Spiritual Realm, Dreamtime, Mystery, Great Spirit and, yes, even “The Force”¹. The only word I will avoid for now is God as, for so many, it provokes reflex revulsion.

The familiarity and troubling associations of many of these names masks what really matters. It exists. It is intelligent. It is alive.

The Elephant in the Universe

Are you still there? Probably not. A belief in this presence must seem like the most outlandish suggestion of all. No-one but your octogenarian Granny and a few fundamentalist maniacs in the Saudi desert or North Dakota believe in such things any more. We² know better.

Don’t panic, I have not been radicalised. I am just feeling my way towards something and it’s definitely not institutional religion. Though I believe all religions offer paths for engagement with “it” – this Force – I can only speak of my experience of Anglican Christianity in which any kind of living, breathing communication has long dried out in words recited by rote. What remains is worship of a taxidermy version of the original teachings, that can be safely placed in the corner as an occasional talking-point, far from the snarling bear that once threatened to eat you alive.

Neither is this a new perennial philosophy, as defined by Aldous Huxley and his acolytes, the idea that all religions boil down to the same simple truths. Rather I prefer the notion of “one ocean, many shores”. In describing the Pacific, for example, you would find a very different account given by an Inuit in Alaska, faced by icy winds, sea lions and salmon, than that of a Solomon Islander, used to cyclones, sharks and manta rays. Yet neither description invalidates the other; rather they complement one another to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of that vast body of sea.

Consider the poet Sylvia Plath – whose husband Ted Hughes said had “access to depths formerly reserved for primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and holy men”. She once wrote:

This is the kingdom of the fading apparition…
Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld,
A world we lose by merely waking up.
Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost
Fringe of mundane vision, this ghost goes
Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down
Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,
But toward a region where our thick atmosphere
Diminishes, and God knows what is there.

Compare that with the words of Maria Sabina, a Mexican sabia, “one who knows”.

“There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And that is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is already known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says.”

Bring to mind the ancient tale of the blind men and the elephant, each with a fragment of the reality of what an elephant is. I believe such stories have been given to us (as Star Wars was given to George Lucas) by it, this Force, as clues to the truth. It’s playful like that. Even so, the core message of the elephant story is often overlooked: that what the blind men are seeking to describe is a living thing.

We are Han Solo

This may sound like hippy, New Age nonsense. Well, I don’t expect you to be persuaded yet, perhaps not even for a long time. Every adult, including me, starts out agreeing with Han Solo that “I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other… and I’ve never seen anything to make me believe that there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything.”

But stop for a moment: are you sure that is true?

Have you ever had goosebumps or a shiver down your spine? Ever had a lucky break or a coincidence too strange to explain? How did you meet your partner or get that new job - was it by chance? Did you know from the very first moment that the love or the work was meant to be? Did you not feel a surge at the first sight of your newborn or have you ever felt awe at the dawn? Ever had a meaningful dream? Ever tripped out at a rave when the roof lifted off and the stars danced by your side? What did you feel when you kissed that person for the first time or when you sat beside someone you loved who was dying?

This is my proposition: that those were moments when you touched It and It touched you.

By its nature, this Force is invisible. Mystery is its lifeblood. Psychedelics are one of the most accessible ways to lift off the veil that conceals it, but there are others like those I’ve mentioned – fleeting moments when the fish becomes aware of the sea.

A part of you, somewhere in your bones or deeper still, recognises what I am describing. It remembers what you knew before you were born.

A Vision

But you don’t have to believe any of this to come along for the ride. Instead, think of it as a game, an experiment in perspective.

In these pages, I intend to look at the desperate real-life crises we face, from the war in Ukraine to the doldrums of Britain, from climate chaos to the corruption of cinema, through this new – or perhaps I should say ancient – lens. To ask if an explanation rooted in this Force might explain what otherwise defies rational sense, offer answers of which we have not even conceived. To ponder what Yoda would say of our times.

I don’t mean to sound flippant about such serious things but the truth is I’m only half joking. After all, Einstein himself said, “We can’t solve our problems by the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them”. We need to reach for a different kind of knowing, long since discredited in the materialist West, though one that until recently was respected everywhere else.

Knowledge that is given, not taken: the guidance of dreams, of visions, of communications with the unseen. The language and knowing of revelation.

What I offer in these pages is far from a neat or complete vision. That’s why they are fragments. The nature of this Force is that in all our attempts to know it, we will never achieve the complete knowledge we crave. My hope is that we may at least pick up a shard here, a sliver there, as if sifting through the debris of a shattered stained glass window. Ever so slowly, we will put the pieces together into a new image to let the light in. One of beauty.

This is not a construction of our own design rather the revealing of something hidden yet always there. If you’ll forgive a pile-up of metaphors, I hope this may be like one of those old Magic Eye pictures, where you stare at a flat, incoherent pattern, and stare at it, until something clicks and you suddenly see the coherent three-dimensional image concealed all along. Of course, it’s worth remembering that some people will never be able to see any image and fanatically deny it is there.

Where appropriate, I’ll tell you of some my own experiences, the encounters that slowly turned me from die-hard sceptic into a student of the Dreamtime. I will also show you that I am not alone, but that others – people you respect, far outside mainstream religion – have touched it too, from Yeats to Jung, Plato to Blake, Terence Malik³ to Herman Hesse, philosophers and politicians, artists and poets, and more than a handful of scientists.

Ultimately, these pages will also be a voyage of discovery. For while I want to report on what I have seen and heard, I know I’m barely paddling in the shallows. The wild sea lies beyond, with so much more to be found. I’d rather not go out there alone.

Flawed Protagonist

Now, you might ask if you do come along, what makes me qualified as a tour guide.

From the outset, I should be clear what I am not: I am not putting myself forward as a guru or wisdom keeper or shaman either of the genuine or the white man’s sort. I have not spent twenty years learning from a tribe in the upper reaches of the Amazon, nor jogged barefoot around the Arctic, neither have I spent my career in an institute dosing people up on psilocybin.

You may not believe it after reading my wacky suggestions, but for most of my life I was a filmmaker and journalist, feet firmly planted in facts. I specialised in films about the very real wars, tyrannies and humanitarian crises people around the world had to face, hoping to help those less privileged than me.

Along the way, my work won awards, including an Oscar nomination, a BAFTA, two Emmys and the prize for Best Documentary at Cannes. I don’t say that to brag, only as a vague bid for credibility, which may come too late after everything else I have said.

The truth is my greatest qualification is that I am just like you. A human being. Flawed, uncertain, juggling work, kids, a marriage and a mortgage as I stumble forward in the dark. Yet I have felt this thing. I have encountered it, I have communicated with it. What I’m hoping to persuade you is that you have too, though you probably ascribed it to something else, like daydreams, luck or coincidence.

So these pages will not only consider epic events; they will be personal too. For the nature of this Force is that it is active in all things from the turning of galaxies down to the growth of each blade of grass.

It dances with every one of us, in life and death, peace and war, sorrow and ecstasy, in the stories you love, in the films you watch, touching everything from the minute details of your life to the history of your town, your country, your people, to the rocks and the rivers and the trees. It affects you whether you believe in it or not, just like gravity, and it binds us together, beyond time or distance, the power that moves all things.

Sure, it sounds fantastic. That’s why they call it the infinite.

My dream is, if I can persuade you of any of this, that this might become a community, a space for you to share your encounters with it too. For that is how we will restore our relationship with it, perhaps even – if you’ll forgive the phrase – to restore the covenants we have broken. For it is nothing if not democratic; no-one is special and everyone is. I have come to believe we all have the possibility of the same connection to it, unmediated by messiahs or priests.

If understandably you find this all too hard to swallow then it’s time for one of those experiments in perspective: imagine, just for a moment, if this were true, what it would mean for your life and our world.

Deus Ex Machina

In a screenplay, even after the All is Lost moment has arrived, once the hero has accepted the truth that she has shied away from throughout, she still faces the hardest part of all: to embody it out there in the world.

In this, our culture conspires against us. We are conditioned to believe that we are weak and brutal and crude. To believe that a drink, a pizza, and the new series on Netflix may be the closest we’ll get to transcendence. It is not true.

Yet it is not easy to shake off comfort for truth. The process of change is hard and it is painful. Once we have cast off the goose-down jackets that our civilization swaddles us in, the wind will blister our soft skin. This path is not for everyone yet it leads up the mountain, to the next stage of our evolution.

Time has almost run out. We stand one crisis, one trigger pull, from the most devastating war the human race has ever seen. And even if by some miracle we swerve that fate, the collapse of the Earth’s life support systems or the rise of the robots lie in wait.

I believe that we cannot overcome these crises alone. Like an alcoholic on the threshold of a 12-step program, we must ask ourselves if we have it in us to control our excesses without the help of Step 2, a “higher power”. When we believe ourselves to be the highest form of intelligence, we have no-one but our own ingenuity to rely on. And though ingenious we certainly are, we have barely begun to understand the complexity of the interwoven web of life that our greed and ignorance has broken. If our car breaks down, we might tinker with repairs to the best of our knowledge. But sooner or later, we may need to turn to the manufacturer for help.

Yet the potential is far greater than simply repairing the damage. Free of suffocating institutions and invisible chains, through a connection renewed for our times, partnership with this Force may help us rediscover the knowledge of our rightful place in the world, and our strength and dignity as human beings.

You’ve come this far so let me send you off with one last thought to outrage the sceptic in you: that these words do not come from me but from it, this entity, this Force. This is one of those moments you’ve met it.

It wants you to know that life is more beautiful, more alive, more full of hope than you’ve come to believe. It wants you to know that it knows you - yes, you personally. You are seen, you are valued, your life has meaning. You were made for these times.

I hope you’ll come along for this wild ride. Despite all the darkness, it’s going to be fun.

Edward Scarlett-Watts

London
May 2023

1. There is no better illustration of our culture than the fact that George Lucas copyrighted this term “The Force” though he himself had taken it from the documentary 21-87, quoted at the start of this essay. If, as I am suggesting, it is a real part of our world then this is the equivalent of copyrighting the phrase “the ocean”, “the breeze” or “the mountain”.

2. Clearly, when I say “we”, I predominantly refer to the rationalist, materialist, capitalist West. But sadly much of our urbanised world now thinks the same way. We forced them to.

3. The still at the start of this piece is taken from The Thin Red Line, Malik’s 1998 film.