If you want depth, you need space.

An invitation to The Realisation Festival, June 27-30, 2024

Most of us were almost called something else. Those near-misses often earn the consolation prize of becoming a middle name and a mention on our official documents, but they are mostly honoured and then forgotten, like silver medalists. Perhaps the purpose of our middle names is to remind us of near misses more generally, and what they imply for the contingency of how our lives have played out. We could so easily have been someone else, and might yet be.

The Realisation Festival was almost called The Festival of Space and Time. We even briefly considered The Festival of Space, Time, and Reality, but managed to take cold showers before things got out of hand.

The venue, St Giles House, offers space literally in its acres of landscape, room to roam, and unbroken lines of sight. The festival also seeks to offer Kairos amidst Chronos, a distinctive quality of time informed by a multi-generation context of social reform and philosophy where we recognise ourselves as historical actors with a future, and sink into the depth of the present.

How often do we hear: “Give it some time” or “I just need some space” ?

These figures of speech are familiar to everyone, but they evoke something deep, and it’s not clear if we need both time and space because they offer different things, or becuase they co-arise somehow.

‘Spacetime’ is part of the legacy of our cultural infatuation with Albert Einstein, but the collapse of time into space, or what has been called ‘the spatialisation of time’, is problematic. We should not be too quick to assume we understand time, space, and their relationship, for a great deal flows from that.

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Time and Space are deep metaphysical mysteries but they are also lived realities. At the festival, we do not examine them directly as questions, but the mystery they evoke is part of the atmosophere.

It seems timely to stress that while minds are well fed at the festival we don’t see the intellect as sovereign. We call it a festival for the soul (rather than just the mind or the body) because we are interested in the full experience of being alive, and exploring and expressing that experience in a range of ways. The role of dance, poetry, improvisation, walking, star gazing, art, yoga, music and other activities are not add-ons or mere decoration, but right at the heart of the festival’s ethos.

To make sense of how our sense of space and time might inform those activities, I began by re-reading chapter twenty-four of The Matter with Things, where Iain McGilchrist has the following reflection on page 997:

‘It is interesting that in some mythologies, Time appears as a god, a mythic person of sorts’, observes Jan Zwicky, ‘but, to the best of my knowledge, space is never so represented.’ Time speaks profoundly to the human condition in a way that space, however fundamental it might be, simply does not. Time is relentless, like another being’s will, where space is pliable and may be fashioned, though not without limits, to our own. Time is emotive; space is bland. Time is always single. ‘I venture to say only one true integer may occur in all of physics’, says physicist David Tong. ‘The laws of physics refer to one dimension of time. Without precisely one dimension of time, physics appears to become inconsistent.’ By contrast space is multiple: it has between three and 11 or even more dimensions, depending on whose theory you are inclined to embrace. Time is irreversible: space open to endless revision. Time creates and corrodes: space lends (temporary) permanence to what is. Writing, for example, was invented to give permanence in space to the fleetingness of thought. Consciousness exists in time, but not in space. For elements that are often conflated, their qualities could hardly be more different.

There is a lot to reflect on in that paragraph, not least the line “Consciousness exists in time, but not in space.” 🤯

In the same chapter, Space is linked to matter, to extension, and resistance; but also to soul, and even to realisation, in a striking quotation by Whitehead:

Apart from space, there is no consummation. Space expresses the halt for attainment. It symbolises the complexity of immediate realisation. It is the fact of accomplishment. Time and space express the universe as including the essence of transition [time] and the success of achievement [space]. The transition is real, and the achievement is real. The difficulty is for language to express one of them without explaining away the other.

Iain also examines what we mean when we call something ‘deep’, linking the dimensionality and relationality and unknowability of space to the recognition of depth, stating that the spiritual and spatial aspects of depth have always co-existed. There is a profound difference between perceiving depth as a mysterious something-but-we-know-not-what and not perceiving it at all. Paul Tillich is quoted saying that our loss of the dimension of depth is the decisive feature in the West’s current soul searching.

We may need space to be deep, in more ways that one, and that’s partly why so much of the festival that is about moving in space. This applies most directly to opening the festival with a dance rather than a keynote speech, but also to the praxis of improvision, the antidebate, and the time offered for people to explore the grounds, alone or together.

Moreover, our loss of appreciation for depth may be related to presuming to understand space. Just because we can draw lines for the dimensions of up-down, back-front, left-right doesn’t mean we know where we are. As Colin McGinn warns:

What we need from space, practically speaking, is by no means the same as how space is structured in itself. I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand it much better than we do.

I wonder then if practices like Yoga and Tai Chi are not just about reconnecting the mind and the body, but also attending to space as a feature of reality, almost as if tasting it. I also wonder if ‘being in nature’ is partly about reconnecting with space emotionally, almost like keeping in touch with a friend. Perhaps much of mental illness is about the literal loss of space, in our living arrangements, in our built-up cities, in the narrow range of movements involved in pulling a screen towards our faces. Perhaps space is the primary nutrient of soul food, and maybe we are meant to taste it together.

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My priority here is draw attention to the neglect of space, and there is too much to say about time, so for now I’ll just share that I believe time is real.

That might seem an uncontroversial position, but one of the implications of ‘the spatialisation of time’ is not just that space gets conflated with time, but that time begins to look unreal. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time is the most famous expression of that perplexity, and I remember wrestling with it as an undergraduate. It is uncomfortable when logic appears to lead us to a conclusion that is at odds with experience, and I remember a feeling of beguiling relief when I first read A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges. The whole essay is moving, but I particularly liked the ending where Borges comes back to the lived reality of time:

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

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Time and space are real, they matter, and we are serious when we say we want the festival to offer time and space for the soul.

Yet just as I am glad not to be called by my middle name, I am glad we chose to call it The Realisation Festival. The festival has recreational and therapeutic features, but it is also an invitation to a collaborative cultural inquiry in the context of societal reckoning, so the word realisation is optimally enigmatic and suitably exacting.

In a short promotional video from last year I share the three main things we mean by realisation: to get real, become real, and make real. These challenges manifest differently for all of us, but we share in their co-arising and relationship in our lives. There are always things we are called upon to understand, to grow into, and to make manifest and our job is to help each other attend to them. We have structured our small group conversations around that same-but-different inquiry, which happens to be a key feature of space, and time.

If you would like more background on the Realisation Festival, you can look at the website or consider my prior attempts: What’s the Point of the Realisation Festival?(2021) A Festival for the Soul(2023) and The Case for Offline Events(2024).)

There are still tickets and bursary places available for this year’s event at the end of June and you can get them here. I hope to see you there!

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