Tag Archives: spirituality

I think therefore I am capital

Posted on by
Reply

ea35012b67112d2997cf0b42c21e2b928e14e6e4

By Jamie Goldrick

Source: Adbusters

In the worldview of the Cree, life is lived along a trail of experiences. Sharing experience with others is a result of the crossing of two life trails. Life is experienced as a tangled pattern of all beings. In this way, beings do not occupy one world, as in the Western sense: they inhabit their own relational field.

To the Cree, even the wind is alive. It interacts and has agency, and it has the capacity to come into contact with other beings and be affective. In this respect the wind too has the capacity to be alive as it can give shape to the world. For the Yukaghir in Siberia, Elk have the capacity to enter into personhood depending upon which relational field they enter.

In animist cosmology, objects can be ascribed personhood simply by the fact that they have potential to enter into relations with the environment and other living beings. According to Anthropologist Tim Ingold, “different creatures have different points of view of the world, because of different capabilities and perception they attend to the world in different ways”. Thus to the animist, life is lived through the relational field that objects enter into with each other. Regarding all beings and objects, we exist, therefore we are.

Edward Tylor coined the term animism in 1871. He used it to describe the idea that inanimate beings and objects were attributed with spirits. To Tylor, an evolutionist, this was just an aberration on the part of the animists, a “magical philosophy grounded in error” and nothing more than the simple mistake of a basic society on the path to modernity.

Steeped in the western philosophical tradition, Tylor naturally found focus in rational inquiry and scientific progress. He is a product of the Enlightenment, espousing such values as the natural rights of humans to life, liberty and property. Roy Porter, describing Immanuel Kant, observes:

For Kant enlightenment was man’s final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error. He believed that this process of mental liberation was actively at work in his own lifetime. The advancement of knowledge – understanding of nature, but human self-knowledge no less -would propel this giant leap forward.

Yet even to this day Enlightenment values have yet to break free from the shackles of Christianity, perhaps even the Classical Period that came before it as well. There are blind spots and limitations to rational inquiry and scientific progress. Our thinking is infected by it.

One such blind spot presumes a nature-culture divide, the notion that we are different than other sentient beings. In this worldview, animals exist as mere automata. They are machines without consciousness, all body and no mind, or to use Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, the definitive difference between us and all other beings on this planet is consciousness: I think, therefore I am.

Thus the environment, the humans who had yet to achieve enlightenment and the animals alike who inhabited it were objects to be manipulated and used by us, the subjects. This is the ontological basis that the West is built upon. It is the foundation that provides the philosophical conditions for capitalism to flourish. The gulf between what is theorized in the minds of men and what is a lived environmental reality was alluded to by one of the foundational thinkers of the Enlightenment, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

The same division that caused the social organism to grow also causes the individual worker to become impoverished …the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The Wealth of Nations relied upon the bodily suffering of the disempowered to function at the expense of an abstract social body and to those in possession of the means of production. Written in 1776, things have somewhat changed in the past 240 years.

Briefly, it has been a long, arduous, and somewhat brutal journey for capital to the present day. Capital, in its search for surplus value, has penetrated through domestic markets, foreign markets, future markets, even now to our very sociality via the technological advances that have allowed for online social networking to occur. The collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, which eliminated the gold standard, allowed the dollar to become symbolic and abstract, facilitating a new definition of economic worth, as evinced by the liberalization of capital markets, the emergence of futures markets, and the notorious derivatives. Economic value has become anthropocentric, a closed human based value system, abstracted from the material environment.

Take for example Google’s $66 billion turnover in 2014, Facebook’s 1.3 billion users, or Twitter’s initial stock market flotation of 23 billion. This value is located in the climate cooled data centers of financial institutions, abstracted from reality. This descent into the digital ether compounds as these abstract value systems begin to play a greater and more influential role in our lives. At a time when our relationship to nature urgently needs to be re-­examined, the gulf between nature and culture grows exponentially. Nature – earth’s ‘free gifts’ – becomes further objectified, commodified and excluded from our sense of being-in-the-world.

Maurizio Lazzarato notes that Neoliberalism relies on the individuality of its users, which has a profound effect upon our understanding of the new digital labor. To Lazzarato, digital labor functions by uniting and bringing together extreme individualization and dividuation (the collection of individuals’ idiosyncrasies into data banks) of individuals. The appendages of digital labor feed off our subjectivity and thus enslave us. As Marx argued, machinery enslaves and is manifested as a form of fixed capital. Today these machinic processes have invaded the daily. Lazzarato observes that we are currently enslaved by the mega-machine. Once our individual identity is stripped, a process called machinic enslavement, the individual is rendered as “a gear, a cog, a component part of business and financial assemblages”.

Today the circulation of capital is now the principal means of generating profit. Capital is reliant on human activity to function and flow. Immaterial capital flows are reliant on dividuals to •connect the circuits• between entities. This modern machinic enslavement does not subscribe to traditional categories of subject/object or human/machine binaries. The dividual does not stand by an external machine, for as Lazzarato notes “together they constitute a human machine apparatus in which humans are but recurrent and interchangeable parts of production and consumption. The individual is part of the machine: part-mineral, part-mind and integral to the functioning of modern day capitalism. By habitually updating a status, Googling a mundane thought, or checking into any given establishment, the bodily language of non-engagement now screams: I think, therefore I am capital.

Technology, paced by notions of progress and modernity, has always had an ambivalent place in Western discourse. The obsession with progress obfuscates the objective effects of technology. Technology once demarcated the distinction between work time and leisure time. According to E.P. Thompson: “Before the industrial revolution, time was task based, with the introduction of the machine to the factory floor, this brought the time-keeper, the informer and the fines.” Capital intensive machines had to be attended to round the clock to function. With the advent of the steam engine, the shift from organic to carbon power, a new proletariat was born. Today technology is once again blurring the boundaries by creating a social factory from out of our leisure and private time. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Innovation within the dominant paradigm of capitalism serves to innovate existing forms of domination. In this case, those who control the visions of the future control the present.

The predominant discourse of think therefore I am, and our obsession with progress blinds us to the realities of the day. We are within its apparatus when we work, or when we play, when reaching out to others, or solitarily in our own homes. What if we could see the true effects of this mega-machine? Strip away Cartesian subjectivity and take on the oft forgotten worldview of the animist. Proclaim “what manner are these things, part mineral, part mind that serve the few and enslave the many, while fouling the land, the water and the air! “We can no longer see objects as they truly exist in the world. To use Descartes’ term, now we are the automata, cogs and gears, the circuitry of the mega­ machine, assembled on the false logic of a nature/culture divide.

Set to the backdrop of species collapse, the disappearance of the rainforests, the acidification of the oceans, the mega-machine operates faster than ever before. The creatures outside look in, from person to machine, and then from human to person, and from person to machine again; but already it is impossible to say which is which….

 

-Jamie Goldrick is a filmmaker and contributing editor to Rabble magazine in Ireland.

A New Map

Posted on by
Reply

Collective-Consciousness-1

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘It is the tragedy of our time that the average individual learns too late that the materialistic concept of life has failed utterly in every department of living.’  ~Manly P. Hall 

We have entered times of incredible change, readjustment, and upheaval. There are many contrary forces pushing through our diverse societies and straining to breaking point the incumbent structures and institutions that, in many cases, are no longer functional for progress. Politics – politikos, ‘of, for, or relating to citizens’ – is in a sense the science of community. It is also an expression of the science of the soul; it reflects the state of human consciousness, and the political sphere provides a vessel for the growth and transformation of the human being. Our social communities are the incubators for the enhancement and expansion of human consciousness.

Political and social theories and practices do not exist in a philosophical and psychological vacuum. Importantly, they are related to two important factors: i) the human being’s worldview, and view of the universe, and ii) the human being’s view of himself or herself. A concept of society, government and justice always rests on the conceptions we have of the cosmos and our place in it.

The orderly medieval worldview was held together by a largely coherent religious cosmological system. This was then replaced by a scientific paradigm held together by a Cartesian-Newtonian cosmological doctrine. And yet in our modern age of scientific-psychological exploration we are witnessing the demise of this once-dominant consensus. To put it plainly, as a species we are lacking any coherent cosmological view to provide us with meaning and significance. Human consciousness is lacking a coherent and shared vision, which in turn affects how we project ourselves onto society and within socio-political discourse. C.G. Jung said that ‘Every advance in culture is psychologically an extension of consciousness.’ Likewise, an extension of human consciousness lacking coherence and meaning projects dissonance into our societies. This is why it is imperative we adopt a new map of reality that can provide us with a new cosmology and worldview that has meaning for our times. Especially as we are on the cusp of transitioning into a diverse yet hopefully unified planetary civilization.

Modern western society places little or no value upon the inner experience, thus placing no value or attention upon the need for conscious evolution, preferring to dwell within a largely economic rationalization of the world. In this worldview the human ego exalts the individual personality at the expense of compassionate relations, empathy, and connectedness. It is the ego which propels a minority of voices on the world stage to declare separatism, division, and national self interests over and above the need for international cooperation, collaboration, compassion, and understanding. It is this rhetoric which gives the opportunity for a hitherto neglected section of society to come forward through the expression of repressed anger and the unleashing of chaotic, disruptive energy. It also allows for the mindset that economic and political changes and upheavals are able to solve all problems because the source of such ills is in the objective environment rather than in the consciousness of the human being.  And yet whilst the projection of peoples’ anger and negativity onto others creates the illusion of improvement, it is actually an unhealthy mechanism that fails to address the real concern. The projection of repressed anger attaches itself to external socio-political movements and charges them with great power – this has long been the bane of human history!

That is why today we are desperately in need of a new understanding – a new map of reality – that allows us to recognize the greater truth. A truth that shows how our material reality is interconnected at the most fundamental level. It is a truth which shows how all living beings are inherently immersed within a collective field of consciousness that resonates between us. We are not separate individuals – isolated islands – but individualized expressions of a unified consciousness that embraces us all at the very core of our being. The new map of the cosmos tells us that the evolutionary trend is toward ever-greater coherence and cohesion, and not it’s opposite. It is these aspects which are conducive to a thriving, sustainable future – not the elements of division, conflict, competition, or fear.

If we are to transition into an integrative, coherent phase of human civilization we need to adopt as soon as possible the new paradigm – the new map – that comes at a time when it is most needed. Each person determines his or her conduct within the larger context of the nature of the world and the meaning of human life. We find this context through our ideas – our maps of reality. We need to share the new cosmological understanding through our institutions, our educational systems, and most importantly of all – in our human relations with one another. We are a human family, diverse and yet unified; each an expression of a cosmic oneness that seeks expression within a material reality. We are now called upon to reflect that unity, and to represent the true legacy that is the human race. Our time is now.

 

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

Something Is Happening

Posted on by
Reply

collapse-era

By William Hawes

Source: Gods & Radicals

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE, but you don’t know what it is: Do you? No one knows, really, as this something is still evolving. As we look back to 2016, though, it is abundantly clear that history has awoken from its slumber. We’ve had a couple events in the West last year: Brexit and Trump.

Politically-charged, dynamic events (as Alain Badiou might define them) have been rare in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the USSR. Capitalism made it seem as if neoliberalism was winning in the 1990s, even as the US wantonly murdered in Iraq and took perverse pleasure in helping to dismember Yugoslavia, among other things.

In fact, one could argue there have only been four notable Western political events in the post-Cold War era: the 9/11 attacks, the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the 2008 banking crisis and following protest movements of 2011 (Occupy and 15-M Movement), and the populist, anger-driven aforementioned events of 2016.

You see, authentic, spontaneous political events (in the form of uprisings or popular revolts against the elite) are a no-no in the West. History is supposed to have ended, remember? Max Weber called this the Iron Cage, and for good reason.

Now, though, the meaninglessness and rootlessness of our lives trapped inside the cage have become too obvious to ignore, for most of us. As each day passes, our political discourse glosses over how lazy, ignorant, mean-spirited, and numb our society has become. We import luxuries from all over the globe, but can’t be bothered to cook or grow our own food, assemble our own electronics, expand renewable energy projects, provide clean water to inner cities, organize high-speed transport, or educate our youth without drowning them in debt, etc.

So, many have lashed out against the system, and our more vulnerable members of society, in anger, defiance, out of sheer ignorance. Could it be because, deep down, we know how helpless, sheltered, and out-of-touch our society is, compared to the rest of the world? What are the root causes of this disintegration of public discourse?

One cause is our utter dependency on the capitalist system to clothe, feed, and shelter us. What we used to inherit from our mothers and fathers, important agricultural knowledge, artisanal and cultural wisdom, a sense of place and belonging, have all been traded in for money, the privilege to be exploited by capitalism, toiling in jobs that alienate us from ourselves, families, the Earth. Paper bills and electronic bank accounts are a pitiful substitute for self-reliance. This loss, this grief, isn’t allowed to be expressed in public. Logical positivism tells us that progress will prevail, the future will be better than the past, and anyone who thinks otherwise must be some sort of Luddite.

Since real income has fallen and social services have been slashed in the last 40-plus years, many have seen their loved ones’ lives cut short (lack of access to health care and quality food and produce, air and water pollution), their dreams defiled (steady jobs gone, factories shuttered), their entertainment homogenized and dangerous (sports mania has become normalized, “Go Team!”, alcohol, painkiller, and opiate addiction is rampant), their hopes for the future shattered (community and public space swallowed by corporations).

There are those, as well, still too plugged into the system (both Trump and Clinton voters), too attached to their gadgets, to the hum of their slave-labor appliances, to the glow emanating from their screens. They will cry incessantly about the turning away of Muslims from flights, but there is only silence for the millions killed abroad by the US war machine. Mainstream liberals are just as likely as the meanest, most selfish conservatives to fall prey to emotional pleas, demagoguery, and pathetic attempts to see themselves as victims in this Age of Anger.

The urge to resort to the myth of a righteous, homogenous, “pure” social group, to denigrate the other, is strong in such dire, despondent situations. In America, though, material poverty cannot be said to be the only, or even the main causal factor, behind this return of nativism and tribalism. Rather, it is undoubtedly a spiritual malaise that has swept over the West. Ever since the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it has been technology which has provided the underlying weltanschauung for our culture. Sprouting from this, an inhuman and Earth-destroying morality has formed. Jacques Ellul explains:

“A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.” (1)

Thus, Western society, through the use of mass-produced electronics and disseminated in what some call our “Information Age”, has now seemingly accelerated the pace of change and ecological destruction beyond the scope of any group or nation which could possibly control it. We are then confronted with the thought that only an economic collapse or series of natural disasters could possibly provide the impetus for revolutionary change to occur. This only leaves us feeling helpless, depressed, and passive in the face of government oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Not only that, but capitalism has quite literally dulled our senses and disconnected us from our source of being, planet Earth. Don’t believe me? Read this amazing paper on how Polynesian wayfinders discovered islands thousands of miles apart without any modern technology. This is part of what Morris Berman means by Coming to our Senses. To re-establish our unity with nature, the Western notion of an ego-driven, domineering and reductionist search for truth, meaning, and creativity must be thrown out. Here, Berman invokes Simone Weil:

“‘decreate’ yourself in order to create the work, as God (Weil says) diminished Himself in order to create the world. It would be more accurate to say that you don’t create the work, but rather you step out of the way and let it happen.” (2)

This isn’t really discussed among wide swaths of leftists, the social-justice crowd, or with mainstream liberals. It’s anathema to a materialistic, dead world where freedom has been traded for comforting lies, money has been substituted for the ability to provide for ourselves and our communities, and the abundance and resiliency (truly a miracle!) of the Earth is taken for granted as we chase our next fix for consumer goods, our next chance for drugs or gadgets to dim our perception.

What you’re not supposed to say in public, of course, is that our world is falling apart, and we are doing nothing to stop it. The reactions are too raw, the reality too grim, even as we know, for example, that 10% or more of the total species on Earth will be gone by 2050.

Yet we can do something: there is an opening now in political discourse which has been previously denied to us. The Republican and Democratic parties have thoroughly delegitimized themselves by offering up Trump and Clinton as their figureheads: these were widely considered the most widely disliked candidates in recent memory, if not the history of our republic. There is room for Libertarians, Greens, and Socialists to gain power: yet only if they avoid their own regrettable sectarianism, organize, and promote an inclusive, broad-based platform.

To do so, citizens will have to gain some perspective on their lives. A slow pace of life needs to be seen as a virtue, not a sin: many on the right and left are quick to denounce the hedonism of the jet-setting, parasitic globalists, the Davos men; yet refuse to see their own lifestyles and actions as smaller examples of such outlandish consumption.

If we are open to life and our environment as part of a greater whole, an unfathomable mystery, we can refuse our culture’s siren songs of death, misery, and destruction. While modern technology can be useful if reined in by an Earth-conscious, responsible morality, some things are better left unknown, undiscovered, if it risks destroying the Earth in order to find the answer. Rather than running a cost/benefit analysis to determine the land’s worth, some aspects of the planet and the universe are better Left Sacred.

Also, acknowledging our mortality, and accepting the basic fact that death could come for you at any moment, can liberate our souls and propel them to unimaginable heights. Joe Crookston explains this quite well:

“And then when I turn dry and brown
I’ll lay me down to rest
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of an eagle’s nest
And when that eagle learns to fly
I’ll flutter from that tree
I’ll turn myself around again
As part of the mystery”

 

Notes:
1.) Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Books, 1964. p. 97.
2.) Berman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. Simon & Schuster, 1989. p. 337

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Counterpunch. He is author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

Enlightenment and Cosmic Citizenship: The Divine in mundane life

Posted on by
Reply

By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

What is Enlightenment?

Is it practical spirituality? Personal, soul-oriented growth and evolution?

Could these formats be experiences? Are those who claim such experiences in a constant state of otherworldly sensate immersion within worlds beyond the ken of most?

All the time? In every moment of every day?

If you peruse the teachings of the universal sages such as Jesus or Buddha, or any of the modern gurus like Adyashanti, Mooji, Amma or Tolle, you find a denial of this continuous state of experiential immersal within Mystery.

Rather, they say that life is comprised of the moments we each live and that transcendence of that moment is in experiential fullness. Of being Present in each moment of the Now, rather than being lost in contemplations of the past and future. And that this perceptual quality is cultivated consciously over time and practice, alongside a certain element of Grace and divine bestowal.

Until the point at which the Now becomes perceptually continuous. And the body, a steady-state, resonant conduit of the Divine in every lived expression.

There are many who aspire to such Nowness who preach and crow their accomplishments to the world, seeking fame and fortune. This path is inimical to the real expression of enlightenment because it is indicative of covetousness and narcissistic self-aggrandizement.

And yet, true teachers and experiencers are also compelled to share their knowing and to seek to open doorways for those yet mired within the swirling sandstorm of Maya manifest.

How does one tell the difference? How do you know when someone has had real, transcendental experiences and have internalized the wisdom gained therein?

Many have experienced alternative perceptual realities by way of plant teachers, artificial drugs and real and synthetic brain chemicals such as DMT. These experiences are valid but also prone to misinterpretation and overestimation of their importance in the context of spiritual enlightenment. Because you’ve seen the world shift during an acid or shroom trip does not mean you have then become Enlightened, in other words.

Experiencing things the mind and soul are not ready for is also dangerous. Those who seek to raise kundalini who have not done the soul work necessary at each chakra to raise their level of consciousness can achieve higher spiritual experiences, but can also do long-lasting psychic, mental and even physical damage to themselves. If serious enough, this damage can last a lifetime or longer.

The sidhis – or powers – such as telepathy, bilocation, telekinesis and astral travel are tools with very specific psychic requirements that can be accessed with practice by some, not all. Most yogis and gurus warn against their specific cultivation as doing so is indicative of growth yet to achieve along the road to spiritual wisdom.

Sidhis occur spontaneously amongst those who travel the Pathless Path seeking the highest expression of Cosmic Citizenship. To express them carelessly or selfishly is to cultivate negative karma and to step sideways along the path. Which is the reason why true teachers do no such thing.

Empaths can tell when they are in the presence of true sages, gurus, teachers. They can just feel the auric emanations of love, compassion and expansiveness. The words of such individuals speak to empathic souls, whisper intimations of innerstanding to their deepest levels of conscious beingness.

The expression of these teachers are consciously cultivated to align with that of their chosen audiences. They can be, therefore, crass or saintly, inscrutable or vivacious, sensual or austere. One thing they all share in common is a lack of adherence to societal norms and taboos as these are primarily human laws and mores and not divine in origin.

Enlightenment does not look like what most people think it looks like. When you have been to the Mountaintop, experienced Kenshō, have been a student in Shambhala, have visited Nirvana, that boundless, infinite and eternal space of beingness within the very heart of love and consciousness manifest, you are not supposed to stay there. That looks like death to the physical body.

You must return.

To life. To the world. To the Marketplace of human involvement. And seek the enlightenment of ALL sentient beings.

By any means necessary.

The Enlightened are, at heart, trickster spirits. Irreverent and undefined. Willing to appear any way to achieve the end of breaking down personal and societal boundaries to reveal aspects of the ineffable to those mired in the mundane minutia of the daily grind.

You never know who you’re talking to.

Especially if you’re not paying close attention because you are caught up in yourself. But you don’t encounter the Enlightened within the span of a lifetime unless you are, in some form or fashion, ready to grow and evolve past the limitations of the unexamined life. Ready to take the next step in your own personal, spiritual evolution.

So pay attention. Let the synchronicities lead you. Meditate. Cultivate the Now.

By doing so, you might discover that your crazy sister or brother, cousin, friend or acquaintance might be something other than you thought.

And wouldn’t that be something?

 

Hybrid Landscapes – From Posthistoric to Posthuman

Posted on by
Reply

spiritual-phenomena-other-dimensions

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Reality Sandwich

The collective psyche seems to be in the grip of a powerful archetypal dynamic in which the long-alienated modern mind is breaking through, out of the contractions of its birth process, out of what Blake called its “mind-forg’d manacles,” to rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.
Richard Tarnas

Reality, it seems, has been deregulated, and nothing is business as usual anymore….as ancient mapmakers used to mark on the watery unknown, “Here be dragons”
Erik Davis

Here be dragons, indeed. Our human exploration is swinging through a momentum that includes knowledge of the finer forces at work within the cosmos, which includes how we experiment in our interactions with not only the environment but also our bodies. In this article I will explore these themes, looking at memes of meta-programming to post-body scenarios – all in the framework of a human search along the sacred path of understanding our very selves.

American writer Philip K. Dick is famous mostly for his science-fiction books that question the nature and validity of our reality-matrix. In “The Android and the Human,” a speech that Dick gave in the early 1970s, he spoke about this blurring of the boundaries between body and environment:

[O]ur environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components – all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves.1 

The human-body-environment is increasingly being reconfigured as a site for a new magical animism, as distinct from the previous archaic notion of animism. Writer-philosopher Erik Davis has referred to this as a sort of ‘techno-animism’ whereby we give life to our technologies based on our imaginations.2 This new configuration is no longer anymore about technologies and us, but rather our technological bodies that now inhabit our ‘techno-imaginal’ realm. The body is becoming back into vogue as a site for experience and experimentation, as a vessel that interacts, intercedes, and interprets the sacred-mystical reality-matrix that encloses us. As modern quantum science has now aptly demonstrated, we do not inhabit a subject-object type of us-and-it world.[1] All materiality is enmeshed within a quantum entangled universe, and our bodies are somatically communicating with this energy field simultaneously.

Much of the western spiritual (Gnostic) mystical practice is interpreted as a somatically felt experience. The body is the instrument that receives and grounds the experience, whether it be in terms of the ‘great flash’, ‘illuminating light’ or the ‘bodily rush.’ The body is the human instrument for attracting and centralizing (receiving, transcribing, and sometimes transferring) the developmental energy. There are many ‘bodies’ in spiritual-mystic traditions, including the etheric, the spiritual, the ecstatic, the subtle, the higher, and others, so that the purely physical-material body is recognized as the densest and least mobile of them all. As cultural historian Morris Berman has noted, the body in history has always been a site/sight of focus.3 It has helped define the experience of the Self/Other, the Outer/Inner, and to be a material vessel for the spiritual impulse. Our earlier ancestors, who exhibited more of an animist relationship to the world, saw less distinction between the physical body and its environment. The rise of the philosophy of dualism and the mind-body split, which was supported by the mechanistic worldview, saw our modern societies further strengthen the mind/body rift. This was publicly endorsed by Orthodox/organized religions that have been quick to spurn and even demonize the body. Many so-called ‘modern’ societies around the world have, at one time or another, attempted to suppress the power and expression of the human body. The body has always been a site for the convergence of power and control. Perhaps no one in recent times has done more to expose this body-power relationship than the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.[2] Foucault has deconstructed, in the body of work that he refers to as a critical history of modernity, how the body has been fought over as a site of power. The physical body is a location of resistance against the establishment; it is a fixed place where an individual can be located, found, and held accountable. If we cannot escape from our bodies then, it seems, we are forever within the system. The body-in-system has always been taken to represent the form of something, as a socially tangible entity. We have bodies in terms of social institutions, such as the body politic, or the social body, the scientific body, the medical body, or the body of an organization, etc. The once sacred site of the body, which was the vessel for somatic spiritual experiences, has become the subject of control and suppression.

In Gnostic terms the body’s site of power has been referred to as those of the ‘sleepers’ and ‘wakers.’ The ‘sleepers’ being those whose conscious self has yet to break through the layers of the body’s social conditioning. The spiritual-somatic experience has been seen as a threat to hierarchical societies because it exists beyond their bounds of power. This is one reason why ecstatic experiences – whether through spiritual or other means – have been suppressed, outlawed, and discredited by religions and mainstream institutions alike. Ecstatic experiences that can break down human thinking patterns and conditioning structures are unnerving for institutions of social-political power. How can you control, regulate, and discipline a body/energy/experience that has no physical location? Such intangible forces, such as the power of baraka,[3] is positively infectious and beyond bounds. As Berman notes,

The goal of the Church (any church) is to obtain a monopoly on this vibratory experience, to channel it into its own symbol system, when the truth is that the somatic response is not the exclusive property of any given religious leader or particular set of symbols. 4 

The spiritual-occult renaissance of the 20th century strove to rejuvenate and strengthen the presence of the somatic experience. This intangible flow of spiritual blessing, grace, and power is also a resurging undercurrent in the sacred revival.

In more recent times there has been an increasing focus on what is termed the innate consciousness (of the body), and which has been revealed through such techniques as muscle testing. It is innate because it is inborn (born in and of the body), and it is instinctual. Somatic consciousness then is another word for our intuitive intelligence. As I discussed in a previous book,[4] many of those now being born into the world are displaying a stronger sense of intuitive intelligence. However, in our modern haste we have, in the words of French philosopher Bruno Latour, never really been modern at all since we continue to exist in an anthropological matrix where nature and culture cannot be neatly divided. As Latour points out, this matrix is composed of hybrids where natural/cultural, real/imagined, and subject/object merge. Moreover, this hybridity is being further enforced and coalesced through genetic engineering, implants, virtual reality, and NBIC sciences (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology and Cognitive science). Latour is right in saying that humanity has never exited from what he refers to as our pre-modern ancestors’ world. We are, and always have been, a hybrid of body-mind-environment. Yet unlike Latour, I contest that we are modern – or rather we are past the post of post-modern, in how we are merging our lives into a new hybrid fusion.

Our ancestors made no such division between nature and society because their state of consciousness did not allow them to – they simply did not perceive it. However, the state of human consciousness today is far different in its capability and lucidity to perceive and acknowledge the relationship with our external world. Saying this, of course, in our development ‘to be modern’ we left behind the sacred component of perceiving just how entangled our reality truly is. Yet the succeeding ‘post-modern’ stage then worked on breaking down these ‘perceptions of containment.’ As William Irwin Thompson says,

The project of Modernism was to expel preindustrial magic and mysticism and stabilize consciousness in materialism, but the projects of postmodernism have broken down the walls that once contained us in a solidly materialistic and confidently middle class worldview. 5 

This breakdown has now moved into a more advanced stage with the advent of the internet and digital technologies. We have now entered what Thompson refers to as the ‘astral plane, a bardo realm, in which everything is out there at once, a technologized form of the collective unconscious…a place where the physical body is either dead or absent.’ 6

Thompson prefers to view this technologized-bardo realm, where the physical body is either dead or absent, not as post-modern but as postcivilization – or even posthistoric.7 We are in a new phase of planetary culture where we are no longer simply reacting to emerging technologies, but rather our evolving state of consciousness is drawing forth these new technologies. In other words, it is as if new technologies come into being in accordance with shifting states of human consciousness. Like a good magician, we are pulling new technological innovations out of the hat of our collective consciousness – archetypes into manifestation. Whereas modernity was about ‘coming to our senses’ in a rather conservative way, the posts we have passed now – whether they be modern, civilization, or historic – are about shifting beyond our senses. As one well-placed commentator put it,

The human being’s organism is producing a new complex of organs in response to such a need. In this age of the transcending of time and space, the complex of organs is concerned with the transcending of time and space. What ordinary people regard as sporadic and occasional bursts of telepathic or prophetic power are…nothing less than the first stirrings of these same organs.8 

As a new historical phase unfolds within the human species – as part of a shift toward a planetary civilization – it appears that new needs are pushing out – or birthing – novel organs or faculties within the human being.

This brings to mind the Richard Tarnas quote that headed up this article, where he stated that the once alienated (read ‘sacred’) mind is now breaking through, as if in a birth process, out of what Blake called its “mind-forg’d manacles,” to ‘rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.’ Note that Tarnas said ‘rediscover,’ suggesting it is a recovery, a revival, and not a new birth. The sacred revival of which I speak is literally carving out a new topography for itself.

Hybrid Landscapes

Our millennial era is still trying to decide how to define and view the physical biological body. At this stage the landscape is literally littered with a thousand voices, all howling ‘for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.’[5] Some voices see the human body as a hindrance upon the evolutionary journey toward an immortal society that is destined for the stellar neighbourhood. Others view it as a field for experimentation; to tinker and adapt toward a genetically modified hybrid. There are still others who see the body as a site to blur the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds. And then there are those voices who view the biological body as undergoing its own intrinsic in-built modification, or upgrade, through a self-adapting nervous system, programmed by emerging DNA programs hitherto latent.

In the latter part of the 20th century we had a wave of trends that all converged upon the body-mind-spirit matrix. These streams included the physical (bodily) research fields of cybernetics, computer programming, and artificial intelligence. These streams then interwove with the mind-spirit tropes of psychedelic experimentation (LSD, peyote, etc), mystical philosophies (Gurdjieff, Castaneda, etc) and transcendental movements. You would literally need a whole book dedicated to this topic alone to even begin to make a credible dent into this yellow brick road bricolage of body-mind-spirit convergences. Just to give a slight taste from the tip of the iceberg I will ever so briefly mention how the computer metaphor gave rise to notions of programming – and meta-programming – the human body as a biocomputer. This image was reinforced by Dr. John C. Lilly’s bookProgramming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer that described some of his experiments on human consciousness and human-dolphin communication. Meta-programming became a core theme of the writings of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson who produced such works as Exo-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers and Prometheus Rising respectively. Both these works discuss an eight-circuit model of consciousness that is part of a path in neurological evolution. Both authors, Leary especially, took it upon themselves to evolve a philosophy stating that the future evolution of human civilization was encoded in our DNA. Hence, the new sacred technology is our nervous system itself, and our DNA is already hard-wired for evolutionary mutation. Similarly, running through some of these streams were the ideas of Caucasian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff who spoke of the human being in terms of a ‘man-machine’ that was asleep to life and could be triggered into wakeful activation. Leary, as if in Gurdjieffian overtones, would call for humanity to ‘wake up, mutate, and ascend.’9 The new sacred magic had mutated into practices (rituals) to reprogram the apparatus that receives, according to the authors, our biofields as well as human consciousness; namely, DNA. Interestingly, recent advances in quantum biology have outlined how DNA emits biophotons that produces a coherent biological field that may be susceptible to impact and influence (read ‘reprogramming’ here).10[6]

Whether or not the new game in town was actively to epigenetically re-program the DNA through a fusion of transcendental and/or psychedelic practices, it was very much about work on oneself. Gurdjieff’s program of study – called The Fourth Way – was a kind of blend of Eastern dervish yoga with western scientism. As Gurdjieff famously proclaimed – Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West and then seek. This blend of eastern understanding and western knowledge became known amongst its adherents simply as The Work. The western melting pot of sacred angst and survivalist spirituality saw an emergence of similar tropes such as E.J. Gold’s The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus. The western playing field in the second half of the 20th century was open to the new Great Game – and it involved inner spaces and the body-mind matrix. Robert S. de Ropp aptly called it the Master Game in his book Master Game: Pathways to Higher Consciousness Beyond the Drug Experience. For a sense of what was bubbling up around this Master Game sacred revival, in the US especially, one needs to understand a history of the Esalen Institute, co-founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price on the Californian shores.[7] An excellent, if exhaustive, study of the body-mind matrix based upon the fizzy, fired-up tropes of the time is Michael Murphy’s Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. These explorations, however, were all based upon expanding and amplifying the potentials of our current human biological body-mind. That was before the computer trope really got going – and science-fiction became research grant.

The rise of the robots literally happened after the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the summer of 1956, announced the beginning of the AI field. College campuses and defence departments suddenly began the earnest journey along the stony research road that finally spawned the controversial concept of consciousness upload. One of the more vocal supporters of this ‘mind-in-machine’ notion is robotics researcher Hans Moravec. Moravec, whose books include Mind Children and Robot, outlines a future where the human mind can be uploaded as a precursor to full artificial intelligence. Similarly, cognitive scientist Marvin Minksy (who was one of the 1956 gang who coined the AI field) espoused a philosophy that saw no fundamental difference between humans and machines – as put forward in such works as his Society of Mind. Artificial Intelligence is uncannily consistent with the Christian belief in resurrection and immortality – does this make AI research into a sacred, god-like enterprise? It does make us wonder. Historian of technology David F. Noble notes also that the AI project is imbued with its own trajectory of transcendence:

The thinking machine was not, then, an embodiment of what was specifically human, but of what was specifically divine about humans – the immortal mind…the immortal mind could evolve independently into ever higher forms of artificial life, reunited at last with its origin, the mind of God.11

Other streams have been quick to spring up around this fertile theme, including several futurist movements and their manifestos. These have included, but not limited to, the Upwingers (F. M. Esfandiary), Extropians, Transhumanists; and then later came the high-profile members that announced the Technological Singularity.

F.M. Esfandiary’s ‘Upwingers Manifesto’ (by now Esfandiary was known as FM-2030) announced in the 1970s our glorious moment in human evolution. According to their manifesto:

We UpWingers are resigned to nothing. We consider no human problems irreversible – no goals unattain-able. For the first time in history we have the ability, the resources, the genius to resolve ALL our age-old problems. Attain ALL our boldest visions.[8]

Similarly, in the 1980s Max Moore and Natasha Vita-More expounded on Extropian principles which later came to be formulated as: Perpetual Progress; Self-Transformation; Practical Optimism; Intelligent Technology; Self-Direction; and Rational Thinking. And for the Moores, Intelligent Technology meant ‘Applying science and technology creatively and courageously to transcend “natural” but harmful, confining qualities derived from our biological heritage, culture, and environment.’ [9] The Transhumanist movement is still going strong and is not definable to any one particular group, although Humanity Plus (H+) is one of its most recognized institutions. There are streams and sub-groups under the transhumanist umbrella, and yet they all share a similar goal in viewing the human condition as being open to transformation through the use of sophisticated technologies. In other words, the goal is to give humanity a technological upgrade to its current bodily and mental capacities.

From Gurdjieff’s ‘man-machine,’ to Moravec and Minsky, to Max and Natasha Vita-More and Ray Kurzweil, the list goes on. And recently we have had the call for a new speciation along the homo sapiens evolutionary line – into Homo evolutis. In their TED talk and subsequent book Homo Evolutis Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans present how we have already gone through twenty-five speciation events before arriving at our current species. Enriquez and Gullans consider it an anomaly to think that no other humanoid will ever evolve; and so they ask the question – ‘what would the next human species look like?’ They say that ‘We are transitioning from a hominid that is conscious of its environment into one that drastically shapes its own evolution…We are entering a period of hypernatural evolution…Homo evolutis.’12 This brings us back again to Latour’s concept of the anthropological matrix where nature and culture is mixed together without clear boundaries. With the NBIC sciences of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science we are meshing our genetic and cultural DNA. We are 3-D printing buildings as well as human body parts. We are now as a species consciously and deliberately experimenting, shaping, and morphing our environments, as well as journeying and mapping our inner spaces. We are the inhabitants and psychonauts of hybrid landscapes. And yet why should all this be part of an observation on the sacred revival? Because this transmutation of the human condition is what we, as a sentient sapien species, have always been doing.

Our early ancestors were obsessed with the transmutation of the human body-mind as far back as 35,000 years ago. The existence of rock paintings of therianthropes (shape-shifting forms from human to animal) that date back 35,000 years are speculated to be the early origins of human religious traditions. The symbolic paintings and drawings on cave walls and traces of ancient rituals which appear throughout the Palaeolithic era display a ‘primitive’ people in touch with the unseen realm. They display a fascination with a creative world beyond that of the human reality-matrix. These numerous examples of sacred, ritualistic art show how early humans were communing with a transcendental realm which modern humans have never stopped attempting to access. Noted anthropologist David Lewis-Williams has built a theory which explains how the people of the Upper Palaeolithic era harnessed altered states of consciousness to fashion their society, and used such imagery as a means of establishing and defining social relationships.13 The rock art of shape-shifting therianthropes also suggests a ‘primitive’ spiritual belief in the human soul as being connected to that of an animal or another being. Here we have a clear indication of our early ancestors creating sacred ritual around the transmutation and transcending of the human body-mind matrix. And this, in a nutshell, is part of the wisdom stream of shamanism.

It appears then that the human body-mind matrix has always, since earliest known cultural records, been a site for practicing sacred transcendentalism not far off from current transhumanist notions. As a species ‘in-transmutation’ we are increasingly having out-of-body experiences that meld cosmic consciousness with cultural artefacts. From the published out-of-body flights of Robert Monroe[10] to the rise in channelled texts and audio, we have passed beyond our senses into a totally different multifaceted realm. We are not wanderers in an anthropological matrix but waves and particles in a holographic field where each flash and speck contains and reflects the whole. Enmeshed and entangled within this field-matrix we are akin to the famous Buddhist Indra’s Net analogy:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.14

We are also reflections of ourselves in other universes as our reality-matrix bends and curves throughout countless cosmic contortions. According to physicist Paul Davis we co-exist alongside countless billions of other universes ‘some almost identical to ours, others wildly different, inhabited by myriads or near carbon-copies of ourselves in a gigantic, multifoliate reality of parallel worlds.’15 We no longer know what it means to live in a dualistic subject/object type of world. Our dualistic prison walls have disintegrated around us like a simulacrum or, in more popular parlance, like a rebooting video game.

We have already passed the post into a posthistoric era. Almost everything is up for grabs, which makes this era one of spectacular possibilities as well as gravest dangers. It would appear to any off-world observer that we are in the midst of a western slipstream of creative nihilism that is creeping its way around the fringes of tech-geekism and apocryphal-apocalyptic mysticism that says Take Nothing for Granted! As the ancient mapmakers used to scribe over unknown watery territories, Here be dragons – and here indeed they be, like lounging lizards waiting to lick at our heels. These are adventurous times as we innovate with outer form, and forge ahead into the inner spaces of essence. These are the features that adorn the sacred – the multifaceted faces of the body-mind-nature matrix that weaves the cosmic with the social, and which collapses the wave of duality. Lifepass the post is where we experiment with ourselves, as a species, and as a vessel of consciousness. And this, if done in a right relationship within our reality-matrix, is at its core a sacred art. Our cultural canvas is a palimpsest upon which new fictions and artefacts are engraved. And these fictions are the channels through which the sacred revival is raising its head and smiling the seven rays of emanation.

1 Cited in Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press, p187

2 Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press

3 Berman, Morris (1990) Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York, HarperCollins.

4 Berman, Morris (1990) Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West. New York, HarperCollins, p146

5 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p307

6 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p307

7 Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin.

8 Shah, I. (1982) The Sufis. London: Octagon, p54

9 Leary, Timothy (1988) Info-Psychology. New Mexico, New Falcon Publications.

10 Ho, Mae-Wan (1998) The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms. Singapore, World Scientific.

11 Noble, David F. (1999) The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. London, Penguin, p148-9

12 Enriquez, Juan and Gullans, Steve (2011) Homo Evolutis. TED Books – ebook only.

13 Lewis-Williams, David (2004) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London, Thames & Hudson.

14Cited in Davis, Erik (1998) Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. New York, Three Rivers Press, p319

15 Cited in Thompson, William Irwin (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, p217        

[1] See Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World by Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis

[2] See especially Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.

[3] Baraka, a prominent concept in Islamic mysticism, refers to a flow of grace and spiritual power that can be transmitted.

[4] See The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness

[5] Taken from part 1 of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl

[6] See also Dennis, Kingsley L. (2010) ‘Quantum Consciousness: Reconciling Science and Spirituality Toward Our Evolutionary Future(s)’, World Futures, 66: 7, 511 — 524

[7] See Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal

[8] http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/upwingers/

[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20131015142449/http://extropy.org/principles.htm

Escapism as Spiritual Journey

Posted on by
1

mobile-marketing-coming-to-virtual-reality

By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

People are racing to leave this world.

Seriously.

There are virtual reality worlds you can immerse yourself in, there are fantasy role-playing worlds too. One, you can put on a headset or stare at a screen to enjoy and the other you play on boards with pieces with your friends. Both, you can lose yourself in for hours out of the day.
Or, you can go the spiritual route.

Become a New Ager, a Wiccan, a Pagan or Luciferian and learn how to astral travel or experience OOBEs. You can visit the Fae or the Reptilian and Mantis peoples; you can communicate with Galactic Councils, you may even be a member of one! You can experience your past lives and leave this one behind, living in the energy streams and the cocoon of coalescing consciousness they call the Alternative Community.

Some People are doing what they can to leave this world behind. Or should I say, some aspects of it. To voluntarily give up your grounding in Gaia is a serious thing.

People say they’re alien, ain’t from here, feel alienated from other types of humans, feel closer to machines and dream of transhumanistic transformations to our world, where the virtual will become the real world and biomechanical implants are the norm rather than the exception.

All I’m saying, is be careful what you wish for. For real.

Allow your imagination to soar free for a while and envision the consequences of your leaving this world, and the people that you don’t like, behind. What checking out of the necessity of saving the world in favor of dreaming fantasies about a future world will mean.

The manifestation of whatever the active (yin) and passive (yang) states co-create will reflect these simultaneous forms of grounding and soaring, vibratory rates of simpatico energetically supporting and releasing souls into their destinies sans plan. Or, seemingly so, at least.

It all looks crazy from this vantage point. If you gotta go join your star family, peace and well being to you. Best of luck. But if you feel your destiny is here on earth, with us mere earthlings of all persuasions and potentialities, we welcome you to join the fight. The Light against the Dark. My name is Mark. Welcome.

Ah…if only it were so simple. But shades of grey reign, as the world seems to be headed down the track in the face of an oncoming freight train, carrying Nazis and Fascists, Epidemics and comet strikes, nuclear waste and dead ocean life.

Maybe the escapists have it right.

Well, whatever the case may be, the world is splitting in twain. Two groups, one seeking the spiritual flow, the other immersed in the world we know.

Which side do you come down on? Dreaming of bringing heaven to earth and making man into gods or getting ready for the Ascension and the New Rebirth? Is Jesus coming to get you? The Maitreya singing siren songs? Or does Deus ex Machina call, luring you down into computerized depths, never to return to the meat haven of Gaia’s bowels?

Whatever folks choose, is what they will experience. Guarantee it. So better choose right. Might not have another chance, past tonight.

Being Our Experience

Posted on by
1

Seer

By Iam Saums with contributions from Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

“Until we choose our own experience of life, we will never truly live.”

Common Thread:

There are over six billion unique interpretations of life in the three-dimensional construct we experience as reality.  Although human beings have the popular inclination to gravitate toward a common one to which we are bound, our true vision and nature is remarkably multiplicit.  We inevitably subject ourselves to inner and peripheral conditioning to toe the line of reality.  We become social echoes for an engineered existence that is distorted, elusive, obscure and unconscious.  Our desire for social amusement, comfort, identity, purpose and security significantly outweighs our quest to fulfill our being, creativity, destiny, love and truth.

Foundation of Illusion:

We are programmed to believe that our intelligence is the sole benefactor of our survival.  Our insatiable fascination with ourselves and our place in the world distracts us from all that is sacred.  Eventually, we exchange our passion to live with an addiction to buy.  Our genuine experiences that empower and enrich us are superseded by virtual events recorded on a sales receipt.  The measure of our fulfillment is in the quantity of our entertainment instead of the quality of our experience.  Society turns on a worthless dime, promising a wealth of abundance, happiness and meaning, though rarely ever delivers.

Wired for Reason:

We are multi-dimensional beings with eternal possibilities and infinite potential.  Our indoctrination into the complex principles and structures of the standard reality conditions, hypnotizes and manipulates us into the human imprisonment of instinct, reaction and survival.  We are akin to a clipper ship with unfastened sails, bouncing upon the social seas of happenstance.  Our body and brain is our hardware and our software is a two-dimensional program of instinct and intellect.  We are dependent upon and obliviously tethered to knowledge and logic, conditioned to be simulations in a paradigm of thought, threat and fear.

Playing the Angles:

All of us are brainwashed and spellbound by the multi-faceted filters of our own perceptions.  We are frequently presented with opportunities to choose how we behold our experience of life.  Most of us view the world through an elaborate tapestry of our analysis, fears, judgements, and wants.  Rarely do we observe the world as it truly is.  We see it the way we would like it to be.  We live from these personal fantasies and push the agendas of our positions in the pursuit of making the common reality ever more comfortable, compliant or convenient to our own desires.  We engage with an illusion of what is instead of its authenticity.

The World We Enable:

Our personal power is in our creativity, compassion, consciousness, love and transformation.  Yet, we express it most often with our drama, judgement, opinion and outrage.  It isn’t that we are purely oblivious to our truth and purpose.  We are products of the societal ethics to which we eagerly acquiesce.  It seems easier to abandon our own unique experience, existence and perception as an inauthentic and noble sacrifice instead of claiming and living the life only we were meant.  We are so powerful as human beings.  Yet, we commit to killing our lives everyday with our denial, disinterest, doubt and obedience to the enslavement of reality.

“Lay down your right.  Lay down your wrong.  Lay down the lie.  To which you belong.”

The Human God:

The human invention of God we accept and are expected to believe is primarily one of judgement, vengeance and wrath.  It is the fear beyond the myth that captivates our allegiance.  The intoxication of this false power seduces us into emulation and imitation.  Though we often fail to see the most glaring truth of this “divine” influence.  The raw power of our unattended ego imposes an experience and perception of cynicism, resignation and ridicule for anything that is not of our own clever design.  We adopt a defense of disapproval, drama, opinion and rumor rather than be present to the possibilities of acceptance, compassion and understanding.

Vital Signs:

The medical field identifies the vitality of our existence by taking our pulse, analyzing our response to stimuli, observing our breath in different areas of our body and listening to our heart.  When we meet these basic criteria, we are given a label of health and an acknowledgment of life.  Yet, the true measurement of living is found in our potential, expression and willingness to make a difference.  The true meaning of life is to serve others as much or more than ourselves for the sake of service.  When we choose to exercise this opportunity, we instantly transform our experience into one of community, purpose and possibility.

In Purpose:

Most of us live our lives in the absence of purpose.  We have a tendency to throw havoc to the wind and see what returns to us.  More often than not very little does, at least to our desire.  Unfortunately, purpose isn’t primarily exercised let alone existent in our society.  The very nature of reality does not support or sustain the extraordinary.  Our personal focus depends solely upon the what, how and why of our experience.  These are the crucial elements of our potential to empower our lives.  When we bring purpose to every facet of our experience, we express creativity, consciousness, enlightenment and transformation.

The Truth of False Power:

Each one of us has our own unique experience of life defined by our choices, the focus of our energy, the perception(s) we embrace and the destiny we fulfill.  There is no one else in this world that could or should degrade, discredit, judge or question the authenticity, intent, meaning, and worth of our experiences.  All who do simply endeavor to conceal or protect their own fears, inadequacies, insecurities and weaknesses.  We have been raised in a social environment of defense that is of great peril to the coincidental targets of our expression.  The force of the false power we project upon others ultimately diminishes the truth of our own.

Being Our Experience:

There is nothing more significant in our life than who we are being.  In a reality where being-ness has been swept under the proverbial rug of contemporary society, it is truly the only saving grace for the present and future of all.  Who we are being creates, expresses and sustains the quality of our commitment.  Our vision, empowerment, purpose and stand inspires how we truly live our lives.  Of us it requires our creativity, confidence, courage and trust to manifest our greatest experience.  Only through us will the power of our experience transcend the boundaries of reality and society and transform the world.

“The greatest experiences we will ever have are the ones we choose to create.”

Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider”

Posted on by
Reply

51el43rwbvl-_sy344_bo1204203200_

(Editor’s note: We’re sharing this article today to commemorate the third anniversary of Colin Wilson’s passing.)

By Gary Lachman

Source: Reality Sandwich

This is an excerpt from my new book, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. Wilson rose to global fame sixty years ago, when his first book, The Outsider, became a bestseller overnight and sparked the nascent counter culture into a sudden blaze. It thrust the twenty-four year old Wilson into celebrity, and inaugurated the brief craze for the Angry Young Men, a kind of British buttoned-down version of the Beat Generation. Wilson had little in common with his other Angries, who were focused mainly on social issues. Wilson’s concern was the lack of spiritual tension in the modern world, and he quickly became known as Britain’s “homegrown existentialist,” rivaling Sartre, Camus and others on the existential scene with his analysis of the modern predicament. Wilson’s path to success was bumpy. In the years before The Outsider he had worked at dozens of menial jobs, always moving on when he got bored. He survived a suicide attempt, hitchhiked across England and France, hob nobbed with bohemians in London and Paris, and slept rough on Hampstead Heath while writing by day in the British Museum. He died in 2013 at the age of 82.

Wilson’s success was short-lived, and soon after celebrating him the press and the critics, ever fickle, brought him down, the boy genius now persona non grata. Wilson went on to write an enormous number of books, over a remarkable range of subjects, from criminality and sex to the paranormal and mystical experience, as well as many novels, such as Ritual in the Dark, about a modern-day Jack the Ripper, and The Mind Parasites, a phenomenological science fiction thriller about alien psychic vampires in the mind…

This section introduces Wilson’s character of the Outsider, a person who has a hunger for meaning and purpose that the modern world cannot provide, and who must discover the “secret life” within him or face death, madness, or quiet despair.

In The Outsider Wilson made his first attempt at analysing a character he felt was peculiar to our age, a person with a pressing hunger for meaning and spiritual purpose in a world seemingly bent on denying him these. In the past, during the Middle Ages, such an individual could have found a home in the church, which was then the heart of life, and which provided a place, monasteries, where he could work toward his salvation – work, that is, to awaken the spiritual life within him, to grasping his purpose with an unwavering seriousness. That purpose was to become something greater than himself, to work against the laziness and complacency that keeps him second-rate and allows him to be satisfied with being “only human.”

But today, in our modern society, geared toward comfort and security and motivated by purely material aims, there is no place for such a person, and his spiritual seriousness is a liability. His or her desire to be something more than a happy, well-fed animal, puts him at odds with the world around him. This type is driven by needs that the people he knows do not understand. For him the world that they complacently accept is false. He sees “too deep and too much” and his awareness of the illusions that satisfy others brings him to despair. He is not at home in the world, his permanent sense of self-dissatisfaction does not allow him to be. This dissatisfaction cannot be met by any changes to the social or economic system, as Marxists like the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, one of the Angry Young men, believed. “The question of freedom,” Wilson writes, “is not a social problem.” Only by the long, difficult, personal struggle to self-realization can the Outsider realize his goal. That realization, or actualization, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow, one of Wilson’s earliest readers, called it, requires an “intensity of will” and is fostered by anything that arouses one’s “will to more life.”

This path is difficult. The Outsider at first feels himself a kind of misfit, a “lone nutter,” and his dissonance from the Insiders, those content with the world of the second-rate, leads to neurosis. There must be something wrong with him, he believes, and he may try to “fit in.” Usually he fails, and winds up occupying an uncomfortable middle realm. He cannot accept the world and its triviality, but he is not strong enough to escape from it completely or to impose his own seriousness upon it. This may lead to nothing more than a life of quiet desperation, or the Outsider may smoulder with resentment at the insects around him, and lash out indiscriminately – as Wilson’s explorations of the “criminal” Outsider will show, this can have deadly results. But if he is lucky, there are moments of vision, when a sense of power and meaning comes to him and he sees that he is not a misfit, and that the hunger and dissatisfaction that drives him, and which drove the mystics and saints of the past, are more real than the newspapers, television, and mediocrity he abhors.

It is a vision of “a higher form of reality than he has so far known,” a glimpse of what Wilson calls “the secret life,” that sense of total affirmation that he had experienced more than once by now. But then the vision fades. The Outsider is back on earth and is left wondering what the vision was about and why he must return to the dreary treadmill. The Outsider examines the possibility of restoring the vision, of so strengthening one’s grasp on one’s sense of purpose that it is not weakened or confused by the banality of “life.”

Wilson’s notebooks were full of observations of such figures, of Outsiders who were not able to survive their clashes with the world and who succumbed to illness, suicide or madness, who were not quite strong enough to impose their vision on their contemporaries. What went wrong? Why did giants like Nietzsche, Nijinsky, Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, and others fail? To say they failed is not, of course, to diminish their greatness. But Nietzsche and Nijinsky went insane, Van Gogh shot himself, and Lawrence went into a kind of spiritual suicide, burying himself as a private in the RAF at the height of his fame. Why did so many poets and writers of the nineteenth century end in a kind of self-destruction? Shelley, Keats, Poe, Hölderlin, Schubert, Hoffman, Schiller, Kleist, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautreamont – this list of nineteenth century geniuses who either died young, went mad, killed themselves or succumbed to alcohol or drug addiction could go on.

Why did it happen? Could it have been prevented? All were infused with the Romantic vision that burst upon western consciousness in the late eighteenth century, the insight that informed the music of Beethoven and the poetry of Blake. This was the sense, lost in the modern age, that human beings are really gods, or at least are meant to be, if only they could overcome their laziness and timidity. The Outsider is an exploration of the psychological and spiritual stresses that these and other men of genius faced in the search for their true selves. “The Outsider,” Wilson tells us, “ is not sure who he is. He has found an ‘I’, but it is not his true ‘I’. His main business is to find his way back to himself.”