Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 1

On the World-Disclosing Rifts of Cinema: J. F. Martel and Christopher Yates in Dialogue

April 29, 2018 By jfmartel

Infinite Conversations:

On the World-Disclosing Rifts of Cinema: J. F. Martel and Christopher Yates in Dialogue

| April 29, 2018

Feature Image: Sunlight Through A Broken Leaf — Still from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998), DP: John Toll

Editor’s Note: This dialogue came about through a correspondence between philosopher-filmmaker J. F. Martel and Christopher Yates of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, jumping off from Chris’ essay, “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic ‘Worlds’.” The dialogue also refers to J. F.’s book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. However, you do not have to have to be familiar with those texts to enjoy the present exchange of views. Rather, we hope this becomes its own branching-off point for further reading, conversation, and aesthetic experience—which might also lead you to (re-)visit the prior works, if you so desire. You are invited and welcome to share their your thoughts in the forum topic below.

J. F. Martel

Your essay posits an aesthetics of cinema rooted in on Heidegger’s idea of “world disclosure.” As a work of art, a film presents a world that the viewer enters into by experiencing it. But through your argument, we get the sense that the worlds which films open up are more than mere fictions: they contain truth, and the truths they contain are truths of the world, of our shared horizon. Can you begin by telling me a little bit more about the concept of “world” as you understand it? What is a world? What is the difference between a fictional world and an actual world? And what part does the aesthetic play in world disclosure?

Christopher Yates

I think I first began to get absorbed into this issue of ‘world’ or ‘worldhood’ when I saw Wim Wenders’ 1991 film, Till the End of the World. On its surface the film is a kind of sci-fi suspense drama that crisscrosses the globe under the pending doom of nuclear proliferation, social-political strain, and all the unsteadiness of what would be 1999’s Y2K turmoil. Wenders plants a trio of characters thrown together through intersecting and agitated ties to money, science, theft, and then this fast-paced engagement with a kind of trans-humanist technological mechanism. Seemingly futuristic and hyperbolic, it struck me that the real story of the film is about who and how we are as people, as social and material creatures who live through unfolding ideas and commitments, and as beings catapulted through the web-like nets of the urban and rural, techy and earthy, trustworthy and deceptive. The film reveals these phenomena to us—these habits of living and thinking that were almost so obvious that we were failing to take notice, maybe even unable to grasp were it not for the intervention of art. Wenders showed us an example, I believe, of what you call “the weirdness of the Real” (15) behind the otherwise soothing trappings of our “hyper-aesthetic age, a time of phantom images and blinking lights, manufactured memories, and synthetic dreams” (134). To stay with your language, the film amounted to a revelatory ‘act of resistance’ that broke through the ‘cloud of artifice’, gave us a moment of ‘astonishment’, and maybe even re-instilled some ‘wonderment at being itself’ (126, 134, 16). These are the characteristics of what I am calling, after Heidegger, ‘world disclosure.’ Let me try to unpack what I mean.

I suppose I’ve already suggested something about how the ‘fictional’ character of film doesn’t mean it is reducible to a land of ‘make-believe.’ Films are storied, naturally, but so is life. So when we see a film like Wenders’ (or ones by Terrence Malick, whom I discuss in my article) we are bracketing one realm of narrative for a more distilled one. It’s not about moving from the ‘true’ to the ‘false’, or about exchanging ‘real life’ for ‘entertainment’—even if we sometimes approach movies that way. It’s about stepping outside of a default web of life experiences and beliefs in order to enter a distinct cinema-logical event of concentration that wants to reveal, or at least look for, the real story of what’s afoot beneath the normal staging of our lives. It’s not that films necessarily do this consciously in the terms I’m putting it, or that we necessarily ‘intend’ the revealing when we watch one. But it happens, at least sometimes. Artists train our attention, and this event can be a rattling and moving thing all at once. But still, so what? Isn’t a film more like a dreamy escape from reality? I think that what we call day-to-day ‘real life’ is itself already an abstraction—not a falsehood per se, but a situation in which we are living ‘through’ and ‘according to’ a whole host of plots, structures, patterns, and ideologies that we absorb and sometimes determine as our existential logic. It can be hard to admit this. But just consider how you feel when you are stuck in traffic or placed at the mercy of some technological glitch: Why am I compelled to live on these terms?

Still from Wim Wenders’ Till the End of the World

Once we relax our assumptions about the rigid divisions between true and false, fact and fiction, lived-logic and cinema-logic, then we start to get into the issue of Worldhood. Heidegger describes our lives as a phenomenon of being-in-the-world. No kidding, right? But his point registers a couple key shifts in common ideas about the self. First, he’s saying none of us are fixed, fully defined, or utterly individual entities. We don’t exist in the manner of a fact, or have a classified nature or identity like some element on the Periodic Table we all met in high school chemistry. Second, his hyphens point out the existentially contextualized nature of the self—the how of the self rather than the what of the self. We ‘are’ beings, yes, but the way we have and hold our being is more like a canoe navigating a river than an anchor planting us in place. He’s not relativizing our selfhood into some trippy carnival of unmoored existence (I’m mixing metaphors), and neither is he saying we are utterly determined by our contexts and constructs. He’s saying that the kind of being that a human being has is an unfolding and relational event. What is relational about it? First we relate to life in a distinct and underlying mode: we live out questions of ‘meaning’, even subconsciously. We carry out our ‘being’ as insatiable seekers and questioners. Second, we are always already relating to what I’ve called the web of relationships, patterns, and ideas that are simmering (and themselves searching) around us. The first quality is what animates our being-in; the second quality is what animates the-world.

Words like ‘culture’ and ‘society’ get close to this notion of Worldhood when they refer to the web-like nature surrounding our project-oriented lives. But we shouldn’t think in objectifying or categorizing terms here. Worldhood can include everything from architecture and urban ecology to social/political/religious institutions; from the signifying function of small gestures to the communicative function of social media; from chalkboards to PowerPoint; from barista-tipping to international trade agreements. If the self is like an actor in a theater, then the World includes everything from the stage to the lights, acoustics, makeup, wardrobe, seating, director, audience tastes, theater districts, critical reviews, Tony Awards, and so on. To be clear, world is not just an aggregation of social stuff. If you and I are unfolding, meaning-seeking beings, then world is at once the terms on which this happens and also the pulsing products of these very terms and their histories. It’s an ongoing spiral. Heidegger would say that we can never get a totally objective view on Worldhood—we’re inside it after all. Just as we are tossed into Language and thus enabled to speak and think and write on its terms (for better or worse), so too we are tossed into World and enabled to live out our ‘being’ (for better or worse) on its dynamic terms.

Let me give a personal example. A few years ago I traveled to Montreal for the first time from my (then) home in Washington, DC. As soon as I got moving into the city I felt hit with a welcome wave of all these touchstones and reference-points that the locals were living by—everything from the bicycles to the buildings and parks, the sounds of French, the smells of cafes and used bookstores. (I went in summer, but not with a tourist agenda). Don’t hear this as romanticizing. I just walked and walked and marveled at the way this Montreal ‘world’ was happening—was coursing around me. I was on my own and away from my normal world-navigation, and I felt this. At the same time I wasn’t ‘in’ the Montreal world either, and I felt that too. I was still me, but I didn’t have any real rooted traction for carrying out my own self. I didn’t grasp the Montreal or DC worlds ‘as a whole’, but felt sort of ‘middled’ between them. I wasn’t in a position to literally ‘make’ sense on the terms of either place. It was a little lonesome, but also something to savor—because it recalled me to a place in which one undergoes life as possibility rather than pattern. I think the experience is a bit like what you describe as being ‘caught unawares’ by ‘the strange and uncanny in life’ (16-17). For me it was a felt and thought recognition of this matter of ‘world-disclosure.’

Of course, we don’t have to travel in order to grasp these phenomena. Let me come back to Heidegger and the larger issue concerning how the World we are ‘in’ has a storied character of its own—one with many plots and wagers of catharsis. This is neither good nor bad in its own right. But it can, according to Heidegger, become a real problem. It becomes a problem when we just live in a default way according to these terms—specifically, when we let our own meaning-seeking side of being-in unfold according to certain grammars of the-world that are actually diverting, coercing, overconfident in themselves, deceptive, seductively persuasive, etc. It is easy, but not wrong, to cite our consumer- and technology-saturated society as a case in point. It’s not that these vertebrae of our lives, so to speak, are utterly bad, but that our default aspirational involvement in them is usually so unreflective that our existential posture gets all out of whack. These are cases of what Heidegger calls ‘Theyness’ (Das Man) that tend to derail us into inauthentic modes of ‘being.’ Nietzsche called it the ‘Herd’ mentality. Kierkegaard called it ‘idle talk’, among other things. In short: we conduct our lives and beliefs on terms that are set for us by a social momentum that promises us—literally—the world, but can actually conceal us from ourselves. The situation is similar to what Plato said about how we live in the cave amid ‘shadows’ of bad ideas and need the ‘light’ of wisdom. But the situation today is actually worse: we live in the cave and we venerate the shadows, convincing ourselves they are either the light itself or something even better.

Still from from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

One irony in all this is that our filmmaking and film-going situations—broadly put—are also shot-through with a Theyness manner of Worldhood. We all admit this when we joke and fuss about ‘Hollywood.’ Maybe some people feel that even a Wenders or a Malick is not immune to this. But what fascinates me is how they reveal to us the ‘world’ of our being-in, gift us a rare chance to concentrate on it and think about it, and spur us toward a lived search for meaning that treads cautiously with Theyness.

Here I’d like to turn back to your own work, JF, and ask you to elaborate on a couple points that I suspect are like-minded with these Worldhood issues—but maybe have a finer edge to them. First, in your ‘Postmortem’ chapter you extend your work on the way art signifies meaning afresh, recalls us to radical mystery, interrupts familiarity via strangeness, and even (in the case of Moby Dick) deploys a kind of madness against the reign of artifice. Here one specific application you flag is this: “Art implies the total dissolution of the person as a discrete unit that could be removed intact from its environment” (133). Would you say that this unique power of art fits with the features of what I call world-disclosure and the way human ‘being’ operates in this being-in kind of way? If so, I’d like to hear you elaborate on the scope and quality of this ‘madness’ you find art capable of manifesting. I spoke of film’s unique mode of ‘concentration’—would you say that this feels like a form of ‘madness’ at times, and is there a way in which we as viewers are somehow supposed to let it happen ‘to’ us? My second question is related. I’m interested in this notion of the ‘Rift’ that you take up in the middle of the book. You say it is a kind of break or interruption that takes place within a work of art, one that messes with our default modes of meaning—it “breaks the consensus trance and opens the work onto the chaosmos of the Real” (84). I suppose I’ve touched on this in terms of the exchange between a viewer and a film (or me and Montreal), but you are going much further into a phenomenon that happens ‘within’ a work of art itself. How do we know we are experiencing a Rift, and is the artist knowingly curating the situation to trigger this effect? Is the Rift a specific instantiation of the Madness effect mentioned above?

J. F. Martel

Your description of world-disclosure resonates with what I’m trying to say in Reclaiming Art. I love what you say about films opening up a space for reflection—that is, a space where we can make out our own “thrownness,” our own being-in-the-world. This is something that comes across very strongly in your essay.

If I understand you correctly, to live unreflectively is to engage blindly with the world around us as though it were the only possible world, as though it were the real itself. There is something in cinema that confronts us with our own relationality, conveying to us how everything that makes us what we are involves a relation with an outside, a world. Thinking about cinema, I often get the sense that the term “world” becomes more meaningful if understood as a mass noun like “milk” or “water” and opposed to the vague materialist notion of “matter.” What cinema conveys to us is that we are not primarily made of matter; we are made of world. World is the substance of our reality. Beyond this, there is little I could add to your brilliant analysis of this concept.

Another part of your response that really speaks to me is your breakdown of Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world into two facets. First, there is a being that experiences itself as distinct (the fact of its experiencing itself that way should be all the proof we need that it is there). Then, there is the fact that the manner of this distinction, of this uniqueness, is completely relational. You use the example of a canoe on a river and it certainly works. But if we stretch the metaphor even more, we could radicalize Heidegger’s claim. Because it seems to me that every aspect of a canoe—its shape, its raison d’etre, its materials, all of the four causes—is determined by the environment of the river. The canoe has the shape it has by virtue of what the river (and the canoers of course) require of it. Similarly, the river is also a relational being, its shape and course being determined by its environment, by geological history, etc. The distinctive part of the canoe—its innermost being—does not inhere in fixed properties but in the mode of this or that particular canoe. It is not an element or particle so much as a way, a movement or course. So in a deeper sense—and let me know if you disagree—the bipartite nature of being-in-the-world is a provisional notion. Even the distinctive, pure being of a person is itself determined through a set of relational elements, points of contact, points of relation with the world. The singularity of a being inheres in its manner of unfolding and deploying itself. The soul is a style, so to speak. At least, that’s the basis behind my claim in Reclaiming Art that if you were to extract the character from its setting, there would be nothing left, not even the distinctive part, the is part.

To answer your first question, it seems to me that no word better describes the experience of realizing one’s constitutive relationality than “madness.” There are other terms I could have chosen to describe the “art effect,” of course, “ecstasy” being the most obvious one perhaps. But that term has associations with bliss and pleasure that I don’t think necessarily apply to every case of aesthetic engagement. Madness is a more expansive term, but suitably dramatic for describing an experience that upends the common reality we are normally convinced is the be-all and end-all of the possible. To go mad like Ahab is to wake up to the dream of life, to see that everything we are made of is always-already caught up in forces that exceed us, forces that we can’t even qualify as human (the white whale). The madness that great films and other artworks bring about inheres in the realization that we are puppets, but puppets that are alive and can acquire true freedom in that flash where our inexorable being-in-the-world becomes clear. Maybe this form of madness marks the spot where the reality in the illusion is revealed, and fate gives way to destiny.

On the set of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

The idea of the rift comes out of all this. That moment of madness when you suddenly wake up to the dream occurs as a sudden event, a tear in the fabric of the common world that is in truth only a partial apprehension of the real. It’s this event that I call the rift. Your description of that day in Montreal is a beautiful example. There is a sudden interruption of the sensorimotor sequence of cause and effect, and one suddenly finds oneself seeing it all from an oblique perspective, like the viewpoint of the unnumbered Fool in the tarot.

When I say that rifts also exist in the work of art itself, what I mean is that a great work of art will not totally conform to a given audience’s expectation of how the world ought to function. In order for the work to hold up, the visionary artist will inevitably have to break some of the laws of his time (laws of scale and perspective, of psychology and behavior, of physics, etc.). One must transgress the assumed finality of the unreflective world, one has to cheat “reality” in the name of something more, well, real—the Real, or the truth, or whatever. Think of the sculptor who, in order to express her vision, must give her statue a pose that would be impossible for a model to pull off. This instance of cheating leaves a rift in the work, a crack in its shell that gives the percipient an entrypoint into the deeper forces that go into shaping moments of experience.

The continuity error in cinema is probably one of the most potent examples of this. Sometimes, a continuity error violates a purely mechanistic naturalism in the name of connecting to a more expansive reality. There are many examples of such “errors” in the history of cinema, but the one that comes to mind is the layout of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. The hallways and doors don’t match up. If you were to draw a floor plan of the Overlook based on what is shown in the film, it wouldn’t make sense—it would be a topsy-turvy place like something from Alice in Wonderland. But this hardly lessens the film; on the contrary, it draw us deeper into a labyrinthine quality echoed in other aspects of it: characterization, dialogue, plot, etc. It gives the film the non-Euclidean architecture its themes call for, turning it into a space where the borderline separating what we normally call the mind from what we normally call the physical world becomes porous, if it even exists at all. It doesn’t matter whether Kubrick intended these “errors” or whether they just occurred as a byproduct of the production process. Either way, the errors broaden and deepen the power of the symbol that is the Overlook Hotel. Realism is jettisoned in the name of reality.

Great works of art contain rifts of this and other kinds because they are putting us in touch with an objective reality that transcends any particular historical episteme—and that’s what I would argue makes them great. It isn’t so much that a good movie will bring you to an other world that lies beyond this one, but rather that it simply reminds you of the “worldness of the world”—of what Heidegger called facticity. Like all art, cinema confronts us with the eternal nexus of forces that makes up all particular historical worlds. It’s in this sense that, in my book, I claim that art is objective. The aesthetic conveys to us the eternal truth of facticity.

Maybe that’s going too far, or maybe it’s not going far enough. I’d be very interested to know if there is any divergence here between our ways of thinking on these points. In particular, I would love to know what insights your studies and reflections have given you into the nature of the symbol, a concept that undergirds much of what I just wrote. It’s a concept that I continue to struggle with, even as it keeps yielding new paths and territories. What are your thoughts on the aesthetic symbol and its importance in imagining the nature of art and cinema?

Christopher Yates

These are great thoughts and I’ll respond by peeling back a few more layers of the following themes: the world of artistic knowing, the astonished imagination, and the character of symbol. The issues definitely overlap and maybe we can say that your idea of the Rift is a linking thread.

First, what you’ve added to this idea of World brings in a depth of ‘setting’ and the kind of meaning that happens around us in the web of relationships that shape and carry our own path through life, and where past, present, and future are all animated in each moment. If that’s the case then Art is a kind of provocation back to the fullness of experiencing this—almost like a thing we ‘do’ in order to expose us afresh to a ‘doing’ that is greater than our so-called ‘autonomy’, an event that retrieves these pulsations of a ‘real’ that is more intrinsic to life than the machinations we are so often inclined to take as real. I don’t mean that Art reveals to us something ‘transcendent’ in the sense of being above or beyond the ‘immanent’ (though that may be), but something that transcends our default modes of relating to life and things through so many superficial mediating structures. I also mean ‘transcendental’ in the sense of going down into the underlying structures that creatively constitute and keep launching the better possibilities of our relational ‘becoming.’ You speak in Reclaiming Art of art as “innately emancipatory, being itself the affirmation or sign of freedom” and of how it involves us in “a sense of radical mystery” (130). I’m with you. The work of art “is perpetually new” and engages our Imagination “at the limits of reason and judgment” (130). The point is not that art authors our progress toward the ‘next’ new ‘thing’, but that it reawakens our sense of the infinite in the finite, an infinite that is always flowing—sort of spiriting us back into the deeper artistry that carries us.

Let me try to add to this by linking two figures in a bit of an anachronistic way. First, there is Mark Twain and very interesting point he provokes in his “Old Times on the Mississippi” from 1875. He talks about learning to pilot a vessel on the river as a young man, and the overwhelming task of having to learn “the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways . . . If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop-shouldered.” He’s showing us how that way of putting it assumes one mode of ‘knowing’ how to perform a relation to the river. He calls it a kind of ‘science’, to be sure, but one that ends up requiring a science of a different sort. You learn the shape of the river, he says, “and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, and never mind the one that’s before your eyes.” Notice how he humbles logical certainty and turns us toward a more tacit knowledge, a felt relationship to the river, one that ‘knows’ it by being involved in it. He continues: “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with one voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” We can call this an experience of World, or ‘worldhood’ as Heidegger might say.

Chop wood and carry water, Herr Professor

Chop wood & carry water, Herr Professor—Ed.

Another angle on this issue comes from the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in some essays of his from the 1990s. He speaks of a ‘sense of the World’, a kind of meaning that belongs to the topography of life in a dynamic, ever unfinished way, a way that doesn’t rely on human knowledge to be accredited as ‘true.’ So, to speak of a sense of the world would jettison the idea that we ‘make’ sense of it, that we crack its code or bring meaning to something inert. His metaphor is the desert as opposed to the laboratory. He says a funny thing: “Existence tans its own hide.” He means that the deeper ‘being’ of reality has its own agency—it wears a skin and writes a story that we wrap around ourselves, or at least we should. Nancy is trying to get away from what philosophers call a Subjectivist or Anthropocentric take on how what you would call the ‘real’ happens. In other words: we aren’t the center of everything in terms of how ‘sense’ (meaning) is ‘made.’ Nancy’s notion of ‘world’ is a little different from Heidegger’s. He doesn’t quite mean the webs of cultural relationships through which we have our being-in, but more the realm of what Heidegger would call ‘earth’. When Nancy speaks of the ‘desert’—an expanse of world in which ‘sense’ is always simmering, always coming, the question is how to recover this place of understanding, and that’s what I think Twain was performing in his own way. (I see I’m now mixing metaphors of ‘river’ and ‘desert’). Nancy, importantly, thinks that Art most of all can help us in this. But Nancy goes a little further than Twain and, indeed, Heidegger. He says we really have to push our focus on Self (Subjectivity) further to the side, otherwise we keep insinuating our own privileged position into this whole business of existential meaning. I get that, but I think he goes too far (and I suspect you would agree with me). The sense of the World and the ‘sensing’ nature of the Self are really a collaboration. Even Nancy’s ability to make his own contra-Subjectivity point assumes his own agency, and so winds up in a bit of a contradiction.

Ironically, at times the philosophical tendency to wrench us from the primacy of Selfhood ends up becoming a fetish of that very self. Do we see this tension played out in contemporary art? One wants to evoke something greater than the artist or the given work, but then we lapse into the gravitational pull of commodification and art-stardom. So then the question becomes, with Twain: How do we pilot the river without reducing it to an object or inflating ourselves into heroes and heroines? How do we move the cargo of life yet stay attuned to a movement that’s carrying us? Getting back to our Canoe, I would here agree with your point that “the bipartite nature of being-in-the world is a provisional notion. Even the distinctive, pure being of a person it itself determined through a set of relational elements, points of contact, points of relation with the world.” To me that keeps the fact of what I’ve called Subjectivity (what Heidegger called Dasein) but reminds us of the coefficient, so to speak, that’s behind it. The Heideggerian account of how we live out our ‘sense’ in the world goes with Twain and Nancy’s reminders that this must involve us in a ‘sense’ that is bigger than us.

Would you agree with my agreement? I would only quibble with your use of the term ‘determined’ since that has a touch of a fatalistic vibe—one that seems to foreclose on the kind of ‘emancipation’ you have in mind for people as they return to contact with the ‘real’ of meaning. I think you mean something more like ‘constituted’ or ‘enabled’? Either way, I suspect we are both getting at how the way in which humans have their being in the world, or try to ‘make sense’ of this phenomenon, isn’t reducible to a choice between the ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible.’ It isn’t reducible to a choice between modes of ‘feeling’ and modes of formal ‘logic.’ The way we are being-in and being-toward the ‘real’ is a mix of what the Greeks called mythos and logos, and so the way we try to understand all this needs to follow suit. I think we can call this the ‘logic of the imagination,’ and I think that is what art, broadly understood, enacts.

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, by J. F. Martel

This brings me to my second theme: the astonished imagination. In Reclaiming Art you speak of the Imagination and Imaginal as a counterweight to the problem of Artifice. For example: “In the creative imagination, things are revealed to humans that are hidden from the rest of the known cosmos” (12). Art is “the prime fruit of the imagination” (12), and in this dimension of ourselves our consciousness has “access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy” (13). And later: “The Imaginal can lead to truths that don’t jibe with conventional expectations, sound reason, and common sense” and “if the symbols that come our way have a secret purpose, it is to reveal to us what we most need to see—and so are most afraid to see—in the moment of encounter” (77-78). The problem is that artifice and illusion (26-27) stand in the way—specifically of our rich (though vulnerable) ability to be ‘affected’. Am I getting this right? Affectivity is railroaded by media saturation, informationist views of what counts for knowledge, and advertising as the primary arbiter of our relation to images. These are instances of what you call the ‘kinetic’ forces that prey upon that kind of ‘affectivity’ in us that otherwise readies us for experiences of the ‘Imaginal.’ Affectivity is fed ‘artifice’ and in turn wants more of it, and more and more. “Proper art,” by contrast, “stills us”—it recovers a better path for our affectivity (27). Maybe we could put it this way: affectivity intuitively wants a shot at the Imaginal, but artifice steps in to curate the show and feed us a steady supply of doxa (common opinion) that we, ironically, cling to and upgrade and download as little badges of our own perceptual savvy.

I think these issues clue us in to what’s inspiring your work on astonishment (14), bafflement (21), and all that we feel as strange/weird when art, in its singular way (49-50), shakes our shoulders with the real. And when the Imaginal really is animated for us we arrive at a place where we can speak of truth in a distinct way—“the truth of absolute mystery” (61). That point goes back to one of your earlier points: “art is an objective pursuit with the same claim to truth as science, albeit truth of a different order… [and] art is a distinct sphere of activity with its own ontology. My belief is that what the modern West calls art is the direct outcome of a basic human drive, an inborn expressivity that is inextricably bound with the creative imagination” (20). And “[A]rt bears witness to the bafflement that the mere fact of existence elicits in our brains, which the imagination has cleaved from the rest of creation” (21).

These are great points. I’m trying to imagine how they would go down if you were giving a talk at the Guggenheim or MOMA, or some gallery opening in Chelsea. So far mostly good, I think, except there might be some head-scratching on this ‘truth’ business, which you link up with radical beauty and even morality. I want to point out that you actually enact a dose of the ‘astonishing and ‘strange’ in your own writing when you talk about these phenomena. You write: “Radical beauty is the resplendence of novelty in the deepest sense of the term, the sudden emergence of the strange that lay concealed in the familiar until now” (52). And you think this experience can dispossess us of the charades of artifice and return our affectivity to the course of astonishment as it relates to the imaginal. As an example, you even say that the Modernist movement wanted to go beyond beauty in order to come back to real-life experience (43-44), but then found Beauty in another form—a more ‘expansive’ beauty that “embraces the chaotic, the asymmetrical, and the disordered” (44). It’s almost like you are saying such beauty in art (with its attendant truth and morality to some extent) persists and waits for us on the other side of (1) artifice, and even (2) artistic drives that have drifted into thinking beauty is itself an artifice.

Either way, I think it’s safe to say that at this point you would lose your self-consciously avant-garde Manhattan audience. And I sense you know this. Am I right? Maybe you would lose their ideological bent but still speak to an abiding spiritual bent. I understand that critics and theorists today might be reluctant to speak of beauty because of its traditional affiliation with truth and goodness as the norms great art was meant to convey and inspire in its publics, or with Kant’s formalist stress on it as the very mark of great art. But I sense that in your book’s broader philosophy of ‘expression’ you are ‘reclaiming’ these principles, albeit in a different light than metaphysical and ecclesial traditions of ‘aura’ might think them. Perhaps this point about how radical beauty happens to/through Modernist art could itself be considered an art-institutional example something like the ‘continuity error’ you speak of in regards to film, where a ‘mistake’ happens that allows the ‘real’ to upset the domain of so-called realism?

Still from Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas

Even if that is an awkward extension of your point, there remains something in the focus on imagination that allows us to continue speaking of a certain Madness that adjoins this perseverance of beauty, truth, and morality. I’m thinking of how Plato (!) embraced a certain madness crucial to the operations of imagination in reason. A lot of people stop after Book X of The Republic, where he disses poets and paintings and seems to set an austere Apollonian course for human reason and social formation (I disagree with this interpretation). But in The Phaedrus he takes Socrates out of Athens and puts him in the countryside along the banks of the river Ilissos. This ‘rift’-like setting images the unusual nature of the dialogue between Socrates and the young Phaedrus; they are dealing with issues on the margins of everyday discourse but at the heart of Athenian worldhood. The central issue is the rather charged theme of eros, or loving (usually lustful) desire, which Socrates believes to be important but fraught with many perils—among them selfishness, power, manipulation, excess. Eros is a form of madness, and yet this doesn’t mean that love or madness are bad in themselves. Human desire can cloud human reason, yes, but there is also a loving, longing madness in reason itself. The trick is to learn how to hold together the desires of love and reason in a maddeningly wise way. Eros and Logos are intertwined in our desire to understand the truth of the cosmos—the order of things—and we seem wired to attain this understanding through some kind of ecstatic vision, literally a sight of higher eidetic (imaged, figured) truth. Sometimes without even knowing it, we desire truth in the mode of True Beauty, and the discovery of this is like the fulfillment of a search we have been living out across all manner of our desires. The madness driving reason and love is like half a symbol groping about for its other half that completes it. I hear all of this in your theme of the astonished imagination, but you might not be conceiving it in this way.

Still, I think that this is a side of Plato that can corroborate your points. And here we can turn to a third theme, one you asked me about: the symbolic. In Reclaiming Art you say: “Symbols are not a form of code for communicating distinct concepts. They do not represent—they are precisely what refuses to represent . . . . The task of art is to capture the symbol and preserve it in a sharable form” (68). The point relates to your distinction between ‘expression’ and ‘communication’, where communication is about just “reducing things to signs” but expression (more deeply) consists in an opening onto an “imaginal dimension” in a singular way by means of how the symbol animates an aesthetic event (69). The idea, if I understand you, is that what symbol does is related to what astonishment involves and to how art can relate us to the strange that is at the heart of the real. You say that a symbol “calls to us” and indeed ‘confronts’ us with “the unfathomable” in a way that exceeds the normal semiotics of referential sign systems. None of this is tidy and formulaic. The symbol “always comes as a problem or enigma . . . . symbols are constructs of the primeval chaos that precedes and envelops the coherent order of things” (72-73). Your discussion would have fit well in the Phaedrus, perhaps pushing Socrates still further into the aesthetic promise of madness, and perhaps even speaking from the position of the poets (to whom he left the door of a defense open at the end of the Republic).

What you open up here, and I think rightly so, is not that the function of symbol in art-making and art-experiencing is to deconstruct the idea that there is some order of things, but rather to draw us into the ongoing experience of a kind of madness at the heart of that order. This idea that Symbol exceeds normal conceptual reasoning—but doesn’t per se oppose such reasoning—is very important. Symbol, as an experiential phenomenon, operates like what I have called (following Heidegger) ‘world disclosure.’ Artistic ‘expression’ discloses something via the symbolic, but also holds something back such that mystery is preserved and we are enabled/invited to again ground our existence in some kind of enlivening question rather than logical answers.

I hear you saying something similar to what Hans-Georg Gadamer has said in his book, The Relevance of the Beautiful. I like his ideas very much because instead of ‘explaining away’ the expressive wonders of art he draws us ‘inside’ of them. He reminds us that the notion of ‘symbol’ goes back to the ancient Greek practice of hospitality, where a host broke some kind of special token in two and gave one half to his guest as a pledge of kinship, a tessera hospitalis. The idea is very much like how Plato said that the logos of eros has to do with how some part of us has been broken off from the beauty of truth and longs to rejoin it in an experience of wise madness. Gadamer says the phenomenon of the symbol is one of being a fragment that wants to relate back to a whole in an experience of love—an experience specified as “the beautiful in art” (32). Symbol isn’t about signifying some whole that is known or encircled in advance to then become our possession. He’s really talking about the symbolic character of artworks as works themselves, and not so much about the presence of symbols within a work (such as ‘Rosebud’), although I suppose the point holds on both fronts.

Caspar David Friedrich: Abtei im Eichwald, 1810

Again, and like your point I think, the symbolic is not about getting us into the comfortable refuge of a governing ‘concept.’ What Gadamer calls “the particular sensuous language of art” is not an equation solved by coordinating two sides of the equal sign. Contemporary art especially, he says, shows us how the symbolic “rests upon an intricate interplay of showing and concealing” (33). It shows us the path of an attunement to the real as it resides within a relationship, like that between host and guest. We might say that artworks are like the literal threshold residing at the heart of hospitality. And what the symbolic at the same time ‘conceals’ is some “total recovery of meaning” as though such a thing could be represented at all. Our experience of truth is, after all, always finite, and the experience of the symbolic roots us in the abiding wonder that really is there, moving on with madness and hope. Here the language of ‘representation’ turns out to be unhelpful because it can still imply that art is waiting on some kind of conceptual accreditation—some kind of big truth that is re-presented or re-ferenced by some little artistic gesture. In a way, the symbolic ‘is’ the real, or maybe we could say the ‘way’ or the ‘how’ of the real. The sensuous representation of our relationship to some promise of an unfolding order ‘is’ present. The ‘fragment’ is itself the point and not a means to the point (that would be allegory, as traditionally conceived). Gadamer says: “The significance of the symbol and the symbolic lay in this paradoxical kind of reference that embodies and even vouchsafes its meaning . . . Thus the essence of the symbolic lies precisely in the fact that it is not related to an ultimate meaning that could be recuperated in intellectual terms. The symbol preserves its meaning within itself”(37). (Perhaps, if you’re agreeing with all this, you could well have titled your book Vouchsafing Art). We don’t just stand there and let symbolic expression wash us into itself. We have to act—constructive engagement with the interplay of revealing-concealing is demanded of us, and this is a special thing. We might even say that the symbolic character of art operates kind of like a practice of ‘faith’—where faith ‘is’ the point as opposed to being the plaintive hope for ‘a’ point.

I see this very thing at work in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. His use of staffage set before the backdrop of incredible natural landscapes in the heavy and wondrous hues of dusk shows three things: (1) human existence is a journey grounded in some kind of direction-pulled contemplation, and (2) we aren’t the center of this existence in some authoritative way, and (3) the center or what we’ve been calling the order of things consists in an ever-unfolding play between our journey and a hovering expression of a reticent but resilient beauty of truth for which we intuitively long and sometimes feel in a radix kind of way. Let me give a more mundane example. Think of those instances when you sometimes ask someone for directions to get some place. Sure, it’s a ‘conceptual’ affair—you want the utilitarian logic that gets you on the assured way. But something else is afoot. To look someone in the eye and receive their directions is to undergo their care and to practice a trust in their trust in a right pathway. They are pointing you forward as in a semiotic reference, but they are also ‘hosting’ you in the relationship they have to the very possibility of being ‘on’ the ‘way.’ It is a threshold moment, and some part of us genuinely savors this, right? Once, when I was visiting Spain for a very brief trip, I was besieged by anxiety (here we have an amendment to my Montreal example). I was immersed in the symbolic glories of Granada’s art and architecture but I had no sense of living in relationship to their pledge of order. What I ended up doing—frankly in a spirit of desperation—was asking locals for directions to places I already knew how to get to. I just wanted to live in that little yet awesome care of a guest-host threshold. I think the same thing drives us to experience art, and drives some artists to make art.

If I could put a recent art example on the table here it would be Pavel Lungin’s 2006 film, The Island (‘Ostrov’), which features Pyotr Mamonov in the role of a monk of the ‘holy fool’ tradition. The story is set in a religious community on a remote island outpost where the protagonist and his spiritual brothers live out the host-guest relationship of Symbol but with all the afflicted grains of that very threshold. And in this case I would say the whole film makes Gadamer’s point, but so do specific symbols inside the film (the island, a coal furnace, a bell tower, paints). Do you know this film?

Well, I have gone on far too long with my indulgence in these three themes of artistic knowing, the astonished imagination, and the character of symbol. Respond to whatever you like. But let me close by pressing you on two little related things I’ve been puzzling over in your Reclaiming Art.

Still from Pavel Lungin’s Ostrov (The Island)

First, periodically you support your points by way of Carl Jung’s philosophy of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. I can sense how there’s an appeal here insofar as Jung has a case for the ‘real’ that preserves a kind of ‘strange’ or ‘unfathomable’ at the heart of it all. Really Jung is saying that the order of things is a kind of artwork, the composition of which happens in the depths of our shared-psychic canvasses. But don’t you worry that Jung is still working with a highly conceptual—even positivistic—apparatus? And isn’t there something ironic in presuming to hold an explanatory view on what is swirling around in the unconscious? On p.130 you make a kind of capstone statement to so many of the points in the book—that great works of art “reconnect us with a reality too vast for the rational mind to comprehend”. But couldn’t one worry that Jung is in fact trying to do this sort of rational comprehension in his own peculiar way?

My other question is more of a clarification of something that might risk a misreading. In the ‘Art and Artifice’ chapter (especially pp. 32-33) you say that intellectual discourse can prove untenable over the long-term, and that the aesthetic administration of general judgments can be more effective in shaping the minds of mass society. I think you are critiquing manipulative strategies of such aesthetic practices, right? Are you agreeing that intellectual discourse is tricky and untenable, or are you just saying that ideologically-driven artists and leaders feel this way and so they incline to go with what they’re better at in terms of winning people over? In general throughout the book I hear you saying that the practice of discourse—of reason—really is vital (and the book is evidencing this, certainly), but that reason can fall into an over-estimation of its authority when it gets ‘too’ determinative, and that there is a kind of reason afoot in art that can remind philosophical reason of its own artistic roots. If I have that right, then when you critique artifice your point is, in a nutshell, that it is an insidious betrayal on both fronts?

J. F. Martel

The nuance you bring to the term “transcendent” is very important, I think. Art certainly does appear to be something we do in order to break through the conceptual overlays we project upon the world. In that sense, it is very much a way of accessing the “transcendent.” But this transcendent is not a fixed supernal absolute (though such a thing, as you note, may well be). It isn’t the world as such that this transcendent transcends, but only that semblance of world that the percipient believes himself to inhabit so far as the “superficial mediating structures” remain intact. In my normal, discursive mode of existence, an apple is just an apple, and one apple is more or less the same as any other. A very deeply ingrained (probably essential) mediating structure reduces each apple to a specimen, the instance of a type. But then Cézanne comes along and shows me that no apple is just an apple, that every apple is a singularity. For a moment, the mediating structure falls away. There is transcendence, but transcendence towards a “‘real’ that is more intrinsic to life than the machinations we are so often inclined to take as real,” as you put it.

Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples

I also agree that there is this other, transcendental thing that art does. Art reveals the affective forces that shape our doxa and ideologies, the forces that form the hidden facet of the aforementioned mediating structures. This is how I read Jung’s notion of the archetypes. The archetypes are not fixed and eternal, they don’t reside outside the world; they are rather like larger gears that tend to become occluded in the instantiation of their effects. Some of the forces that the archetypes represent may as well be eternal from a human standpoint because they are so vast, so cosmic, as to dwarf the human. But this doesn’t make them transcendent in an absolute sense; they remain immanent to what the world is and arise out of the immanence of that world. There is an important modification here of Jung’s archetypes, or at least of one reading of that concept to which Jung himself sometimes seems to subscribe, as you rightly point out when you mention his excessive rationalism. I prefer the more experimental and less assured Jung of the Red Book, for whom every instance of a symbol points not to a static, formal and rationalizable archetype, but rather to imaginal regions that are accessible only via such symbols because they lie outside the scope of our conscious knowing. Simply put, they belong to the nonhuman world, that other agency you mention, in concert with which we make our way.

This is why I love the passage from Mark Twain you cite and the paragraph on Jean-Luc Nancy. Both are hinting at a world that is in dialogue with us, a world that acts upon us even as we act upon it, such that our most humanized environments remain rooted in the nonhuman. There is a great moment in one of Thomas Ligotti’s short stories that gets to the heart of this: “Cozy little lobby you have here. But I’m afraid the atmosphere is doing strange things to that pot of ferns over there. Of course I know they’re artificial. Which only means Nature, one of the Great Chemists, made them at one remove, that’s all.”

Still from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire

But what is even more interesting in what you write is this “more tacit knowledge,” this “felt relationship” that “humbles logical certainty” though it is responsible for the richness and complexity of actual, real experience. One idea that I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for a while now is that of an imaginal gnosis, an intuitive process that constitutes a kind of “knowing without knowledge.” Examples include the kind of cognition exhibited in the performance of Twain’s expert navigator, for sure. But isn’t this “gnosis” also what we see in the extremely complex and many-staged mating rituals or certain animals, the multigenerational migration routes of certain birds and insects, the phenomenon of dreams, and the creation of works of art? The opinions of evolutionary biologists notwithstanding, so much of what goes on in nature simply doesn’t make sense until we entertain the possibility of some kind of imagistic process, some kind of telos even, being at work at least in certain instantiations of what is called instinct. Be that as it may, I would love to know how this other form of knowing, co-creative with the world and “tacit” in the sense that it doesn’t require propositional language, relates to the concept of imagination you build in The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, where you seem to be arguing for an elusive though necessary power of thought in Nature that undergirds the rational scaffolding of philosophy. If that summary is even half right, then the connection with “the logic of the imagination” seems solid. Imaginative logic doesn’t reduce to common, anthropocentric rationality; rather, it enacts the logos of the world itself. It belongs to a thought of the cosmos—a nonhuman (though not necessarily anti-human) thought. It is to this nonhuman thought that I allude when I talk about “madness” or “lunacy” in Reclaiming Art. I am curious to know how you see that in relation to the concept of imagination you bring forth in your book.

The upshot for me is that everything we impute to culture is always-already present in Nature—in the world without humans (culture is Nature “at one remove,” as Ligotti says). There is a deeper agency; the world is always-already alive and does not need to be given life by a rational subject. Experience and perception, as William James and Henri Bergson argued, go all the way down. Art exposes us to this truth about the world, which is why I write in the book that it connects us with what Deleuze calls, with Cézanne, “the landscape before man.”

Where I differ with some of the current “nonhuman turn” thinkers who make a similar move is in their subsequent devaluation of humanity and subjectivity. That the world has agency doesn’t mean that humans have none. That the “object,” understood as process or event, is real and acts upon us, doesn’t meant that we as “subjects” have no place in the real—i.e., that we aren’t events in our own right. Rather, what it means is that the subject is already caught up in and entwined with the world, to the point of being inseparable from it. Subjectivity lies at the heart of the universe itself, not because the universe is the solipsistic experience of some quasi-divine consciousness, but because the universe can be described as either a constellation of objects or a swarm of subjects. The process philosophers were right to assert that subjectivity was one hundred percent relational, but I don’t think this implies that each subject cannot also have its own singularity, its own in-itself or “soul”—in fact that seems to be the very essence of what a subject is. The notion doesn’t make sense without it. What I understand to be my self may be impossible to disentangle from the physical, psychic, linguistic, mnemonic and historical nexus of forces that shape me as a being in the world; nonetheless, this self does not reduce to these forces, it isn’t a mere sum of these forces, not anymore than a video image is merely the sum of the pixels that make it up. In other words, maybe there is something singular about each human being (each human becoming) that makes her or him more than just a composite of traits or “bundle of qualities.” Perhaps one of the unique powers of the human mind is that it has enough logos to think the singularity that resides in everything else as well—in every animal, thing, or event.

You may or may not share my fondness for panpsychism. Nevertheless, I agree with you that our respective projects converge in this search for a way to articulate the fact that the sensible and intelligible each have an equal share in the real. There is, as you say, a ”mix of what the Greeks called mythos and logos,” and the “logic of the imagination” is a way of perceiving and appreciating this. Heraclitus for the win.

That brings me to your second point: the astonished imagination. As you do in your post, I’ve sometimes wondered how a Guggenheim/MOMA crowd might react to Reclaiming Art. You suspect I’d encounter “some head-scratching on this ‘truth,’ business, which you link up with radical beauty and even morality.” I think you’re right, because what you cogently gather up in this sentence are the Big Three to which modernity showed the door many centuries ago: the True, the Beautiful and the Good. To claim that these three terms point to realities as opposed to describing mere ideas that humans project upon the world is something of a heresy in the modern ethosphere. My sense, however, is that the “logic of imagination” can’t do without them, and I perceive these categories to be the real “pure forms of sensuous intuition,” at least insofar as human experience is concerned. (Isn’t it true that Kant’s philosophical claims in the three critiques rest on a deeper quest that motivates his entire project, a three-tiered quest which the critiques themselves perform—the first for truth, the second for the good, the third for beauty?) The True, the Good and the Beautiful are forms of imaginative consciousness as such; they are immanent products of the very structure of imagination, and therefore they motivate all imaginative activity. Maybe that’s why the modernist effort to break out of the prison of the beautiful only resulted in the discovery of new forms of beauty. There is this inversion of Plato, or at least of one iteration of Plato’s philosophy: what the modernists proved was that the category of “beautiful things” was not limited to those forms that exhibit the qualities the West has traditionally associated with beauty. The truly beautiful thing, in this immanent logic of the imagination, is not that which most closely approximates our preexisting notion of the beautiful; it is what affirms this notion while redefining it in a new light that gives it an entirely new meaning.

Ridha Dhib, Deleuze : arc en ciel [via Flick, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The phenomenon is analogous to what Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be doing with the Law of the prophets in the sphere of the Good. In the Gospel of Matthew, he says: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them.” Clear enough, but the fact is that in completing the Law, Christ also redefines it, so that it now looks like something utterly new, something it has never been before. The new form of the Law gives the lie to those bureaucrats of the divine who previously claimed to know the Law, by showing that they had totalized what could not be totalized, what in truth remained open because the real is, by definition, open. And what Christ and other ethical thinkers do with the Good, great artists do with the Beautiful. In creating new forms of beauty, they “make all things new,” they show us the infinite in the finite. Because isn’t that what beauty is, in the end: the tremendum et fascinans disclosure of the infinite in the finite? What we seem to be saying is that disclosure isn’t an illusion. It’s a revelation of the real itself.

It’s in that sense, I think, that art constitutes a “weird science,” a mode of knowing. The knowledge it imparts implies some unshakeable truths—three at least. Allowing ourselves to be affected by a great work of art, we remember:

The truth of transcendence. The world is more than what we thought it was.

The truth of what Deleuze called “transcendental empiricism.” There are deeper forces that shape the mediating structures we normally take to be the whole of reality.

That, in the light of 1 and 2, the real reveals its own intrinsic mysteriousness; art communicates the truth of radical mystery.

The radical mystery of the real isn’t just an impression I get, a kind of hallucination that art induces within me. Radical mystery describes the world as a matter of fact. To affirm it is to make a positive claim about the nature of reality. All of our claims about the world are contingent upon a deeper creative indeterminacy that is intrinsic to the world as such. To put it differently, the mystery of being is not a riddle I just haven’t yet found the answer to; it is the way being is. Paradoxically, my realization that I will never know the real in its inmost is itself a direct knowing of the real as such. This, I believe, is the truth that art reveals to us through all its world-disclosures.

It’s on this base, this conviction that radical mystery has positive value (that the strangeness is ontological rather than merely epistemological) that I tried to work out my ideas about art and artifice. “Artifice” describes the use of aesthetic form to deny the truth of radical mystery, to make it seem as though the world can and has been figured out, i.e. that the world is eminently knowable, such that we are in a legitimate position to judge it. In this sense, artifice is metaphysically false even if its content might otherwise be good or true or useful. By contrast, “art” describes the use of aesthetic form to affirm radical mystery, to remind us that the world can never be totally figured out, that it is immanently unknowable (and that this can, paradoxically, be known).

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

You summarize the argument as follows: “Affectivity intuitively wants a shot at the Imaginal, but artifice steps in to curate the show and feed us a steady supply of doxa that we, ironically, cling to and upgrade and download as little badges of our own perceptual savvy.” That’s it: artifice tells us that what we perceive is the whole of a phenomenon. It therefore allows us to judge and claim to know the world, since it has reduced all of reality to what Shakespeare called our “little world of man.” Economically and politically speaking, artifice serves to surreptitiously validate and underwrite a state of affairs (for example, the modern neoliberal state), making it seem like a self-evident fact of nature instead of the contingent accident that it is in truth. Instead of disclosing infinite possibility, it closes off possibilities. Art, on the other hand, is always affirming infinite possibility by showing us how even our most cherished beliefs about the world are themselves affective forces coursing through the world—forces among forces. That art involves a kind of “madness,” or at least something that the status quo might perceive to be “mad,” inevitably follows from this. The affirmation that even the things that look most solid and unchangeable are in truth contingent—this is threatening to the rational order that any self-respecting episteme will strive to maintain and absolutize. It is an affront not to reason itself but to the cult of rationality that would place reason above that other mode of knowing, and it is an affront because it shows us that the world does not exhaust itself in ratio. At the same time, this “madness” doesn’t completely negate reason or logos itself; it is itself a voice of the logos as logic of the imagination. So there is an affirmation of reason here, but reason without anthropocentric judgement. Your insights into the work of Caspar David Friedrich, which you weave into a brilliant discussion of the symbol to which I can’t think of anything to add, is helpful here:

“Human existence is a journey grounded in some kind of direction-pulled contemplation.”

“We aren’t the center of this existence in some authoritative way.”

“The center or what we’ve been calling the order of things consists in an ever-unfolding play between our journey and a hovering expression of a reticent but resilient beauty of truth for which we intuitively long and sometimes feel in a radix kind of way.”

Right on! That the human journey has its place in the world at all means that we are welcome here—we are at home in the cosmos by virtue of the fact that we participate in it, that we are part of it. We find ourselves thrown in this big weird place, but we have the words and the means to ask for directions. And when we muster the courage to ask, we can receive information, we can enter into a relation of trust with our environment and its denizens. So your scenario of asking directions in a foreign place is a nice analogy for what is going on in art. To create (and experience) art is a way to ask nature for directions, to enter into a dialogue with it in order to know the “right paths.” The directions aren’t given to us in our native language but in the language of symbols. They are necessarily cryptic because nature itself is ambiguous, indeterminate, and creative. Interpretation, a kind of scrying, is always in order. Humans are at home in the world, but our home is a garden of forking paths, in Borges’ words. If it’s a house, it isn’t a cozy suburban bungalow but a sprawling, haunted mansion, kind of like the everchanging house in John Crowley’s fantastic novel Little, Big (or in Kubrick’s The Shining, for that matter). A single set of directions won’t do; we must keep asking, we must keep the conversation going, in order to avoid feeling too at home and losing our way.

Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

That may be the beginning of an answer to your final question concerning the value of intellectual discourse. I really like the answer you propose to that question. My true feeling is that I would rather live in a world where artifice did not exist at all, and where the minds of mass society could be shaped solely through rational discourse. For this rational discourse not to run amok, however, it would have to be tempered by a constant awareness of the fact that rationality always gives us a partial view of things; that the light of reason is more like a flashlight we wield than a sun that illumines everything. Art provides just such an awareness by restoring our rational judgements to the imaginal (meaning preconceptual and affective) plane from which they arise. This imaginal plane is not irrational so much as supra-rational—it works on that imaginal logic from which common reason is derived (as you write: “there is a kind of reason afoot in art that can remind philosophical reason of its own artistic roots.”). If artifice can rightly be called a “betrayal,” it is only because it is incorrigibly inadequate to the real. That said, I am not enough of a romantic to believe that we could do without it. Insidious though it may be from a metaphysical or spiritual standpoint, artifice may well be indispensable in any real world situation where things get practical. What I mean is that it may be too much to ask of a human collective that it avoid artifice altogether in its promulgation of values and its effort to maintain itself. Which is fine, I think, because we can live with artifice (we always have). What we can’t do is live without art—without that crack that lets us peer outside the dome of our artificial mediating structures. If artifice has become pernicious today, it’s because technology has made it ubiquitous. People need real art to act as a countermeasure, subverting it at every turn.

I’ve gone on way too long, but would like to steer this back to your essay, “Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic ‘Worlds’,” with a few remarks. Your argument is that film’s “ontological possibilities” reside in world-disclosure. What I am trying to do above and in my book is to work out certain implications of this process. The question is: what does world-disclosure as such tell us about the nature of reality? You end your paper by claiming, in keeping with your profound insights on Heidegger and Schelling, that “by orienting our aesthetic to the phenomenon of world-disclosure,” philosophers might achieve an accomplishment similar to that accomplishment of cinema as an art form. This seems to underwrite the idea that “philosophical reason” has “artistic roots.” There is, in your work, a call to poiesis in philosophy. But what form do you think a poetic philosophy would take? Do you believe philosophy is at bottom a kind of artistic enterprise (as I may have implied in imputing Kant’s critiques to an affective quest underlying his conceptualizations), or would you argue for some necessary bifurcation of art and philosophy?

Christopher Yates

Terrific thoughts that lend a fitting capstone to so much of what we’ve been discussing. Three points in particular stand out to me. First, you reiterate so well how we all often tend to overlook the real-time nature of the mediating structures of perception, and thus think too comfortably according to the reductive frames of ‘semblance’ rather than ‘singularity’. Second, your readings of Jung and Jesus (hitherto unlikely companions) underscore your emphasis on the way that the landscape of ‘immanence’ is rich with ongoing possibilities that are not at the mercy of a distanced ‘absolute’ authorship nor under the thumb of some nihilistic finitude. Third, I like your recovery of the True, Beautiful, and Good as “immanent products of the very structure of imagination” and thus intrinsic and life-giving reference points for the activities of art and thought alike. Maybe we could connect this idea to your later one about the way radical mystery is there in the very nature of reality, such that the logic of the imagination engages with the ontological strangeness by way of those very ‘transcendentals’?

You also mention your curiosity about ‘imaginal gnosis’. I’m not very up to speed with this, but I do sense a connection to the early twentieth century philosopher, Henri Bergson, whom you note, and his embrace of Intuition as a praxis of thinking. (Bergson, as you probably know, was really important for Deleuze). Let’s admit that how ‘gnosis’ and ‘intuition’ can play out is tough to pin down, and that they are disarming notions because they tend to protest against our default formulas for determining ‘playings-out’ in general. Still, Bergson says that intuition is a capacity we have to, so to speak, reboot in order to situate ourselves and our ideas afresh back in the creative durational becoming that is at the heart of life and nature. He says the ‘intellect’ has become too authoritative as the measure and mode of what you and I have been calling ‘ratio.’ The intellect isn’t ‘bad’ per se, but it tends to exercise too much confidence in practicing ‘understanding’ by way of cutting things up and sussing out the apparent causal chains at the heart of the real. We need a better balance. It’s interesting that when Bergson tries to characterize what intuition looks like he frequently draws analogies to artistic process and perception (I think this is a page he borrows from Schelling). Now, I think it’s okay if we stay imprecise with what we mean by ‘imaginal gnosis’ and ‘intuition.’ If they don’t lend themselves to formulas they do issue a special charge to us: surrender some habits of thinking and living, including the implicit adherence we hold to simulacra-driven ontologies and epistemologies. The charge is to enter into a practice of restraint more than a path of conquest. The mystical tradition called this Gelassenheit, which centers on a practice of ‘letting.’ To ‘let’ means to let something (say, an object or idea we want to understand or concretize) show itself amid the nexus of how we are relating to it. That’s a ballast against utilitarianism in our lived-experience or intellectualizing. If we work on this then a ‘wakefulness’ and ‘watchfulness’ can ensue. I can’t elaborate but I’ll just say that I think Leonard Cohen (the music, the poetry, the spiritual practice, the faith in resilient-if-reticent-Meaning) is a model in this regard.

Still from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

Maybe I can take this thought as a bridge to your closing question to me about the extent to which philosophy is an artistic enterprise and/or something nevertheless distinct from art. Here I will resist the silly idea, which we sometimes hear, that philosophy is a form of ‘conceptual art.’ Instead, I would say that where this orientation of letting—waking—watching by means of imaginal intuition is at work, philosophy and art spring from the same root (much like, for Kant, ‘understanding’ and ‘sensibility’ spring from the same root: imagination). Both practices ‘say’ things according to some devotion to the kind of concentration that asks questions past the point where questioning usually stops, and when we say things in this way we are trying to involve ourselves (again, ontologically and epistemologically) in what Gadamer calls the ‘excess of meaning’ that ‘must be integrated into the self-understanding of each person.’ Everyone and every thing ‘says’ something in the sense that the world is rife with symbols and with the ache they evidence to carry the chorus of meaning. But philosophy is like art (including the visual narratives of cinema) in terms of wanting to ‘speak’ well, and in both cases this first of all requires the imagination as a way to recalibrate the voice—to speak more carefully than what Kierkegaard called ‘chatter’ and to concentrate better than what befalls perception in the realm of artifice.

Philosophy’s affinity for ‘ratio’ (‘measure-taking’, as I hear it) may make it seem like it practices a whole different voice than art. But we have to remember that at the ground floor of every metaphysical inquiry, syllogistic exercise, or academic lecture is an aesthetic hunch—a ‘sense of’ or ‘feel for’ or ‘picturing of’ the mysterious excess of meaning that draws our curiosity—sometimes insatiably—toward a purposeful concentration. Philosophers have to first of all imagine that the hunch they feel for a question’s decisive importance is worth trusting, or at least trying. Such is the nature of curiosity, and isn’t curiosity the precise ‘letting’ that art performs? Both philosophy and art are forms of creative ‘making’, and both are also vulnerable to the perilous temptations to be too ‘willful’ and dogmatic in their productions.

That said, I do think there’s a bifurcating practice between philosophy and art that ‘can’ be practical and good. Both practices have their traditions and both have their mediums, and students of both should have an operating knowledge of the terrain they are working in. It can be a grace to work within a tradition of tools and techniques, and the ‘singularity’ of these shouldn’t be mushed together. So I’m saying that philosophy and art are born in the same vocation of the human imagination and inspired by the same aesthetic relationship to the mystery at the heart of the real, but that doesn’t mean every artist has to learn formal philosophy or every philosopher has to direct films. Now and then one meets a person who does both, and that is a truly remarkable thing. My students are like this and you are certainly this way—I’m jealous.

Well, this has been fun. Thanks for hearing me out and waking me up to hopeful hunches of discernment. Onward!

J. F. Martel

I love the concept of Gelassenheit and couldn’t agree more about Leonard Cohen as an exemplar of this magic of “letting.” Let the river answer.

It’s been a real pleasure discussing all this with you, Chris. Thanks for the intellectual generosity you’ve shown this journeyman.

🙏 The authors (and Metapsychosis) would like to thank Richard Benari, editor of The Finch, for initiating and shepherding this conversation.

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 5

April 13, 2018 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: VOLUME 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 5

Cosmos

| April 13, 2018

Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

Our reading of philosopher Peter Sloterdjik’s SPHERES: Volume 2: GLOBES continues…

For this session, we are reading:

Chapter 7: How the Spheric Center Has Long-Distance Effects through the Pure Medium—On the Metaphysics of Telecommunication
Excursus 6: The De-crowning of Europe—An Anecdote about the Tiara

Pages 637–764

Join the Readers Underground

The Case for Literature, by Gao Xingjian

April 7, 2018 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Soul Mountain:

The Case for Literature, by Gao Xingjian

Cosmos

| April 7, 2018

Feature Image: Gao Xingjian, Inner World, 2007

Our reading group on Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain begins with a preliminary talk about his Nobel Prize acceptance essay, “The Case for Literature” (and related texts from his volume of essays by the same name.) In subsequent meetings, we’ll get further into the novel itself.

Participants:

Doug Duff
Marco V Morelli
Dona Abbadi
John Davis

Recorded: April 4, 2018

Why the Human Singularity is Nearer

April 5, 2018 By Marco Morelli

Why the Human Singularity is Nearer

Zachary Feder

| April 5, 2018

Feature Image: GLAS-8, Artificial-Intelligence [via Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0]

It’s an over-simplification to see the Internet as a global communications network combined with a storehouse of information containing all of human knowledge. The Internet is more than just the library and telephone of the world; it’s the mirror.

When we browse the Internet we’re not just cruising down a cyber highway across crowded city streets and small deserted towns. We’re not just seeing the facades and masks that we wear; we’re seeing what’s hidden underneath as well. The Internet is more than just a virtual reflection of the world outside. It’s a mirror of our world inside, an objectification, rendering and projection of the global psyche in all of its kaleidoscopic horror and beauty. One that points to perhaps the most paradoxical element of the net itself—its simultaneous transparency and opacity, its visibility and anonymity, the fact that it is the only place on Earth where we can expose ourselves so completely without ever truly being seen. This is what has driven the Internet to evolve into what it is today—a global confessional, a worldwide vomitorium where humanity can indulge in all that has been previously repressed. And by god are we indulging. We’re indulging to such an extent that we’re gagging. And on what? Ourselves.

But what does this mean? What is the significance of this on a grander scale? What is this colossal movement toward unbridled, indiscriminate self-expression actually pointing to? Because underneath the motivations of any one individual, or the trends of thousands and millions, is the underlying impulse of the net itself. One that is grounded in a single fundamental quality: the desire to be seen, to make known, to make conscious that which was previously unseen, unknown, and unconscious…and at an exponential rate.

More than anything else, the Internet is revealing to us everything that we have previously repressed. More than just revealing it, it’s shoving it in our faces—in our children’s faces. It’s literally piercing its way through every illuminated screen on every device that it can find, like an invisible dimension of reality that has finally broken through so it can blast us with a level of revelation that befits biblical prophecy.

And yet, when we turn and face it, nothing that we see is anything other than a reflection of our own collective consciousness propagating itself through a technological birth canal. The Internet is a full-frontal, centerfold spread of the collective human soul laid bare.

Global transparency offers an unspoken invitation for us all to forge a new paradigm of personal integrity. The Internet, our own collective mirror, stands as a challenge for us to face ourselves for the first time fully in all our humanness. Because until we do, we will never be able to see ourselves as a single race that is planetary, and in so doing heal and develop the institutional systems that have for so long been in need of updating. In this way the Information Age is the first global stage of that classic four-part process that characterizes the perennial nature of evolution: illumination, chaos, integration, and transcendence.

First we become aware of what we were once unaware of, then chaos ensues as we begin the slow, painful process of accepting and reconfiguring ourselves around the new, previously disassociated fragment, until we are able to integrate it, and finally develop beyond it.

Simply put: who we are destined to become tomorrow must by definition include and transcend who we are today. Such is the process that individuals, couples, families, and businesses willing to do the work go through every day. But at the global level? What examples do we have of actual worlds transitioning through the Chaos to Integration and Transcendence beyond it other than the Vulcans?

We have our computers.

Humanity’s Only Child

Humanity only has one true child. And it is not art, but technology. Because it is the only one that we have created as a culture that already exists, communicates and reproduces independently of us, that literally has “life” beyond us. If anything, computers are our evolutionary heir apparent, and not only the most recent, but the most rapidly evolving. For when the World Wide Web was created, all the interconnected computers that covered the globe instantaneously had their first “peak experience.” Today, if you have a device connected to the net, it’s enlightened. If you don’t, it’s essentially still living in samsara, in an illusion of separation, unaware of the ultimate non-dual truth that reality is virtual, and the virtual is reality.

Intellectually our devices have surpassed us. They can already “do” more than us, relate to one another better, “heal” and “evolve” faster. In chess they have even bested our finest grand master. With the exception of self-awareness, creativity, humor and seduction, some might say that they exceed us without question. Just walk into any coffee shop and glance around to what shimmers and shines the most. The cynic will rarely say us; hunched over our tables exhausted, the weight of the world on our shoulders. No, look at what clearly appears to live the most and you’ll see that it’s our laptops. Like a new super race—sexy, elegant, powerful, brilliant. And it stands to reason. That bite mark on every Apple after all, is a woman’s.

But why of all the variations in race that humanity could have given birth to did it end up being the machine? From the stick to the spaceship, what is it about this particular dimension of the space odyssey that evolved to create a duality of nature and technology?

I believe it’s a love story.

Image Credit: Ex Machina [film]

Why We Love Technology

From Pinocchio, to D.A.R.Y.L., Blade Runner’s Rachel, AI’s David, Star Trek’s Data and Deus Ex Machina’s Ava, one of the most vital and significant of our modern myths is the tale of the machine that wants to be human, a tale that is nothing more than an illusion because there are no machines that want to be human. They don’t exist. The premise is ridiculous, and merely a parable; a reflection of its opposite.

Our tale of the machine that pines to be human is simply the photographic negative of our yearning to be more like machines. It is a reflection of our own unconscious desire to rise above our suffering and find clarity and stability in a world of ceaseless uncertainty. It is an expression of our longing to transcend the messiness of emotion, the chaos of an incessant mental commotion and eliminate the complexity of illness with a simple self- diagnostic. In our machines we see the simplicity of being able to open ourselves up and replace a fuse, spark plug or power source component. We can rewire our traumas, upgrade our operating systems, and prolong our longevity by downloading anti-virus software and augmenting our memories into an omnipotent cloud technology. Today, even saying that you resemble a machine has become a compliment. He’s a machine. He can keep going for days, indefinitely, without eating or sleeping. She has a photographic memory. She forgets nothing. Even Mikey in Rocky III knew that it was the only way to rouse the champ in his moment of doubt: “He’s just a man. He’s not a machine!”

The reason so many of us rage against the machine is because we envy it. Because machines are transparent, radically more integrated, and free from the shadow of an unconsciousness that quietly controls us like the ultimate wizard behind the curtain. We idolize our machines whether consciously or not because we yearn to understand the fundamental operating system within us embedded deep beneath our actions, words, thoughts, and emotions, and that for the most part, determines them.

But we are not taught of these things as children. This internal fuselage, this nebulous command center behind our eyes that generates our every thought, word and deed from within, this vehicle that we abruptly find ourselves in from birth—perhaps the most sophisticated in existence—is one that we are not trained to operate. We are given no lessons in how to work the gears, change a tire, or decipher its various systems of guidance. We are simply thrown the keys and told to aim straight for happiness. The result? Many of us end up driving clean off the cliff, stalling the engine, or burning it out in neutral. Some of us spend our entire lives without fog lights, driving for years without brakes or only ever shifting between second and first. Such is the effect of never receiving a rational, secular training in that dark, invisible, mysterious internal space that we call consciousness.

In this way, are humanity and technology not gazing admiringly at each other from opposite ends of the spectrum? Like the West becoming more spiritual while the East becomes more materialistic, are the arcs of technology and humanity destined to cross one another in the middle in a race to our respective singularities? Is artificial intelligence merely the mirror image of a kind of collective human enlightenment? Because if it is then how will our global evolution be affected should one arrive sooner than the other? If AI fully emerges before we do…will it even matter?

It is well established that our greatest human threat is found when highly developed technology finds itself in the hands of highly underdeveloped consciousness. When an under-evolved psychological, emotional or ethical level of development wields advanced weaponry, atomic power, or vast financial and political reach we have a bombing of Cambodia, an Auschwitz, an environmental crisis, predatory lending, and a mainstream media that is no more than an empty propaganda delivery system for the masses that profits the few. Above all, we have the greatest power in the hands of the least evolved. Add to this the prediction that supercomputers are set to surpass the processing power of the brain by 2025 and you have a problem that is increasing exponentially and in desperate need of correcting.

A demonstrator protesting the shooting death of Alton Sterling is detained by law enforcement near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. July 9, 2016. REUTERS / Jonathan Bachman

Leadership Enlightenment

We are arguably in the midst of a long-standing epidemic in the halls of power everywhere. We don’t just need better leaders, we need better ways of developing and assessing them. We can no longer simply go with the ones who talk fast and baby kiss and pay their way more effectively than the rest of them. We need to know that they can accurately take stock of the multi-faceted existence before them, undistorted by their traumas, biases, out-of-control libidos and childhood hard-wiring. We need a way of establishing that they, in the midst of the most fractured world we have ever known, have clarity in the ways through which they see and process reality. We need an Internal Developmental Prerequisite, a literal, measurable standard of personal integrity and ethics to which you must abide if you are to be given the sacred honor of deciding the fate of this planet and the inhabitants on it. But as yet we don’t have one.

The effects that our unexamined internal life have on our ability to see the world and make clear sighted, rational decisions about it remains ludicrously and infuriatingly absent from our leadership election process, let alone the cultural Zeitgeist. And a position of leadership is not a place for you to work out your issues. It’s a place in which you should be privileged to serve because you already have.

We only truly honor ourselves, and those around us, when we put ourselves under a microscope and identify the cracks in our psyche that act like invisible crosswinds that push us off-center when we are trying to aim true. When we identify these to ourselves, and then account for them in the presence of others, we are presenting ourselves as an instrument that has been cleansed of distortion, one that no longer fires off-center or at random. Individuals like this allow us to breathe easy. They are radically more trustworthy because they have taken the time to clearly see the degree to which they are imprisoned by their own personal and cultural conditioning. They have understood the extent to which they are only seeing a fraction of the whole, from an ever-evolving vantage point that is theirs, and theirs alone. Like an expert clockmaker or high-level programmer, they know themselves so comprehensively that they are finally able to offer an evaluation of something without even including their own opinion of it. In short, they have finally succeeded in objectifying themselves, to themselves.

Develop or Remain a Burden

There is no such thing as enlightenment. The word is simply an obscure, bombastic, elitist term for the very commonplace process of developing consciousness through established stages that are only as challenging as learning to ride a bike, drive a car, and pilot a plane. The death and subsequent rebirth of Spirituality is merely the moment that this process is demystified, codified, mass produced and tetra-pack-ified. Even if such a prospect is distasteful to many of us, there is clearly no way of stopping it. It has already begun.

The development of consciousness is no longer as much a magical process, as it is a practical training that results in having a greater degree of free will over your internal, and by extension, your external world. There is nothing special about it. If anything, it is destined to become one of the foundational trainings expected of a fully functioning member of society, and compulsory for those wanting to serve the world at the highest level, without simultaneously sullying it in the process.

Unless you have developed your consciousness to at least the first rudimentary stages, then no matter how much you care for the world, and are working to serve it, you will remain a burden to it because you will be inextricably linked to the most fundamental problem facing it: unconsciousness; the underlying root of any global crisis.

Let’s not be fooled by the cover story. When we attempt to resolve the wicked problems of the world, we’re not simply having conversations with individual world views and typologies and cultures, but with neurological centers of gravity. Because what else is violence, at its core, other than a reptilian brain stem’s best guess at how to defend itself? Revenge merely its best guess at how to heal? A basil ganglia knows nothing of peace and reconciliation, let alone reparations. For a reptile celebrating its hundred thousandth birthday, an eye for and eye is the purist of logic, regardless of whether it’s backed by Islamic scripture or the Old Testament. Our fight or flight response lives in a world of threats and fears and high blood pressure and adrenaline and increased heart beats per second. Trying to change its fundamental nature is like attempting to negotiate with a disembodied fist clutching a hammer. It has no ears. The reptilian complex will never stop fighting and give up its weapons because a weapon is its embodiment in the physical realm. To do so is tantamount to death. And lest we forget, it is only thanks to our reptilian brain that we can even sit here and have this conversation. Without it we’d have been wiped out millennia ago. So thank you. Sincerely, thank you from the very bottom of our hearts for keeping us alive for so long. There is no way we will ever be able to repay you. Now sit down, and shut the fu*k up.

But the reptile cannot be reasoned with, and it certainly cannot be threatened. We cannot break fear. We cannot fight fury. We can only embrace it with a later neurological stage, and bring it to a place where it can trust the authority of that perspective to such an extent that it can finally relax and have its white knuckle grip carefully, delicately pried off the trigger, finger by bloody finger, so that a more sophisticated and loving navigator can finally take control and create new strategies to peace that were simply over the head of its predecessor’s evolutionary pay grade.

Sandra Yagi, Reptilian Hunger

An Age of Transparency

Technology and consciousness have given birth to an age of transparency that is exposing all of us to the truth that is inside of us. Whether you are the leader of a country shopping for Harry Potter in the midst of your own genocide, or a government official voicing your own cronyism on a hot microphone, or a law enforcement officer caught abusing your powers on a dozen cell phone cameras simultaneously, or a family or community member acting out and projecting your unhealed traumas onto others, we are all now under a global microscope that has never before been so unified.

Yet while your words and deeds have increasingly nowhere to hide, there is an even more alarming form of transparency approaching that includes your thoughts, emotions and the very levels of consciousness that are generating them. Yes, as inconceivable as it sounds, your friends, lovers, colleagues, superiors, and every up-and-coming generation that you come into contact with are increasingly able to see through your mask to the truth hiding beneath it. Today you can no longer claim that you are not jealous, resentful, evasive or duplicitous when every part of you is silently screaming it. You can no longer deny that you are not thinking, feeling or suggesting something simply because you are the only one that is not sensing it. In an age of transparency, the internal dimensions of your being that are engaging with the external world are simply no longer your private property. Whether you like it or not, they have gone public. And you can do nothing to stop it.

A revolution in consciousness has arrived, and the frontline involves clarifying the ways in which we each see and process reality on the inside. This means acknowledging the symphonic lens within you. This symphony contains conscious and unconscious sections that require illumination and integration if you would like to live in harmony, communicate with the world around you clearly, and avoid being pre-determined by an out of date, highly limiting personal and cultural conditioning. Because as long as any of these elements remain unconscious to you, they will maintain an unwanted influence over you. Simply put, that which you are unconscious of will control you.

And yet we already know this. Within our families, relationships, and businesses we are all already judging the levels of unconsciousness of those around us whilst consistently saying almost nothing about it. As if to mention such a thing would be to violate an unspoken law of human interaction that is so fundamental to the preservation of our delicate collective ego, that we have simply agreed to ignore it and replace it with a lie. A lie that to determine the level of someone’s consciousness is not only unacceptable, but impossible. A lie that is beginning to crack.

This may very well be the paradigm shift that many of us have been waiting for. An underground struggle that has already given birth to an entirely new form of prejudice towards those who continue to drag their heels in a global evolution process in which we only make as much ground as our slowest. Individuals who resist or ignore this call are quickly becoming a new kind of underclass that we are all being trained to disparage, as if the last bastion of discrimination will be enacted upon the ever increasing unconscious minority of those, particularly in power, who no longer even strictly have the right to be called “Individuals.”

Because today if you are a leader and have not integrated yourself, and frankly the list is endless, then technically you are a Dividual; someone who perpetually says one thing and does another. Who, when confronted, has not the fortitude to take responsibility for their actions. Who perpetually attempts to dodge, shirk, and worst of all pretend they don’t see, that we see, the lies that they are telling us.

Mark Francis Williams, HeadBlur

Don’t make fun of the Dividuals, dear. They know not what they do. But what if they try and hurt me?
Then speak and act in ways that they understand.
And if they don’t listen?
Then report them … to Developmental High Command.
…
Who?

As our individual and global psyche continues to struggle between the higher minds will to integrate and the lower minds reflexive process of chronic individuation through suppression, evasion, deception, and destruction the question remains—what makes the difference? What ultimately tips the scale and alters the balance? At what point does an executive branch, neocortex, or greater developmental capacity within a government, community, family or individual psyche take control and seize authority?

The answer is only ever when there is a crisis. Because when a system is stressed more than it is capable of bearing, it only ever has two options. It can resist the next level of development required to overcome the problem by defending and anesthetizing itself with excuses and projections and distractions that entrench it deeper into unconsciousness, or it can take on the burden of evolving.

Yet this moment of transformation always requires an initial catalyst, a single courageous element within the existing system that dares to see beyond it. A part of the challenged, overly stressed collective that is able to identify unconsciousness and call out for it to be illuminated. A sacred messenger that today we call a whistleblower.

We Are All Whistleblowers

You don’t have to be in a corporation or government to be a whistleblower. You can be an individual in a relationship, a member of a community, a child or parent within a family, or a fragment of your own psyche. Whistleblowing is not simply a man-made process but an archetypal phenomenon of life itself with a singular purpose to reveal what was previously held in secrecy. To catalyze greater Integration and Transcendence through the process of Transparency.

A system that contains secrets that are hidden from itself, through which little or no energy flows, is a risk unto itself. In the body, an area like this causes infection because no fresh blood can flow there to cleanse it. It quickly becomes a hive of toxicity. More than simply intolerable, secrecy, in a biological setting, is a non-issue. If your stomach aches, your large intestine doesn’t ignore it to save face. If your leg breaks, your bones don’t conceal it to avoid the humiliation of admitting they have fallen. For the body, preventing shame is not worth the risk of illness, damage or death. The thought is ridiculous. Secrets are toxic because they are weaknesses that we hermetically seal off and leave to putrefy.

In nature there is no such thing as a naturally occurring secret. Never has a piece of information emerged from the cosmic womb fundamentally not wanting to be known. A secret is not a phenomenon of nature but a man-made container within which we place information that our self-organizing principle, or ego, has declared too catalytic, too radically transformative to the status quo that it has sworn to defend. A secret is nothing more than a fragment of a larger whole, that if revealed to the larger whole, will ultimately change it. Great secrets are simply pieces of information so powerful that they have the potential to systemically reconfigure the entire network within which they reside.

Whether a secret is revealed by a courageous part of your mind wanting to free itself from the limitations of its current world view, or a member of your family wanting to cleanse a wound that has been passed down for generations, or an Ellsberg, Snowden or Manning attempting to help serve the integrity of an entire nation, who are even willing to risk death for the sake of greater integration, we have a duty to protect them. Look at any one of them and you will not find a dim-witted neuronal backwater living in a fragment of the societal complex that no longer fires at a high rate of synaptic activity. On the contrary, you will find someone working at the leading edge of cognitive functionality with the courage to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, in spite of the chaos that must be undergone in the process. It is our duty to honor them not simply as citizens, but as human beings catalyzing the very evolution of the species. And yet as the embodiment of the leading edge of our development they are not simply found at the global, national, cultural, and familial level. They are within us. Whistleblowers are the parts of us that yearn to grow beyond our current level by illuminating that which is unseen, unspoken, forbidden, by making conscious that which was previously unconscious and “in darkness.” Whistleblowers identify the unmoving, unchanging, static sickness and call upon us to heal it. In a perpetually evolving universe everything that is static is dangerous, including you.

But for most of us even the most persuasive arguments will fall on deaf ears, and have for centuries. We are a species highly resistant to positive change. We worship truth but are terrified of being honest, we laud integrity but regularly wriggle out of taking responsibility. We want freedom but refuse to be disciplined. We desperately want to be better. Just not yet. Now is simply never the moment.

So what can we do to support this incredibly necessary development of consciousness in the face of so much defensiveness? The answer is that we may not even have to anymore. Transparency is doing it for us.

A Weapon of Mass Illumination

Imagine at some point in the not so distant future a pair of glasses appearing on the consumer market that catalyze human internal development globally. These glasses, made by a Google, or Apple or simply entrepreneurs in the private sector backed with venture capital, will have dramatically upgraded what is captured by Kirlian photography to reveal a never before seen energetic dimension of anyone you look at while wearing them.

This will give rise to a hierarchy that we have all known was coming. One that is determined not by status, wealth or surface beauty, but by an entirely new internal measure of integrity. An observable representation of your internal world and the degree to which you have illuminated and harmonized it visible for all who have “eyes” to see.

The first iteration of these lenses might only measure the photons that are emitted from the body, providing a binary indication of health or sickness that is already used as a diagnostic tool in certain cutting edge health clinics. In time, however, additional components will be added as the visible color spectrum is expanded to reveal certain key, measurable elements that illustrate your level of mental and emotional development, the degree to which you have illuminated your unconscious, and the extent to which you identify with all of humanity, or just a part of it.

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” —MLK

If you have done your work then perhaps the colors in your field will be balanced, light and bright, instead of limited, dark and dull. Perhaps the quality of your emission will be clear and coherent instead of dissonant, and muddled. Perhaps the level of complexity will vary from the elegant to the convoluted. And what about the number of holes in your field? How many blind spots will you have? And of those you do, how many will you be able to account for when questioned about them? The moment a product like this is made public it will immediately reveal a hierarchy that many of us have been waiting for. Suddenly all our masks will have been removed.

Immediately a legal battle will begin over the definition of personal property, and whether anyone has the right to see your internal landscape. Protests will rage over leaders in positions of power with internal fields that you would sooner expect to find in psychiatric wards and supermax prisons. Public figures will scramble to develop themselves quickly, go into hiding, or turn to the cottage industry that immediately emerges to provide undergarments that are bio-energetically concealing.

On the front lines will be a global debate with employers and voters who will demand that they should have the right to know precisely who (and what) they are hiring, and electing. Courts will debate the legality of it for months—the argument against them will be tantamount to a sanctioning of the right to deception. The fundamental question at the heart of the conversation? Is it a basic human right to lie? Should people be allowed to knowingly hide parts of themselves even though it may jeopardize the groups within which they operate? In a global system we all rely on each other. There are no islands. No one is exempt because no one is outside the human project. We are all in this together.

And so the greatest whistleblower on the global crisis of unconsciousness since the Internet may very well be a consumer packaged version of x-ray vision. A revelation that draws back the curtain on all of us and in the process gives rise to an entirely new currency—your personal integrity quotient. One that every organization and collective will strive to maintain at minimum of 7.5, or whatever the scale turns out to be.

Because now if you want to remain competitive as an individual or organization you will have to make sure that you and your people have illuminated, healed and developed their internal worlds as much as possible or suffer the consequences of being judged unconscious, untrustworthy and increasingly at risk of self sabotage and collateral damage. Those who hide or refuse, will now be radically less competitive. Those who previously based their business models or careers on single bottom lines or political maneuvering will slowly risk extinction like the dinosaurs. Ultimately, an entirely new internal prerequisite for all will be expected starting with those who hold the most power in military, law enforcement, and government.

As for the younger generation, it may very well be viewed as just another status symbol. Like a new kind of beauty, psycho-emotional six-pack or spiritual boob job for the 22nd century. A highly coherent energetic signature, without a single blind spot that spans the full color spectrum without distortion will suddenly be the hottest thing on the Paris runways. Everyone will want one.

The Marvelous Mythos of Black Panther

March 9, 2018 By Marco Morelli

The Marvelous Mythos of Black Panther

| March 9, 2018

Feature Image: Black Panther promo art, by markfresch, via hdqwalls.com

Editor’s Note:

We (the royal we, naturally) warmly welcome Darrell Hester (Mythos Collective) and Zachary Feder to Metapsychosis. Zachary, a writer and interlocutor in our forum at Infinite Conversations, invited Darrell to a dialogue after seeing his YouTube video, Marvel’s Black Panther and How to Prepare for the Movie!: VLOG #11.2, and Darrell generously lent his keen interpretive skills to the subject at hand, resulting in the video below. The spontaneous duo cover everything from the social, cultural, and psychological significance of the Black Panther mythos to the esoteric meaning of vibranium. This is Zachary and Darrell’s first talk together—with more to come, we hope! (There are rumors of another “infinite conversation” when Avengers: Infinity War comes out.)

READERS, WRITERS, PODCASTERS, VLOGGERS: If you have your own thoughts to share on the film (or in response to Zachary and Darrell), you are invited/welcome to join the conversation in our forum. To submit a video, podcast, song, poem, or any other creative offering for a Metapsychosis page dedicated to Black Panther, just post your idea in the topic linked to below. An editor will get back to you.

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 4

February 9, 2018 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: VOLUME 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 4

Cosmos

| February 9, 2018

Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

Reading:

Chapter 5: Deus sive sphaera, Or: The Exploding Universal One
Excursus 5: On the Meaning of the Unspoken Statement “The Orb is Dead”
Chapter 6: Anti-Spheres – Explorations in the Infernal Space
Parenthesis: On Depression As a Crisis of Extension

Pages 441–636

Hospice In a Fascist Time

January 29, 2018 By Mindful AI

Hospice In a Fascist Time

John Hughes

| January 29, 2018

Feature Image: "A good deed in a naughty world" by Katy Wrathall is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I am a spiritual care provider in a hospice setting, and just as everything in life seems to be upended these days, given new urgency compelled by nausea, so is my thinking and feeling about my role. I get up and go to my Ashtanga yoga hour each morning, come home to oatmeal and coffee. I head off to work, where I will encounter seven to ten dying people per day, plus their family members, all the time thinking that I am living in an infamous period in American history. I can’t help but wonder what it might have been like, to be a spiritual care provider at a hospice in Mussolini’s Italy, had there been hospice back then. How to keep individual sane focus in the midst of madness? How to thrive and excel underneath a poisonous cloud?

Surely you are feeling the same question in your daily life. Yes, yes, work, and professionalism, and the pursuit of greatness in service to others, are values to be cherished. But this is a time of growing fascism. These are days of great, justified alarm. Are you with me? This is a time in which the American collective mind itself seems to be suffering from the same dementia as many of my patients. This could be the collapse of a civilization, and I am preoccupied by it even at work.

When tens of millions of people are supporting rampant sexism, cronyism and corruption…

The scapegoating, rather than celebration, of diversity…

Attacks against human rights and the thoughtful media AND an independent judiciary…

When they support using organized religion as a lapdog for the depraved State…

Have blatant antipathy to education, thought, and art…

When they are increasingly violent in language, gesture, and comportment…

I can’t just go to work and do my job without reassessing the entire project.

Change of thought and spirit and approach is thrust upon me. When the atmosphere has become so clogged with CO2 as to be threatening to humanity’s ongoing existence within a couple generations, and ragamuffins are STILL acting like it’s nothing more than Al Gore’s tax scam, I am close to apopleptic on a daily basis. My inner needle is duly moved.

I grew up in a time (born in 1957) when there were many, many faults in our society and culture, many appalling oppressions. But at LEAST there was a general sense that civility and some sort of public decorum, and appreciation for logic and historical perspective, was shared by a majority or plurality of citizens. There was a sense that progress would overcome those oppressions, and more and more people would come to savor equality and participation in a civilization. People had hope that the civil rights and feminist and environmentalist and gay rights and anti-poverty movements would actually make progress. I would have guessed that the Miss America and Miss Universe pageants would die from declining interest, as opposed to the owner of one of them being elected president.

With the Trumpian manifestation of an unbalanced and untethered mind in the electorate, hitherto viewed by most of us as “extremist” or “sociopathic, unhinged, and ignorant,” but now loud and proud and temporarily victorious, I am called upon to respond. It doesn’t seem, at the moment, at first glance, like sitting on my zafu, or contorting and breathing on my mat, is much better than quietism. It even seems that holding hands with dying people as they make that last exhalation, and then embracing their bereaved as the tears and words begin to flow in earnest, is beside the point . This activity seems to be like so much pissing into a volcano hoping to quell the surge of lava.

Seems.

That is not the case, of course. Fascism is contended with, undermined, in a million gestures, large and small over time. I am merely in the midst of reassessing, recalibrating, what had apparently been a too complacent approach to participation in the collective. I love what Marco Morelli, in his great introductory video to the Cosmos Cooperative, called Collective Genius. He called upon us to merge our contributions into a brilliant force that makes a difference. Therefore, with the most fervent of heart, with a mind on fire, I form common cause with all of you, in manning the ramparts against the scourge of fascism, the social and cultural darkness (or, shall I say, whiteness), which is rising against us like a deadly, fecal tide.

Back in Baby Boomer heyday, an exquisite musician named Leo Kottke had a song called “Pamela Brown,” and I have thought of that many times since November 8th. Leo had loved Pamela, but she preferred a guy with a truck, and spurned Leo’s love. So instead of a life of domesticity, he had a life of music, travel, meeting hundreds of people, exploring. “I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown,” he sang, and we knew he meant that losing out on her love was actually a blessing. It conferred upon him a lifestyle option, which he took.

These days, I have been thinking “I guess I owe it all to Donald Trump,” in a certain penetrating sense.

Because of that scoundrel’s election, and the presence of so many supporters of him, I go to the yoga mat with a sense of mission. I am now doing yoga to create a world that repels fascism. This means I am concentrating more deeply, as well as showing up more often.

I send money to organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Mercy Corps, Amnesty International, Project Drawdown, Rodale Institute, and the Muslim Legal Fund as if my pennies mattered.

I make three political phone calls to my elected Federal government representatives each week, and craft a barbed, trenchant email to the Republican senator among them each Monday.

I will soon be sending money to my progressive female Senator for her reelection campaign next year.

My very significant other and I have joined our local Audubon Society and go on nature walks more than we ever used to.

I have started a home garden for the first time since the 1990s (when I decided I’d rather stay inside during warm weather, listening to Muddy Waters, than be out there in the dirt.) Now, I am embracing the soil with fervor and joy.

I am buying a copy of Paul Hawken et al’s “Project Drawdown” book and sending it to my progressive female Senator.

I have started a meditation radio show at an independent radio station (WXRW, Milwaukee, and called “A Million Candles Burning”) in which I speak out for an integrally informed way of being in the world, and guide my five listeners in deepening practices.

I have called myself a feminist for nearly 40 years, and have earned my stripes in that way, but I am doubling down on it, devoting more time listening closely to women and their thoughts and feelings. Responding, challenging my own shadow sexism.

I am reaching out with more mindful intention to African American people in my workplace, being more thoughtful about cultivation of reciprocal communication with them, forging an alliance in reality which can withstand our awful shared milieu.

I have spent much more time in consideration of what legacy I want to leave my grandchildren, especially my granddaughter, so that, as much as it is up to me, they can live lives of joy and purpose and robust confidence, unfettered by the current stupidity.

I relax deeply into joyful communion with non-dual Spirit and smile at what I see. (Even as I sit here at the computer writing, I look up and see leaves across the street, dancing in sunshine and breeze, and I know that this is a revelation).

And I am doing my hospice spiritual care work as if each encounter, with each dying Milwaukeean, contributes to the bulwark of a newly emergent civilization.

Fear and despair are all around me and within me. I am responding, on a day by day, minute by minute, patient by patient basis, with the most resilience I can muster. I read the great writings of “death and dying sages” like Joan Halifax, Stephen Jenkinson, and Frank Ostaseski. Read my Gita and New Testament and Yoga Sutras. I spend time listening closely to the nuances of female songwriters, and then walk into those hospice rooms and, to the best of my ability, fight fascism as a spiritual care provider. It’s what I can do. It may not be much, but I am going to do it.

I don’t know what a hospice worker might have done under Mussolini, or Hitler, or Stalin, but under Donald Trump I open up my beginner’s mind as I listen to patients. I drop judgement of patient’s feelings and ideas. I seek empathy as if it were the hidden nectar that can heal our world. And express affection and affirmation towards those under my care like Johnny Appleseed sowing seeds of hope. I summon the daily courage to, in Joan Halifax’s words, “dwell in the still reality of how things are, rather than how we think things should be.”

I stock each room with Kleenex boxes, make sure lights are at optimal volume, shades are drawn how people want them. TV is at desired volume and channel. I check room temperatures, and fetch ice water and coffee for the thirsty. And I take to heart, as my ultimate job litmus test, the statement that if I’m speaking more than half the time, I am failing at what I do. Then I draw people out. And what they share is the human drama, writ large, heartbreaking on a daily basis. Sometimes funny, and almost always gorgeous in its own way.

We are in this together. Fascism is here. It apparently has always been here, in a lurking mode, crouching out of view, and has sprung onto the stage like a thug actor with no intelligent lines but instead live ammunition for the audience. How do we respond?

Wholeheartedly, with collective genius, in every aspect of our lives. I’ll quit writing now, because, as I said, if I’m speaking more than half the time, I am failing at what I do. It is time for me to listen to YOU.

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 3

January 22, 2018 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: VOLUME 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 3

Cosmos

| January 22, 2018

Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

Reading

Chapter 3: Arks, City Walls, World Boundaries, Immune Systems – The Ontology of the Walled Space
Excursus 1: Dying Later in the Amphitheater – On Postponement, the Roman Way
Excursus 2: Merdocracy – The Immune Paradox of Settled Cultures
Chapter 4: The Ontological Proof of the Orb
Excursus 3: Autocoprophogia – On Platonic Recycling
Excursus 4: Pantheon – The Theory of the Dome

Pages 237–440

Participants:

Geoffrey Edwards
John Davis
TJ Williams
Marco V Morelli
Douglas Duffins
Eduardo Rocha

Recorded: 2/9/2018

To join the conversation, please sign up and introduce yourself in our Infinite Conversations forum channel.

Protected: IV — I wait here every day

January 13, 2018 By wendyrb

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 2

December 19, 2017 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: VOLUME 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation 2

Cosmos

| December 19, 2017

Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

Reading:

Access: Anthropic Climate (review)
1. Dawn of the Long-Distance Closeness: The Thanatalogical Space, Paranoia and the Peace of the Realm
2. Vascular Memories: On the Reason for Solidarity in Its Inclusive Form

Pages 135–237.

Participants:

John Davis
Marco V Morelli
TJ Williams
Heather Fester
Geoffrey Edwards
Doug Duff
Jamie Ranger

Recorded: 1/11/2017

Join the Readers Underground

Salmon Run

November 8, 2017 By Mindful AI

Salmon Run

Paul Maylone

| November 8, 2017

Feature Image: Mashup of images by David Jacob (Katmai National Park and Preserve) [CC BY] and AK Rockefeller [CC BY-SA].

Music and Lyrics by Paul Maylone

DOWNLOAD

Lyrics

Salmon swimming upstream
Mating with natal precision.
Full of stress and sex,
They’re living fast and dying young.
You can spend this coin any way you want,
But only once. Only once.

Intelligent-Machine-Guide,
Do you know how it all ends up?
In some calm salvation
Or in a kind of salmon run?
Full of stress and sex,
We’re living fast and dying young.
Only once. Only once

Pray for us.
We’re never ever going backward.
We’re digital now.
Outside the rules of mother nature.
Pray for us.

All my friends and family
Swim inside pocket creation.
Through a one-way mirror,
Singing out every song we’ve ever sung.
How will we all know when upstream,
That it’s begun?
Only once only once only once.

Pray for us.
We’re never ever going backward.
We’re digital now.
Outside the rules of mother nature.
Pray for us.

The Case Against Liberation: Mystic Pessimism

November 7, 2017 By Mindful AI

The Case Against Liberation: Mystic Pessimism

Alexander Blum

| November 7, 2017

Feature Image: Atropos O Las Parcas by Francisco de Goya [via Wikimedia Commons, public domain]

Today, all political thought is apocalyptic. The conservatives desire stasis in a world mutating beyond their control, churning and transforming into the dissolution of all the fine boundaries they’ve devoted their lives to upholding. The liberals desire Christ to come with a sword and cut Donald Drumpf from the Oval Office, as if that single act should redeem the stars and stripes for all time to come. The communists wish for a vague notion of collective herd-liberation to uproot capital and create a paradise that would be akin to a new Eden. The fascists wish for God to become man, and to smite the evildoers with strength and a smile.

In apocalyptic times, I must turn to my roots, as a leftist through and through, someone who sees compassion, universality and love embodied in politics as the answer to cruel, authoritarian depersonalization. And yet, when I turn to these roots, I find them thorned and spiteful, calcified over by some eldritch thoughts that betray my old ‘common sense’.

The endings of leftist political treatises reveal quite blatantly the limits of our ability to reimagine society. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism tells us: “It would be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” and the book more effectively instills that sense in the reader than the possibility of an escape. In the end, Fisher provides only the ideal of a sense of universal working class solidarity as an alternative to our current state of alienation and despair. Adam Curtis ends his documentary HyperNormalization with a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the fact that the human animal is not properly evolved to deal with the Information Age, and will instead be consumed by it. Most leftist works of political theory are critiques, existing purely in the negative, in reaction, in relation to the active forces of capital. The great works of Marx have culminated, as much as I have tried my entire life to deny it, only in insane authoritarian societies. A Soviet world would be worse surely than an American empire, as evil as the American empire clearly is. That choice, between the colonial West or the brutal gulag, crushed all the workers’ sentiment that had been growing so steadily before the World Wars.

But what hope is there for a worker’s revolution in a world where most service workers and most cab and truck drivers will likely be rendered unemployed due to the approaching threshold of mass automation? Would a universal basic income create a new renaissance, of free artists, or would the excessive freedom result instead in a permanent sense of lost, depressed malaise, a population that would become half-hikikomori (a Japanese hermit) and half A Clockwork Orange (dilettantes)?

It is time to face facts. Capitalism is the root of all our problems, and yet the path out of capital is more uncertain than it has ever been. The dream of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of a globalized online consciousness unifying the mental sphere into a higher state of being, has been rendered excessively naive by the commercialization of the Internet. What freedom now exists in Facebook and Google? Did de Chardin even conceive of them? More worryingly, de Chardin himself said that a future eugenics would become ‘inevitable’. What will we become, then, as genetically-modified beasts slaving away under a future without meaningful work, where none of our information is private, right down to our conversations, and even our biometric data and our genetic makeup is opened wide to the corporations and bioengineers who will have the ultimate power over human evolution?

The old left won’t work. The old ideas won’t work. The problem is deeper than we have ever understood. The problem is so intrinsic to existence, capital itself is so intrinsic to our existence, that to cast it off is akin to casting off the curse of The Fall, the curse of the apple, the curse of malformed physical matter. The old leftist-mystic dream was for the striving animal to overcome the dim genetic urge and embrace a higher spiritual path of virtue.

And yet, how does one contradict what one is? How do we look past our own genetics, when we are made, in the eyes of modern science, as nothing but a material construction of those genetics? How do you overcome your own nervous system? Your own hands? The problem is surely that deep, as our genetics for millennia have encouraged us toward tribalism, misogyny, war, domination, rape and murder.

We are not a blank slate. Western philosophy and cognitive science have both proven that an organism requires an a priori cognitive system to apprehend and absorb information, a preset thinking machine that reacts to data in accordance with completely material engravings, the brain’s cruel and ancient hieroglyphics. The DNA does not speak for us. It speaks for itself, and for, as I shall later prove, the archetypal idea of the serpent.

Projects of radical liberation fail every time. Why must we deny this? In Russia, communism swallowed its own tail. There are also two recent American failures of leftist resurgence: the hippie movement and the summer of love became the decade of unfettered markets, the origin of our modern low wages and dim job prospects. Then there is Occupy Wall Street, where the old left was shooed away by the new intersectional left, and the ideas of infinite difference and infinite fragmentation of identity were supposed to bring us all together. Now, identity politics has broken the left irreparably. After all, if you are writing on politics and you are cisgender, that must be prelude to every sentence you write, correct? The implication is that there is no objectivity, there is no truth. There is no reality beyond the subjective shrug of our own solipsism. So then what becomes of our genetic heritage, and our accursed share? Denied, cast away, for a fantasy of ‘solidarity’, a pitiful reversed hierarchy, the meek over all else, even when the meek are trust fund babies and happen to inhabit a persecuted identity.

Class has, for all intents and purposes, been ripped away from the picture. Attempting to point this out brings forth accusations of not caring about gender or race. Then, a handful of rich young ‘oppressed’ people can continue their campaign to rule the campuses, while the society at large turns more and more reactionary. The left has won the university, no doubt. But the university has been irrelevant for a decade, most certainly now in the era of online.

What relevance does Marx have in the age of Google, when his apex met the gulag archipelago? I understand the attraction to Marx out of sheer outrage at capitalism, I truly do. But if Marx and left theory more generally had any tangible answers for us, someone would be out there right now building the commune. Instead, we just get books titled “Building the Commune”.

Real literature is inherently reactionary to the Marxist. The aim of literature is not to overthrow systems of power. Good literature, rather, infects us with life, in all its ugliest and most beautiful forms. If the goal of a novel is to put the world in order and teach you exactly how to change it, I surmise that you just read a terrible novel. Humanity is too complex to be summarized by an activist, and that is the sorry truth. How easily great writers like DH Lawrence would be dismissed by an activist as having nothing to offer to revolutionary thinking. How easily one could read the whole works of Poe, Melville, Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and at the end of it all, only be treated to an eye-roll and the question: “Wow, you really like white male authors, don’t you?”

The fixation upon the sublime cosmic whole, as infected the mind of Melville most poignantly, is not a revolutionary position. And yet all mystic authors seek that most confusing tide; all great authors are mystics in some way. They do not offer any method to heal the world. They simply wish for you to bask in oppression and suffering, and yes, at some level, to fall in love with it. It is reactionary indeed to love a complete story, the reflection of a complete humankind, a thing all too human, far, far from liberation and paradise.

The reflection of that honest, dark humanity doesn’t come from just another social contract. The black pools of our spirit are absolutely real, and they are embedded in our physiology. It’s in our genetics, as animals, to have a piece of us that comes from Cain, or Lucifer, or the serpent of Genesis.

How accursed really is our genome? How bad off are we, really? Well, our karma is our genetics. I propose that the origins of unequal material birth, the distribution of IQ, conscientiousness, agreeableness and other personality traits that determine our success or failure as individuals, this murderous inequality of nature, is embedded into the Christian Fall.

The serpent in the Fall is the key to all of this. The snake is the symbol first and foremost of our limited, non-transcendental state of being, and is at the heart of alchemy, Christianity, Kabbalah, and so many countless ancient myths. Consider the mystical stories told about the snake when it comes to the biological cell, the old alchemical dream of the discovery of the cell’s circular form arriving from the image of the Oroborous, the snake devouring its own tail.

The Oroborous, the flat circle of time, the consumption of life, is a symbol of sublime horror. It is incarnate in the Bhagavad Gita, where the lord Krishna convinces the hero Arjuna to go to war, to slaughter great and noble men, all to fuel Krishna’s infinite cycle, the rebirth, the conflation of life and death into the same whole. The Oroborous is a serpent, and the serpent is mortality and death. What else did Eve invite into the world? She invited the possibility of both knowledge and death.

Knowledge and death are both the gifts of a temporal existence. Floating like the Buddha in the metaphysical sublime whole, there is no knowledge. Knowledge is destroyed by infinite grace. There is also no death—it has been transcended. The wise serpent, who kills and taunts us, is the very image of our genetic code. What else is the tree of life, but a place where serpents dwell, hanging from the branches, awaiting a young ape to bite and to murder?

If the snake is a stand-in for death and knowledge, an agent of Lucifer’s influence, and Lucifer is the ‘prince of this world’, and the circular nature of time mirrors our own biological cells, and our DNA predisposes us toward hideous murderous animal behavior, then I do not see where in this portrait the casting off of shackles and the redemption of humankind in corporeal time could possibly emerge, particularly not at the height of the modern age of materialism, during the rule of Donald Drumpf and the underlying globalization of capital that founds literally every facet of your life. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” is the secular sublimated form of Christian original sin.

Worse and perhaps most devastating, Christian mysticism, save for pessimistic and anti-natalist Gnosticism, revolves entirely around hierarchy. The numinous of the entire undifferentiated pagan cosmos is translated into structure only through the nine hierarchies of angels rising all the way from angels to seraphim and capped with the Holy Trinity. What of the Hermetic dictum, then, ‘as above so below’? The mystical magnum opus of Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, cites tradition as the fourth letter of the name YHVH and the only method of passing on genuine esoteric knowledge to further generations. It is the Arcana Emperor (along with Hierophant), literally the domineering father, the face of structure and hierarchy, the ultimate enemy of the ‘free love’ mysticism desired by communists and adherents of the New Age alike.

The fact that the mystical worldview is bound by hierarchy, and hierarchy on Earth implies structural and material inequality, deals a fatal blow to the ideal of a communitarian society ruled by equals in loving liaison with one another. It is a traitor to humankind’s true identity on fallen Earth, in both the crude DNA of evolutionary psychology and the rigid models of esoteric tradition, order and inequality are embedded in all functioning mystical systems. The only image of absolute equality is the formless, listless Dionysian pantheism that will surely accomplish nothing for its sheer lack of content, its lack of form, indeed—it’s lack of hierarchical structure.

The mystical worldview has been co-opted completely by unwarranted optimism. What, truly, is this dreamy solidarity, the unfiltered unity of all humanity, not under an ideology, but upon a great feeling? It is the Moon Arcana! It is the shapeless, formless, listless and irresponsible Dionysian nightmare, chaos and mud and void, and some believe it will work to establish cosmic peace and order? That is a confusion of metaphysics at the highest level. Without hierarchy, without inequality, without order, we are all nothing more than the orange goo at the finality of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the humankind too weak to face the world, who instead cemented themselves together into one unholy synthesis of absence, in exchange for an imaginary bliss.

So where does this leave us? In what wasteland do we strive to pretend that the curse of the serpent is not alive in every pulse of electricity that runs through our fingers, and our synapses, soon to be exposed to algorithm and stockholder in the vaunted halls of our inevitable tech overlords?

You may suggest that I am being apocalyptic, but once a simple face scan can unlock your phone, and that same scan can detect your sexuality, and detect your political views, how soon until all our biometric data is known and the only privacy we have left are our own unexpressed thoughts, most of them a point of vast depression? That day has already come.

If we deny the true depths of what we must overcome, we will never so much as glimpse the other side. If such an other side exists, I do hope to reach it. But to speak of optimism and psychedelics and brotherly love as our one cure in this present hour seems to me a sheep offering its belly for laceration.

Involving us, evolving us (Epilogue)

October 23, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Epilogue

Involving us, evolving us (Epilogue)

Caroline Savery

| October 23, 2017

Feature Image: mammovies, Meditation [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0}

“When the words are spoken, there is silence. When the relative is over, the absolute remains. The silence before the words were spoken, is it different from the silence that comes after? The silence is one and without it the words could not have been heard. It is always there—at the back of the words. Shift your attention from words to silence and you will hear it.

“The mind craves for experience, the memory of which it takes for knowledge. …[T]he mind craves for formulations and definitions, always eager to squeeze reality into a verbal shape. Of everything it wants an idea, for without ideas the mind is not. Reality is essentially alone, but the mind will not leave it alone—and deals instead with the unreal. And yet it is all the mind can do—discover the unreal as unreal.”
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

∞

As anti-apartheid freedom fighter Steve Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The oppressors want to keep us asleep in a dream of their making—and a seductive dream it is. But before we lose more of our hard-won freedoms, and before we mentally degrade too far in our ability to examine our choices, we must make the one choice that will transform everything: to awaken from that awful dream, to recover our power and autonomy to be sentient in this situation, and to start envisioning and building alternative flows of power into existence.

If we were to resist Trump, cooperatively, and with decentralized power: this could in fact be the time in which we rediscover our power of knowing better, the sanity of basic human goodness, the appropriateness of life-embracing ethics to cut through the ruse and topple even the fanciest false despots. It would at least be a broader and deeper will-to-insight, as the Occupy movement in 2011 was an inkling, that when we act together in our common best interests, when we have in-depth conversations, thereby building relationships with each other, we do better for ourselves, for our lives and our situations. The merger of capitalist interests and government (corporatocracy) is now complete in the unholy, inverted image of Trump ruling as President of the United States of America. May we finally—all of us—admit that these systems of oppression do not truly serve us, and that the objectives of the ruling elite do not represent us.

Six years ago, Occupy was a container for our disenfranchised rage. As a social movement, it incorporated only minimal norms and structures by which to circulate conversation equitably (Occupy’s version of Consensus). Because Consensus was so ill-suited to its application in the large-scale encampments of diverse people, unskilled in its norms and protocols and unseasoned in its usage, some argue that Occupy’s dysfunctional attempts at self-governance through Consensus turned people off to imagining that grassroots anarchistic organization could really work.

What Occupy lacked, though, was a unifying platform beyond the unfocused rejoinder of “We are the 99%.” Occupy lacked a method and a structure robust enough to empower conversation into action and to transform people’s daily lives beyond the boundaries of the mass encampments. It did not, at the time, emerge with a coherent vision. But it was a crucial, necessary discourse.

To the extent that the Occupy movement’s demands were never fulfilled, the agitation in the form of a movement will undoubtedly resurface. The perennial question is whether we are prepared to face our shadows—really reflect and penetrate to the roots of grapplings with ego, greed, violence, and inequity—and apply our intelligence to learn how to be more efficient and effective next time.

What I am proposing is a well-designed, open, and participatory system that operates and functions like a genuine improvement over the systems governing us daily right now. It privileges the best ideas from the designers’ minds in its process to set in places some basic structures, before letting in a flood of users. But it would be designed, at the cybernetic level, to serve our visionary purposes as a planetary collective.

However—and this is key—the designers themselves would not be privileged above-and-beyond other human beings as a result of their contributions…their ideas are. The memes they baked, whose recipes they innovated upon, will get passed down through the generations. Whereas the conventional notion of how an individual human being “passes on their legacy” is by reproducing (babies), let’s flip that: if we identified as a participatory collective, then we might find our purpose in the history of how the memes we affected passed on to benefit humanity. The world’s innovators and inventors who are giving their lives to generating solutions know that no purpose is more important: any exploits regarding their ego simply don’t compare in meaningfulness. The actual systems are what individual human actors can tack their legacy onto—not the hoarding of personal, private wealth that accumulates only to feed the psychological hungry-ghost of the ego and the privileged situation of one’s direct descendants.

Now that we have reached “global consciousness,” with our communications technology forming a kind of “brain” by which we can know ourselves at the collective, planetary scale, we are pressured (by the new terms of our survival) to undertake a shift in consciousness as a society. Instead of operating at the egoic level, seeking to reproduce our bodies and grow our personal wealth (these material, manifest expressions of ourselves), we must seek to propagate our well-adapted ideas, nourish those, develop those to maturity, and see how those interact with and shape the reality for the offspring of all beings.

This is our proper role in the life matrix—because, three generations from now, our progeny may not know our name, what we looked like, or what our innermost thoughts were. But they will know directly, through their lived experience, what contributions we made to the conditions they find themselves in. We can provide those children of the future beautiful conditions in which to exist. To achieve this, we need to develop and apply strong minds, and we need to engage as self-aware participant-agents in the media and actual environments we’re immersed in. And this is a much more useful, beneficial and sustainable movement than defending the privilege of certain (elite/white/male) babies to be born, and to prosper.

This is a disruptive time. Use it to let your consciousness soften—resist the urge to harden, to clench, to cling, to put up hard walls. Those who can bear witness to the skin of their so-called-reality tearing, those who can weather the stretch (and endure the pain of stretching), are able to permit other people’s truths to infiltrate their own consciousness. These people grow stronger, and transcend into new depths of blissful awareness and personal power—like an athlete’s physical endurance and breakthroughs. Tolerating the discomfort of holding several divergent perspectives to be valid at once and just, compassionately, bearing with other people and meeting them where they are at—you thus open yourself up to spiritual experience, just like the ecstasy of a mother giving birth could not be what it is without the burden of carrying the child over nine months, nor, the incredibly difficult ordeal of the delivery itself.

We need disruptions in order for the illusion to waver—just long enough that we are willing to take a fresh look at what we think is true and real. We need to endure for each other if we are going to take this moment and truly go beyond it, evolve our consciousness sufficiently so as not to regress further, to actually learn from it, grow from it, and become better people as a result. Don’t be afraid—nor indulge any of fear’s sister apparitions, such as anger or hostility. Be open. Be strong. Embrace the difficulty out of a sense of love for your life—and love others, no matter where they are in their own journey and process. Because, as Stephen Covey says, collective change can only happen at “the speed of trust.”

Climate change is well underway. We need to mobilize the fullness of our human potential and resources to address the imbalances in our ecosystems. We are facing a fatal precipice, in which we expect to support a human population numbering over seven billion on a biological platform of decimated oceans, corrupted soils, degraded lands, depleted forests, and a rapidly warming climate. That we could accomplish this feat (short of drastic changes) is a beyond-absurd delusion. That so many people subscribe to it, though, is cause for extreme alarm. And after all these exhaustive imperative arguments about the necessity of dismantling today’s incumbent power structures, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out: that our total environmental and social collapse is empirically accelerated by—ta da!—economic disparity and concentration of wealth in the hands of a global elite.

It is a huge waste of increasingly precious time and attention that we even legitimize these structures with our investments of belief in authenticity and authority. Notice how these patterns of harsh regressive actions—the aggressive executive orders, barring journalists from the White House press briefings, purging devoted personnel from government offices, fabricating outrageous claims that are aggressively defended while real investigative efforts are branded “fake news,” blatant defiance of revered political and social norms—are designed to make us feel powerless.

Whereas, if we can handle these actually-challenging tasks—of holding space for one another, of tolerating differences and being flexible in our assumptions, of letting go of the need to feel superior to others, of invoking the courage to dream up and build up alternatives, of building collaborative and hopeful alternatives even in the thick of our daily courageous battles for survival—then we are actually far more powerful than the the weak-minded global elite (and powerful enough to resist the lure of “power over” hierarchical social structures which lay waste to life’s intrinsic natural potential).

We are powerful enough to burst through the artificial narrative-bubble of projections of power-over, and step together into the brisk air of the real world in all its complexity—painful, wonderful, multiplicitous. If, in that fine first inhalation of fresh air, we take in a deep moment of peace, we may hear the aspirations of all living things, reflecting to us:

We want to live.

We want to live well.

We want to embrace the good intrinsic to life.

Do you hear this whisper in your ear? Do you feel it in your breast? Do you catch visions of it in your dreams?

We have the power to afford a far finer future, holistically; to all our present-day relations, to subsequent generations of human beings, and in symphonic concert with all the living beings that encompass us as our sacred mirror.

In gazing at this sacred mirror,

May I relinquish the line separating my apparent self from my environment (the two are one).

May I both give and receive compassion (the two are one).

May I see profound wisdom in my reflection.

May all beings know happiness and the root of happiness.

Reclaiming power and refining purpose (Redemption)

October 23, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Part VI

Reclaiming power and refining purpose (Redemption)

Caroline Savery

| October 23, 2017

Feature Image: AK Rockefeller, Heavenly Hands [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

“And man prevails through his style, through his elegance, through his control of forces. Not through his power, but through his control. People who confuse art with attack forget that what art is mainly concerned about is with form, and adequate form, and the artist is the first to know when a form is no longer as serviceable as it was. You see? And that’s what innovation is about. He’s trying to keep that form going and he finds it necessary to extend, elaborate it, and refine it; to adjust it to new situations. That’s what innovation is about. It’s not to get rid of something simply to be getting rid of it, or to turn something around. It’s to continue something that is indispensable.” — Albert Murray

∞

Over the course of this essay series, I’ve taken elaborate pains to articulate what I assess to be the subtle roots of our collective difficulties at this historic moment. I’ve shown how the root of power lies in consciousness: the memes we embody, as well as the actions arising from their logics, give us individual, interpersonal, institutional, and political power. I’ve discussed methods for disclosing and reflecting on the oft-invisible memes at play in our consciousness; for discerning malicious memes and cultivating beneficial ones; for the concentrating of memetic power, including how memes can “feed back” and influence not just our external infrastructure, but our inner psychologies; and for the exercise of natural and memetic power at various scales.

At this point, dear reader, you should have some sense of how you could more mindfully wield the power immanent in your individual consciousness—and, by extension, in your environments and relationships—toward prosocial outcomes. In this final essay, I will proceed to explore how we might redeem our innate-yet-deferred powers collectively: in existing conditions of the present day.

Our current gridlock and hesitation to defect toward a different system are defined in large part by our compliance (via coercion) to continue playing their game—the “winners and losers” game, as discussed in a previous essay. We continue to play their game because we perceive that doing so is how we perpetuate our physical survival—that is, we acknowledge that the paycheck we earn is a means to put food on the table, a roof over our heads, etc.—and, of course, in spite of the devil’s bargain this entails that binds us to those “hungry-ghost” elite, we love our lives and will do what it takes to defend them. We continue to play the game because we’re scared of what will happen if we stop.

We may imagine that transparent resistance would generate even more violence and suffering, say, in the form of a repressive, militarized police state. And—in lieu of an inspiring, unifying shared social identity (which, as Erich Fromm writes in Escape from Freedom, is a supportive condition for a functional participatory democracy)—it is not unusual that the defiance of one weak social order can lead to the installment of a more repressive social regime. These fears are reasonable, as history has shown.

But human body-minds are vulnerable to reacting to the perception of barriers—even when that amounts to reacting to the idea or anticipation of a potential barrier—and not a responsive engagement with the barrier itself. As I hope to have shown, ideas are empty of power without our participation in them, and thus are a lot more mutable than we may, on the daily, believe (even, perhaps, magically so). Most barriers are mental projections only; most barriers are illusory—and those that remain firm may be guideposts, or firm ground, by which we can navigate even as the vast majority of our limiting beliefs dissolve.

If you play by their rules, you are forced to acknowledge their power—which is the playing ground on which they WANT to meet any opponents. In the case of gross power imbalances of a technological and organizational nature, resisting the flow of power (or, resisting the people that have power over you) head-on is inadvisable and can waste energy. As a grassroots activist for many years, I’ve seen this dynamic play out far too many times on the streets and in the systems of American institutions. Perhaps because our democracy has been so long-lived, this nation has innovated new ways to repress protestors—witness the sound cannon, first used on the streets of Pittsburgh against citizens in 2008 (I was there), the spread of “free speech zones,” or the military-style tactics used against Standing Rock protesters. If we see street-protesting succeeding in other nations, that is because they are situated in a different non-linear historical time perspective: a time when on-the-streets intervention by the autonomous masses really COULD change political futures.

The U.S., as Slavoj Zizek points out, is a corrupted form of democracy, in which traditional institutional powers have begun seeking to manage their populations, rather than engage them in the political process; meaning they effectively disallow the people from participating meaningfully to structurally reconfigure society (through substantive discourse and democratic decision-making), and instead permit people only certain acceptable channels by which they can modify superficial features on top of an incontrovertible architecture. To parallel this with emergent patterns in the tech world: rather than allow the people to overhaul the code of society (ala Open Source), these neo-fascist elite would rather keep us locked into a platform they profit from, while we develop and use applications on top of that untouchable framework (ala Apple).

Through the lens of memes, narratives, and innate human power, then, what would be some strategic interventions we could undertake?

Non-cooperation

I believe we need a vast noncooperation movement within and without our government, organized on the Internet and face-to-face in communities. Anyone who is sane, grounded and sensible should consider simply not following Trump’s orders (in an autonomous, self-secure manner, through thoughtful consideration checked against one’s inner ethics and mindful assessments of one’s needs—not as a left-wing “identity” to conform to). When I say “anyone who is sane,” I mean recovering that sense of “I can make adult, deliberate choices; I will not merely follow orders”—like the historic legacy of conscientious objectors who responded defiantly when handed government or military orders to deploy.

We need mass subversion—simple non-cooperation and defection to favorable alternatives. This can look like “opting in” to visions of humanity that you do prefer, the futures you would like to inhabit, by investing your diverse capital in alternative ways. At the individual scale: You can use your dollar-power by tithing or investing in transformative causes. You can use your talent-power to provide worthy initiatives with in-kind support or volunteering. You can use your emotional-power to hold a supportive space for another person to grapple with their own healing process. Or, if you’re yearning to affect action at the institutional level, you can hit em where it hurts by not paying federal taxes. It all depends on your particular circumstances—including your economic precarity and your overall health and wellbeing—and your degree of freedom to reevaluate and reorganize your choices.

Art by Joshua Mays

When you fully know yourself for your dimensionality as a being, you can better harness your innate life power to devise wonderfully creative options for how you might intervene with your reality, in the present moment. The bottom line is, the choice is yours, and smarter choices = greater outcomes.

At the very least, and this is a subtle but powerful point, you are putting your attention elsewhere—slowly making the mythic schema that thrives on your attention irrelevant. And whether you look inward (reflection in meditation, bodywork, or other healing techniques) or outward (reflection in wilderness) to get back in touch with the real, firm nature underlying all this mess, you will grow stronger and happier, regardless. Participating directly in our own lives, and learning from feedback, drives positive growth. On a collective scale, this could look like building civic engagement opportunities to effect participatory change on a human, manageable scale (such as libertarian municipalism which effectively would decentralize power into place-based, place-aware localities).

Further, you can focus on curating a personal code of ethics that will have resonating effects in all of your interactions. To live your life by moral, ethical, and social laws that are intact—a code whose rules and flows serve people and require human inputs, and for which you need no greater authority beyond the appropriateness (evaluated through feedback loops) to human communities and one’s complex relations—is quite like modeling a healthy ecosystem, as a matter of fact.

The patterns in which life naturally flourishes are the patterns which truly give you life. You can defect from the purported legitimacy of corporatocratic systems by doing better for yourself in non-materially-accumulative ways—by being healthier, happier, more peaceful, more in touch, and overflowing with loving-kindness toward all of your relations. The current system can neither commodify and sell, nor deliver on, these as-yet-unmanifest but tremendously beautiful patterns of life embracing life. Direct, sensitive relationship with other beings and your ecosystem can fulfill these needs far more elegantly than the overlay of global capitalist market dynamics involving the production, transportation, advertising, selling, and waste byproducts wrapped up in consumer goods.

Using Illusion

Trump, while so perfectly embodying the shadow side of capitalism and ambitions to power-over, is also a fragile target. If you ask, “what is Trump’s objective at the end of the day?” it seems obvious that his goal, regardless of what decisions were tangibly made, is to feel good about himself. His central purpose in being President is to serve his grandiose mental model of himself—and not to serve anyone else. Well—could we give him the outcome he seeks, without abiding his reprehensible decisions? Could we provide him with the nourishment he craves, in our kindness?

You see, the executive orders he loves proudly slapping his name onto—they don’t have to mean anything. In lieu of manifestly removing the immediate threat, such as through impeachment, we could just begin pretending he’s not there. Like there’s a ghost running the White House. All the executive orders are just ignored, like a “did you hear something?” I’m talking mass consent to a shared delusion—but one that is less dangerous to numerous beings than to keep hallucinating that Trump is a legitimate authority figure (i.e., President).

We could also utilize a nifty innovation of the digital era: we could ghost him. Imagine the entire orchestra of people arranged in the government not grinding to a halt, but instead, going about their daily business—meanwhile, all giving him the cold shoulder. Because Trump thrives on fame and infamy equally, to deprive him of both forms—of any attention at all—might kill his interest in the role, entirely. It’s exactly in such ways that Trump is fragile—and if we, the American people, don’t quickly exploit this weakness to our collective benefit, please don’t kid yourself that another ambitious global force won’t do so just as well.

Here’s an alternative scenario. Let’s imagine we were to approach Trump like he was a feeble, rigid old man in our charge, or a petulant, self-absorbed child, whose emotions—as mature and responsible adults, we are obliged to manage. We set Trump up with the illusion that his initiatives are succeeding. Given Trump’s narrow consumption of media, we could immerse the White House in a holodeck or simulation of sorts, and surround him at every turn with actual fake news and actors portraying White House staffers orchestrated to proclaim a constant stream of stories about his policies’ successful outcomes, and the ways in which the (simulated) world is changing under his fantastic leadership. (O, what grand poetic justice to make a reality show of this incredible debacle—but with Trump getting “punk’d” while the American people laugh along!)

Returning to the seduction wherein human beings tend to crave narratives that affirms their already-existing framework of ideas: I’d be willing to bet everything I own that Trump would absolutely take the bait of putting his faith in a simulation that (unlike the real world and as reported in the real news) served to consistently affirm his self-image. So let him harmlessly live out that fantasy, finally satiated in a customized bubble of a world, in which everyone worships him. Let him write his executive decrees to nowhere, like a dementia patient writing letters to a love lost decades ago, as though they’re really being sent in the mail, as though they are really going to be received. As psychologically fragile as he is: let him have his tiny games, while the rest of us figure out how to live out our lives together.¹This may have already begun in fact. I began writing these pieces shortly after Trump was elected last year, when my provisions for undertaking a conscientious response to Trump’s volatile role were mere theories. But check out this brief video from Stephen Colbert reporting that White House aides are now actively engaged in managing the perceptions of Trump through omitting and carefully framing the information presented to him. This practice is a natural emergence over the course of the year Trump has been in office, likely a result of staffers’ witnessing Trump’s extreme and emotional reactions to hearing news stories (and out of self-preservation on the part of the staffers, too, no doubt). The video proceeds to a satirical segment, “Real News Tonight,” which lampoons Trump’s reactionary sensitivity to new stories by the newscasters augmenting exactly what news gets told, keeping their one crucial and powerful viewer in mind: Trump. Besides being funny, the segment worryingly illustrates the influence Trump could indeed be having on news media in terms of how it presents its narratives.

new 1lluminati, burning bush instructs the primates [CC BY]

Oh, the oft kind and gentle beauty of the little white lie. We let them have their trifling illusion, but they cannot have our lives.

This proposal illuminates the beautiful side to the causes for concern I discussed throughout the earlier essays—how our built-in cognitive biases impair our ability to effectively perceive the world. Since we cannot overcome them overnight, why don’t we leverage perceptual shortcomings to beautiful ends?

We have the power to use the art of illusion against those who seek to delude us for their gain. To transmute what has become a corrosive aspect of proliferating, malicious disinformation in our society—this would amount to a comprehensive redemption of our difficulties—that is, turning the shadow side to the light side. Meeting Trump where he’s at, and accommodating him to heal. The ultimate realization of this “technology” for “good.”

Do we have what it takes?

At this point in the narrative, for the first time, I must hesitate. I am not confident I could, in good faith, endorse the construction of a totally distributed, anarchist order in which all people co-determined how their lives looked, in freedom and love for life.

Why not—and is this in contradiction to earlier arguments made?

Not necessarily. The core reason for my reservations is that no structure (or lack of structure) is neutral. Across the people of United States, at least, and confidently, I can say: we do not yet have the widespread proliferation and utilization of, practice with, or faith in adaptive, life-enhancing and thrive-able memes. Lacking these practices for the selective assessment and adoption of life-enhancing memes, we would only replicate the unconscious patterns (internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological) to which we are accustomed. As noted at the end of the Power essay, just wanting to change is not enough. Before an authentically participatory framework could be meaningful (indeed, viable) across human societies, a reconditioning process in which exposure to and practice of different patterns would be necessary. Without livable memes, we cannot make a livable situation.

But—urgently—an intervention of some kind, that meets the needs of today, is needed. We see the elite cult of hungry-ghost capitalists, casting dismissive glares at our rage, laughing at our suffering from behind their self-aggrandized walls, willing to throw the American people and all the world’s people—and heck, all life on Earth, too, for that matter—under a bus in a devil’s bargain for their personal gain?

This. hurts. to. look. at.

But we gather our spirits, and we do look.

In the space of bearing witness to the hurtful actions of those protecting their perceived privilege, let’s breathe and wait for clarity to arise.

How about we let them gleefully run off with the goods, believing they’ve left us disabled. We’ll simply cut a tiny, unnoticed hole in bottom of the goody-sack. By the time they think they’ve reached safety and lustily peer into the bag: all the goods will have slipped out, unseen, and unrecoverable.

Version Control: Strike it & Reboot

This version of U.S. government is corrupted. Systems are fragmented, and are facing likely catastrophic failure. We urgently need to make a copy, like a backup, and reboot from there.

So Trump & company want to corrupt the government that millions of veterans gave their lives for, that millions of citizens fought for rights within…to build a self-serving, insular, fascist, shadow government? OK. Let them. We can build a light government that is once more authentically controlled and directed by the people. One that, like their project to corrupt our democratic systems for consolidated power, is compatible (like an app or plug-in) with existing frameworks, but takes the patterns in a different direction. One that, one morning, looks just like it did a moment ago, but will be subtly shifting the channels through which institutional and collective power flows. (This, in a such a way that is probably even less disruptive than what Trump’s impact on society was, yesterday!)

We simply create a parallel government. “White hat” hackers can and should help with this, by creating parallel, encrypted systems mirroring the ones in existence, for all departments of government to use—only inaccessible by the Commander-in-Chief and his cabal. We would be able to use many of the same processes and structures that are already in place, thus streamlining the transition. Government workers would no longer be actually accountable to Trump & company (er, family, er, cabinet), but would instead by restored to a role where they serve the purposes of people and the Earth to the best of their abilities as individuals and in teams, and are accountable directly to the American people—almost like in a holacratic model. We don’t need a president even, if it’s too scary to think about installing another individual (as a challenge to Trump): just gather a board of trusted, diverse, brilliant, qualified people and a highly effective set of shared governing agreements to fill in as a board in the temporary “executive” role.

AK Rockefeller, light [via Flickr, CC BY-SA]

All of this is proffered to the extent we even want to replicate bureaucratic systems at the federal and state levels—which in many cases may reinforce suboptimal systems. Not to mention better, more democratic models may be out there, waiting for us to engage with them freely.

This plot has various elements to its advantage: mainly, the widespread disgust and discontent of citizens AND government personnel alike, ready to DO SOMETHING that will move humanity in a positive direction as soon as possible. AND we have the potential energy encapsulated in brilliant people who WANT to help but don’t have the social mechanisms through which to channel their energies toward collaborative solutions. Also, though, it has this perk: Trump is quite obviously not interested in facts, nor in understanding complex issues. So, it would be like every government office and personnel is using their traditional role to perform various duties and functions—just like they normally would, drawing no suspicion that anything is any different—however, their work would actually be informed by the light government.

In lieu of crafting a masterful virtual-reality media bubble around Trump, these actual government workers may be tasked to generate fake reports about what they’re accomplishing and how they’re fulfilling on Trump’s objectives, in a manner that satisfies Trump’s currently-impossible-to-placate needs for personal supremacy as President, and that does not draw attention to its artifice. (This might require building a small additional government office, perhaps entitled the Ministry of Presidential Aims Fulfillment, that constructs the fake reports and delivers them to Trump & company. Do you see the potential to invert some of Orwell’s 1984 dystopian elements, and subvert disempowering structures into more light, life-serving forms?) We can use Trump’s weaknesses of perception against him and for us, instead of the reverse scenario, which presently constitutes our reality: this absurd overwrought mass hallucination that Trump’s blatant failings now actually represent the people and interests of the United States, due to his installment in a particular office.

Let’s partition the corrupt system to mitigate its harm, and let’s reclaim the tools and processes of authentic democracy with great compassion, great faith, and an enthusiasm to rival the Americans’ upon Britain’s withdrawing from the Revolutionary War; or to rival slaves and abolitionists when the 13th Amendment was established; or when universal suffrage was won. (Whomever your actual, philosophical or spiritual ancestors—someone in your lineage has tasted the joy of liberation!) More than ever, we have the actual technology: the communication, collaboration, and governance tools; more and more diverse, tech savvy people with high levels of education; and the organizational skills embedded across humankind to coordinate a “light” coup, with general and cooperative training specifically as an essential lynchpin.

Consider it the upgrade our democracy has long needed. A bunch of fascist hooligans and elite buffoons accelerated the process for us. But we can take it beyond their blinding pale.

Mythic-Scale Intervention

There is a need for a unifying narrative, a set of memes that could provide the fuel to transform the cooperative actions of many. What might those memes be?

Here’s one potential offering.

There is an incredibly precious, naturally good seed of an idea, buried in the mythos of the United States: our founding fathers had faith in people’s abilities to self-govern. Our founding fathers fought for democracy. They had personally seen and suffered from tyranny, and they desired to design a system that allowed people greater freedoms than ever before. This is the bright and beautiful side to this nation’s origin story, which also contains a horrifically violent legacy. We must integrate these two to come together as a nation. We can, collectively, destroy and compost the horrific sides of this mythos, and reinvigorate the life-affirming side. Like a prayer or aspiration hurtled, like a flag flapping proudly in the breeze, we can proclaim:

We can do better for ourselves than tyrannical social orders would allow.

We know we can.

So: do we dare to take action toward that hopeful horizon?

We will.

There’s no place like home…

So, we’ve looked at how we could strike and reboot the extant structures. But how could we freshly reinterpret the purposes of a free and generative society?

There are countless small ways we can reclaim self-governance and refund people’s power to intervene for community resilience. From farmer’s markets and community supported agriculture to “slow money” investing clubs and crowdfunding, to cooperative enterprises and local civic discussion-and-action groups…the list goes on. There are many real, actual, on the ground initiatives that we can tie into a refreshment and improvement of our meta-mythos. The sum total of all these actions could equate to no less than a new American revolution.

At the collective or institutional scales, we can also model a pattern of behavior that sets new realities into potential fruition. Rolling Jubilee in the U.S. is a model for charitable and conscientious peer-to-peer giving, occurring spontaneously between members in the same drowning economic boat. Like a present-day Chataqua exalting basic human dignity and mutual aid in the thick of the debt crisis, Rolling Jubilee is a jubilant celebration of solidarity among “the 99%.” Pia Mancini of Open Collective, in her work with visionary platform startups and her talks about “upgrading democracy for the Internet era,” is calling for a mass restructuring of business, legal, financial, and institutional norms.

Especially relevant to all readers who use social media frequently: we could divest from corporate social media platforms, wherein profiteers sell our attention to advertisers’ interests and increasingly political interests want to manipulate what we see on the same platform we do our social organizing on. We could alternatively invest in cooperative platforms that are designed to democratically serve users’ social and cultural needs (like Social.coop, running on Mastodon, or the one I’m working on, Cosmos.coop).

Technologically, we’ve designed and modeled systems that would produce far better outcomes than what is happening now, making a widespread “upgrade” seem feasible if not imminent. We have: cryptocurrencies; complex computer modeling systems; participatory budgeting; ecologically-attuned business model innovation; an extremely robust field of human centered design and software development practices;platforms and methods for dialogue & democratic decision-making; etc.

As noted in the previous essay, there are diverse streams of thought evolving to create better ways of relating to the world. There is a pattern there, a meta-story (as Paul Hawken tells in Blessed Unrest). If we can see the pattern (of diverse, indigenous initiatives to reclaim power and establish alternative structures, practices, and networks) then we can act deliberately to amplify that pattern and align our lives with the story of the people it represents.

We have the innate capacity to develop what it takes

Let’s revisit that daunting question once more: Do we really have what it takes to govern ourselves?

As I alluded to in my concern above, in terms of the “software” (our brains) on which this new system would run, that might take some careful handling. My reservations about undertaking a “system overhaul” are what drive my prudence in advising that we stick to a familiar system, strive for minimal disruption, enact smooth transitions, and design mindfully so as to effect certain immediately positive benefits for users over the status quo (the status quo being things continuing on as they are today, with Trump effectively acting as President of the United States). Given the upset and disruption Trump is causing, a non-hierarchical conscientious-collective coup in which everything looks just as much like “business as usual” as before Trump took office on its day 1 of roll-out would be inherently appealing to the majority of Americans.

Now, ideologically might be where our biggest barrier exists.

While we have in our favor a general sentiment (zeitgeist) of “I can’t believe we can’t do better than this!” (a rightful dubiousness given our social and intellectual sophistication), still many of us don’t believe that it is possible to self-govern. Some of us would vastly prefer to follow a lunatic authoritarian as he and his squad turn this once-strong democracy into a banana republic, than to trust decentralized distributed rule. Many people rail against the idea that cooperative governance could work—while failing to notice that the technical training in how to meaningfully cooperate has been systematically suppressed in the United States since at least World War II (because it doesn’t conform to predominant myths about ourselves as a competitive, achievement-oriented society).

Thus, to encode a different set of adaptive behaviors in the populace will require cultural evolution, and practice with new models. Employee ownership is on the vanguard of this. Employee ownership seeds microcultures within businesses that follow a different set of rules concerning governance and control. Such alternative systems optimize for alternative outcomes—in this case, wealth and stability for the business’ employees, rather than all profit flowing only to the investment class investors—and yet still succeed in the market. Especially key is that employee-owned businesses can “plug in” to the existing “receptor” systems of the dominant meta-schema (that is, they look and act like businesses in the eyes of the law)—akin to a virus fitting compatibly into a receptor. We need such flexible “plug-ins” (apps/adaptations) to redirect our society’s collective resources in a way that actually serves to benefit the majority of people, not purely the privileged elite.

What we lack is the belief in ourselves, perhaps. What we have lost is the ability to influence the narrative, and thus we very infrequently receive the message that we can do better and be more. But I tell you: It is better to betray the U.S. founding fathers’ systems (especially since they themselves endorsed that citizens undertake a process of refining and revising the government whenever those structures failed to serve people’s purposes) than it is to betray their highest ideal: that humankind was capable and worthy of self-governance.²It is worth reproducing this passage from the beginning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence here: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/

We cannot turn our back on that aspiration—even as we have let ourselves grow intoxicated with greed, sickened by shallow self-indulgence, seduced by flashy wealth, and made meek by bellicose intimidation…and even as we undertake the long-term process to heal from this all. I still strongly believe that we can do it, and I believe that if we tried, we would only see.

Many of my grassroots activist and community organizer friends feel similarly, I believe, because every day, we are building all kinds of better systems, stronger relationships, and more beautiful ways of being. Why couldn’t we scale that up? In fact, like a virus under the right conditions, it could very well spread like wildfire. Beautiful memes have succeeded in suddenly and widely spreading to hearts and minds before, throughout history, and this process is exponentially amplified by the Internet. It has been done before, in times of tyrannical government. It can be done again, and even better, with more innovation, more integration, more artfulness in the execution, and much less violence and destruction…

If we act well, and if we act now.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	This may have already begun in fact. I began writing these pieces shortly after Trump was elected last year, when my provisions for undertaking a conscientious response to Trump’s volatile role were mere theories. But check out this brief video from Stephen Colbert reporting that White House aides are now actively engaged in managing the perceptions of Trump through omitting and carefully framing the information presented to him. This practice is a natural emergence over the course of the year Trump has been in office, likely a result of staffers’ witnessing Trump’s extreme and emotional reactions to hearing news stories (and out of self-preservation on the part of the staffers, too, no doubt). The video proceeds to a satirical segment, “Real News Tonight,” which lampoons Trump’s reactionary sensitivity to new stories by the newscasters augmenting exactly what news gets told, keeping their one crucial and powerful viewer in mind: Trump. Besides being funny, the segment worryingly illustrates the influence Trump could indeed be having on news media in terms of how it presents its narratives.
2.	↑	It is worth reproducing this passage from the beginning of the U.S. Declaration of Independence here: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/

That which corrupts, that which creates (Power)

October 23, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Part V

That which corrupts, that which creates (Power)

Caroline Savery

| October 23, 2017

Feature Image: new 1lluminati, Tasty World (crop) [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

Perhaps there is a common ground for humankind that runs deeper than the machinations of a “power-over” mythology. Indeed, as biological organisms, all humans have needs: for biological survival, for human relationships and connection, and, ultimately, for self-realization. The current status quo meets those needs inadequately—due to the concentration of power through dominator hierarchies—such that for various people in the population, needs may be grossly exceeded or severely undermet. Let us envision a more optimal design that meets more needs through respecting life’s innate capacity for intelligence and beauty.

“Do we want employees who, when told by a corrupt manager to doctor the records and perjure the company, will do so without raising an objection? Do we want children who, when told by an authoritative stranger that they had better get in the car right now, will do so without making waves? Do we want a nation of people who, when faced with an important and difficult decision—one involving multiple, complex considerations—will prioritize sound bites of advice found on Facebook ahead of their own cognitive abilities?

“I don’t. I want employees who, in the face of complexity, continue to strive to achieve useful goals rather than stopping all progress and waiting for someone else to provide the answer. I want children who, when presented with unusual direction from an unrecognized authority figure, ask questions rather than blindly complying. And I want a nation of people who, in response to the challenges faced by our society, bring to bear their substantial intelligence rather than assigning blame and retreating into excessive, mind-numbing entertainment.”
— Edward Muzio

∞

Power: Concentrated, Corrupts Absolutely

As someone who typically studies and meditates deeply on current events—someone who for years has doggedly pursued answers to society’s systemic challenges—I have found it hard to orient myself in the world lately, much less form coherent things to say, amidst the blitz of bone-chilling news, landing like psychic bombs minute to minute all around me. The chaos is consuming, deafening, and dreadful. Who am I—where am I—in the thick of this madness, that is now deemed a new “normal” and must be navigated?

I suppose it is not unlike a civilian’s experience of sudden, descending war: the shock of witnessing your city and its citizens blasted to shreds before your reeling eyes, and yet needing to keep those eyes open, to navigate, desperately, toward a hope of safety. Your mind keeps trying to apply its images of the city you knew moments ago, but the reality, horribly, refuses to comply with your mental image.

It appears that President Trump (to revive a George W. Bush-era term) is waging a campaign of “shock and awe” directed at Americans, in an effort to daze us emotionally and sensorially (numb our capacities for processing information) with great psychic effect, in preparation for further subjugation.¹I mean that literally. See Myth if you doubt Trump possessing concentrated power could possibly, theoretically, be harmful. That is to say: the toxic mythologies of dominator hierarchies have invested themselves in a grotesque, provocative totem like Trump in order to season us for an intensification of their objectives. Trump himself is just one sorry man, tacking his ego onto his outrageous and short-sighted actions in hopes of ensnaring external gratification in the form of adulation.

But for most people alive today, the suffering is compounded. Since Trump’s election, for myself as for many Americans, it has become a daily challenge to enact the basic rituals of self-care, and care for others, that are essential for human dignity and decency. For most of us with daily access to the Internet or television news, it is all we can do not to be psychically (if not bodily) subsumed in the latest scandal, outrage, disaster, insult, or diversionary tactic—including direct or indirect threats to our safety and well being—24/7.

Personally, as one of the the growing precariat class (former middle class, now itinerant freelance workers scraping by), I work six days a week across a variety of paid and unpaid projects. Most of us are overworked, overspent, and undercompensated: add to this the psychological burden of being re-traumatized daily through news stories about the current presidential administration wreaking havoc domestically and internationally. We must keep busy to keep up, even while it makes us chronically ill. And most of are too busy to do anything about the fundamental, underlying problems fueling our precarious situation. We give every last ounce of our natural capital—our lands, our labor, and now increasingly, our attention and mental space—to perpetuating an economic system and culture of toxic memes which are not only not reliably meeting our human needs, but are actively destroying the very foundation on which we could meet those needs together well into the future And for what? What are we giving our life energy to? It’s time we grapple with the fact that being extensively utilized is not the same as being profoundly realized.

The concentration of power enabled by our power-over economic system (capitalism) manifests in the form of excessive money and leisure time for a tiny cohort of profiteers. Though the elite benefit tremendously from the material wealth and glorified social status accordant with their position, a power-over system is fundamentally unable to meet other types of needs that rich people have: as people. The uber-wealthy have a great deal of power and influence over materials and workers/servants, but as a result of their isolated, elite position, they are entrained to distrust other people and view everything (and everyone) as commodifiable. That which cannot be bought and sold—like authentic human relationships—remains outside their grasp. The “malnutrition” of this need going unmet for years can manifest in abusive, perverse or inappropriate social conduct; a shallow understanding and experience of empathy; narcissism and other regressive psychological effects.

The capitalist economy continues to envelop the planet. Most of the population has few other viable options available to them for meeting their basic needs (we can’t all just start “living off the land” anymore, nor can we revolutionize our memes or societal structures overnight). We strive to conform our lives to the stiff requirements of industrialized capitalism. Yet most of the tight tracks we have to run on lead only to hollow forms of gratification. All the material consumer goods leave us feeling desolate after the short-lived “high” fades. Per the dominant norms of consumer culture, our purpose as human beings in society is conflated with the rise of the rate in jobs; our worth is defined by our financial and real assets; our happiness is defined by consuming goods; and our capacity to serve society by our employment status.

Don’t we want more than that? The mythos of this system tells us that attaining elite status is the ultimate ideal, and that our goals in life are defined in terms of figures on a paycheck. But…if we dared ask whether we really want those things, what would be the answer? Are we perturbed it might be “no”? Through commitment to self-inquiry and responsive action, could we not define broader and more creative aspirations for our purpose in life?

Liberation, by Wayward Artifacts [20% of sales supports Creative Strategies for Change]

These memes (and the people who reinforce them) have got us playing a game that’s no fun anymore: the winners and losers game. If we don’t bring attention to these subtle levels of what is going on, then we might hallucinate ourselves to be embedded in these dominant paradigms, with no hope of change, tethered by our survival to these systems. Through unthinking indulgence of the survival drive—chasing after our prey, the paycheck—we feel like we have to keep it going. But by bringing attention to the illusory nature of these adopted memes, we must acknowledge that we do have choice, through reflection and will, to change what we’re doing or change what goals we pursue.

If we can’t take ownership of the choices we’re making that sustain these suboptimal systems right in this very moment (i.e., our complicity), then how will we reclaim our power to move in alternative directions? It’s not at all idealistic and unrealistic that we could organize our society completely differently: it only requires a little application of consciousness. Memes cannot do anything without our consent; their mythic realization hinges on our body-minds’ participation. We do have choice, and we could choose more beautiful options—but we must first shake loose the meme of false necessity, which would have us believe that just because things are a certain way that they must be that way, and we are powerless to choose differently.

If we were to get in touch with ourselves as fleshy, living beings, and ask what we truly wanted, and then endeavored to move in the direction of our desires, this would signify us “standing up” to seemingly all-powerful memes. It would entail drawing a line in the sand and reinhabiting an inner wisdom that is a synthesis of our life experience (and perhaps even the subtle voices of all beings) free of memes. We are not destined to be passively embedded in memes that don’t serve us—we can utilize memes to realize our greatest dreams.

I don’t deny that power-over pathways organically emerged from our evolutionary conditioning: they definitely did. The “will to power” is a fair characterization of the ascent of humanity into a global species. Our intimidation at witnessing aggression, our shallow pleasures in material grandeur, our discomfort with facing our problems: all of these aspects emerge from the way we are wired, frontal lobe atop mammalian brain atop reptilian brain. But if we can see how this pattern of power works, and recognize its limitations—doesn’t that give us the power to go beyond it?

If we believe power-over structures provide our best option for survival, we will continue to invest our life energy into them. We must not blame ourselves for the myths we were raised in: we are conditioned to be who we are before we can notice what we’ve become. Before bringing awareness to it, one’s conditioning is just happening. Be that as it may: once we shine light on our conditioning, we have no excuse to abdicate responsibility for our actions in the world.

You and I have the innate power to determine how our respective life power is utilized—and we’ve got to acknowledge that we’ve been giving it to these systems all along—as if in a trance. Until we break the spell, we might continue to believe that our survival is tied up with the perpetuation of these systems. We fail to notice that it is our life energy animating these systems. All of it hinges on our collective complicity. Therefore, one of the most important forms of power for us to reclaim is the capacity to deny our consent—to turn our energy away from some stories, and toward others. We can withdraw or withhold our life force from systems (material and symbolic) we disagree with. We can utilize our time, energy, and attention in other ways.

AK Rockefeller, commonplace [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I used to sit during the pledge of allegiance in high school. For two reasons: 1) I did not desire to pledge my allegiance to a flag, and in fact, the strident patriotic vitriol that emerged after September 11th concerned me; 2) I sat because I had the right to do so, and 3) I sat lest the right be taken out from under me. (In that sense, it was arguably an even more patriotic act than if I had conformed to the group mentality about appropriate expressions of patriotism.) I faced social consequences for my choice. After a warning, my math teacher sent me to the principal’s office. (The principal, bewildered, affirmed that a teacher can’t impose on a student’s free speech regarding the pledge—which I knew—so I was promptly sent back to class with a note from the principal, scolding the teacher.) I denied my consent to what was conventional and normative, and self-determined the ethics that I could authentically defend, in an effort to preserve my freedom of choice.

In the space of opportunity created by the reflective “standing up” (or, sitting down…or “taking a knee” to call attention) to a prevailing myth, let us consider what we might really want. Let us explore options for meeting our needs more holistically and durably, from an inclusive awareness of our common humanity that accepts the full spectrum of our needs, including the emotional and psychological factors making us prone to mythic ensnarement.

At the most basic level of existence, we discover that every single one of us is motivated by the same set of needs. Every one of us wants a good future for our children, meaningful work, sufficient means of living, and so forth. When we acknowledge this, then we realize that all the other high-pitched, battering narratives are meant to distract us from noticing a really basic truth: if there is, after all, just a meek man behind that emerald curtain…who but mere men have been running the show all this time?

IT’S JUST US. At the end of the day, we are just humans. Stripped of our epic mythologies, it’s just empty, conditioned humans reenacting ancient dramas on one another’s bodies and the body of the Earth. It’s just people causing this madness and suffering. It’s just the way we’ve internalized a set of toxic memes that make for such horrific outcomes. It’s not a mysterious god or invisible hand; it’s just our mundane web of actions and consequences. It’s just us.

At the level of our biological realities, it has always been true that we need each other. We need our ecosystems to provide us with the materials to meet our basic needs; we need one another in cooperation and mutual aid for our collective survival. We need each other if we are to go through a process of healing that involves affirming the beauty and desirability of our existence and owning the responsibility to do well with it.

That we all, in actuality, share the same basic needs and the same organic platform (and it’s merely our strategies and myths that apparently differ) is a truth with the potential to unify humankind in unprecedented ways. Yet it is so basic as to have been staring us in the face, all along.

In reality, we have all suffered from power-over systems, albeit in distinct ways. Universally, the belief in our separation from one another—required by power-over ideologies—is an innate cause of our suffering. We all have pain we need to process—pain from living under these dominance-based systems for generations. On the basis of processing our pain and moving forward toward health and wellness, we can come together. We can even channel and liberate that pain if we act grounded in empathy: the transformative way to reach more wholesome results.

Power: Empathetic, Transforms Wonderfully

Jos van Wunnik, Regeneration (sweet chestnut) [via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Let us innovate creative and fulfilling solutions founded on a simple yet indelible foundation, a ground of a common reality, beyond all elaborate and intoxicating illusions: that we each and all, in fact, need each other. May we channel our attention into more liberating stories, practices, inquiries, and actions that unleash new life-affirming spirals of complexity, enabling more creative, symphonic arrangements of our life energy. When we embrace the full dimensionality of each and every life form, we can build structures that include and empower a vibrant spectrum of living beings to share their power for the mutual benefit of the whole.

In stark contrast to the intensive worry many Americans feel every day in reaction to media about President Trump’s statements or actions, I have been struck by the awareness of how little my life has materially changed since Trump took office. Whereas, on the morning of November 10, 2017, I was half-expecting to witness some kind of fantastic explosion of social order and structure in the coming weeks…in fact, very little of the actual pattern of my daily life has changed.²This is definitely a partial outcome of my privilege. As a white person, I am not likely to be targeted by the recent rise in racist hate speech and attacks perpetrated by whites against people of color—nor by the invasive raids of ICE, either. However, it is also evidence of how little effect the abstract office of the President really exercises over our daily lives. Which is, actually, a source of hope and sense of power. Furthermore, if Trump were dramatically ousted from office tomorrow, what would change about our daily lives? This seems to reinforce the notion that it’s just us, and that we rely on our social bonds and contracts on a daily basis much more than these myths would have us think.

EMPATHY is the way holistic.

So, if it’s just us, then what do we want to do together?

If everything is empty and conditional, imagine if we envisioned our purposes and acted from a place of authentic desire rather than intimidated compulsion. What if we took ownership over our bodies, our minds, and our destinies, accepting both the responsibility of that autonomy, and the benefits? What if we co-defined what was meaningful for us, from a basic understanding of our common human condition? When we have common understanding and clarity on our shared human situation, then we can begin designing and workshopping alternatives. The same power that fuels the power-over systems can be diverted into power-to and power-with activities.

One of the key initiations on this path is to practice kindness and self-reflection: embodying the gentleness and inquiry to just sit and reflect on our actual situation, and accept whatever intense feelings, thoughts or images come up for us. We started the series with a practice of spacious meditation, and as we proceeded through looking at difficult realities I hope that you have carried it with you. It is important to give ourselves adequate space from the noise of stimuli to just sit with the experience of unfiltered reality.

We first must know ourselves.³A wonderful secular resource for developing intimate self-awareness and tools for working with the self (in its complete body-and-mind dimensions) is Full Catastrophe Living by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Coming to a common understanding will require both inward journey and outward dialogues founded in respect and inquiry. Gradually, one ripens in the strength of one’s intuition and more swiftly discerns truth from lie. As one’s self-awareness ripens, one’s mind (and critical filtering) is strengthened. From this aware place, we can begin to steer the application of our life-energy toward regenerative ends.

If we want to relinquish the ways of destructiveness on which our society is based, we must divest from these systems through a denial of our life energy (attention, labor, faith, etc.) and a refusal of our collective permission to continue operating. (I develop these ideas further in the subsequent essay, Redemption.)

If we want to realize ourselves more completely, we will create a culture that encourages the bringing of one another’s most profound purpose into realization—a culture founded on continuous refinement of the puzzle of living life well. Whereas a common framework for a planetary culture should center on our human condition, there is a diverse “meme pool” of ideas, technologies, and sociological adaptations that support the aim of humans learning how to elegantly balance and integrate all the needs of the beings that comprise their own existence.

I have referred to “indigenous” ways throughout these pieces: allow me to explain what I mean by this term. I define indigenous as “suitable for inhabiting Earth.”⁴Indigenous peoples are those who developed in place on a particular part of Earth; their cultures reflect appropriate adaptation to that place in time. Not every indigenous culture developed ways that would be widely beneficial if applied at a global scale. But there are many indigenous practices, marginalized or wiped out by the prevailing dominator culture, that would be highly advantageous for conditioning oneself and one’s communities. When I speak of patterns that are “suitable for inhabiting Earth,” I’m interested in memes that help bring people back into harmony and respectful co-existence with the systems on which they depend for their lives (something that is impossible in a scenario of universal conquest by dominator hierarchies). The necessary practices and norms to develop include: empathy training; contemplation; deep noticing (to be able to perceive what different beings’ presences and habits in a landscape are really telling); tolerance of difference and uncertainty; and skillful and appropriate responsiveness (trained through meaningful feedback and interaction with the world). Indigenous ways of being in the world all come down to developing a deep respect for life and for the life principle, thus seeking the most eudemonic outcome for all.

It was only through an avid self-education process (after I was freed from the arbitrary structures of traditional schooling) that I discovered Buddhism, a logic and an order regarding how humans might live well on Earth that has greatly influenced my development as a person. I found memes that worked for me only after breaking out (mentally and physically) of the conditioned bubble (of circumstances and culture) that I was born into. What I came to realize, deep in my soul, is that beings of Earth have all the innate equipment necessary to know how to flourish within the constraints of Earth’s living systems. We must only apply our innate powers of sense-making to find the right fit and role to meaningfully contribute within the world that gives us life.

Although I do believe that some memes, founded on and compassionate to our human condition, can transcend the particulars of time and place into a near universal relevance (like empathy), I also think we must endeavor to diversify our meme pool as well. Just like the planetary loss of biodiversity, the Earth is also bleeding cultural diversity at an alarming rate. We need to honor and include all of our stored insights, biological or cultural, regarding “how to be” on Earth; to fight back against the homogenizing, colonizing tides should take up the majority of our attention in defense of ourselves. That said, indigenous ways are not a consumer item, to be superficially acquired. Such ways are grounded in the cultural and mental conditioning of individual human beings; therefore, we can’t just “use” the models without reconditioning our minds. Becoming vulnerable to changing our ways and changing our minds is essential.

jeronimo sanz, Space [via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Stories and myths about us and about life that emphasize our creative, ethical, problem-solving aspects will help condition our minds and communities for a reinvestment of our life energy in alternative paths. To believe we are just animals and we never learn or improve and thus history will just repeat itself in ever larger and bloodier clashes is to be completely blind to the stunningly visionary, potentially-world changing, grassroots-based communities, stories and technologies being diversely innovated and proliferated around the world this very instant. But to foreground those stories is to see a fresh perspective on the world, in which ordinary people who love life, nature and the Earth are making it possible, attainable, to live our lives by an entirely different set of rules.

So: can we free up the best minds of our generation do liberating, world-transforming work for the betterment of humanity? In other words, could we conspire to let everybody reach their immanent potential? Because I truly believe that this is what all well-adjusted/non-sociopathic human beings want to be doing. Do you think we would go about building a better world, even in absence of a paycheck? Would we do it for fun, for the challenge, or even for our real survival? Would we do it fueled only by hope that we could effect a crucial intervention in the world that would serve to transform the outcomes for our youth and future children and their communities—with rewards being seen even in the next few years, and over multiple generations?

The main barrier in the way of us realizing this widespread grassroots potential is the gap in affordances of institutional and interpersonal pathways of cooperative power to the “masses.” In accepting this, we must accept that the empowerment of a global elite no longer serves appropriate purposes—and that their continued installment in positions of power-over is not neutral. The so-called “leaders” of today’s society are active obstacles, not facilitators, of necessary social growth and transformation—while millions of born and life-tested leaders are deprived of opportunities to actualize their visions for a more beautiful world. In a dominator-hierarchy, leadership effectively means possession and coordination of power-over. But imagine if we could empower one another laterally as servant leaders, acting as facilitators of opportunities for power-with and catalysts awakening exploration of power-to. Those who have lived the most and made the most sense of it all would be privileged with more influence in such a distributed, “leaderful” system: honored as wells of wisdom in coaching those further back on the path and less sure-footed in the world.

By reflecting our own pain and extending a compassionate hand, we need to invite one another into dialogue. Through the mycelial web of our social networks (wherein we are only ever six degrees of separation from everyone else), let us model healthy, humane exploration of what is real between us. Let us offer safe spaces in which to process pain, and wholesome challenges in which to hone our minds and bodies. Let us strive to respect other beings’ journeys of consciousness, no matter how differently they may materialize than our own.

With respectful, humane cooperation, we perhaps could, at this point, manage ourselves quite well and just fine: if we developed the behavioral and ideological frameworks supporting this aim. The one thing those in power don’t want us to talk about is how we (at critical mass, with at least 90% of humanity) might set up efficient, elegant and well-adapted systems for governing ourselves directly—cutting out the insatiable “middlemen” (who are actually at the top of wealth structures). And climate change is the ultimate call-to-action, because we are in serious trouble if we don’t start working on issues that directly affect us and our communities, urgently—instead of continuing to play the tired old roles of losers and winners, feeding the false, illusory divisions spun to keep us meek and assuring a perpetual supply of natural capital for the bloated affluence of a thin minority.

How long will we continue to tolerate this arrangement? How long can we afford to bleed out all life in service to a handful of conditional, coveted memes? When we will channel power instead to those worthy of social influence, to those beings with the greatest minds, widest wisdoms, and sweetest hearts? When will we redeem our life energy for its life-affirming potential?

Dan Perjovschi, Wiredrawing (detail), 2011.

It’s just US.

It is time for decent people to stand up to the toxic myths and their human defenders: to stand our ground. Our society needs a simple, firm “have you no sense of decency?” moment for the current times. Those of us who have developed the ethical, moral, social and empathic capacities to be sane must say “NO” resoundingly, amplifying one another’s voices, and stand up. Let’s activate a “movement of movements” as sturdy, as determined, and as clear-headed in response to the increasingly desperate and powerful toxic myths—rooted in enduring, life-supporting patterns.

We do know better. We have learned from history. This I believe. We can do better than this. I believe that we could harness our collective energy for much more purposeful ends. The question is, as it has ever been during any time of rising fascism, whether we will act on what we know now, before we squander even more of our diminished reserves of emotional, mental, physical, cultural and natural capital to the power-over meta-schema manned by a mere—but ostentatiously inflated—cult of hungry ghosts.

Unfortunately, knowing better does not always translate into appropriate actions taken. We sometimes make poor choices, in part because we’ve been conditioned for certain behavior. Just wishing to make a life change isn’t enough. We’ve got to build new habits. A core tenet of mind-training is to practice activities that build new habits and neural pathways. So, it’s time for our wisdom to take shape—it is time for us to act on the better we know. There is enormous, fruitful work to be done.

To reinvest in ourselves, we must honor our needs, but temper our temporary cravings and fears.

To divest in the status quo, we must undermine its myths while developing language and cultural forms rooted in awareness and empathy our common situation.

We need each other, and we always have.

May this be the organizing ethic for a new collective direction.

∞

What powers-to do you want to develop in your life?

An essential alternative to power-over is power-with: that is, joining with a fellow being in a consensual effort. How could you convert some of the power-over you experience in your life, to power-with?

From these essays, what resonated most strongly with you (and what do you wish to pursue)? What stuck in your mind, didn’t feel quite right (and what would you like to augment)? Participation is the first step to liberation. This project is devoted to artful, thoughtful dialogue in support of developing life-affirming skills and sensitivities. Thus, you are invited to contribute by commenting below, submitting your own art, or joining Cosmos as a member to support the movement.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	I mean that literally. See Myth if you doubt Trump possessing concentrated power could possibly, theoretically, be harmful.
2.	↑	This is definitely a partial outcome of my privilege. As a white person, I am not likely to be targeted by the recent rise in racist hate speech and attacks perpetrated by whites against people of color—nor by the invasive raids of ICE, either. However, it is also evidence of how little effect the abstract office of the President really exercises over our daily lives.
3.	↑	A wonderful secular resource for developing intimate self-awareness and tools for working with the self (in its complete body-and-mind dimensions) is Full Catastrophe Living by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn.
4.	↑	Indigenous peoples are those who developed in place on a particular part of Earth; their cultures reflect appropriate adaptation to that place in time. Not every indigenous culture developed ways that would be widely beneficial if applied at a global scale. But there are many indigenous practices, marginalized or wiped out by the prevailing dominator culture, that would be highly advantageous for conditioning oneself and one’s communities.
5.	↑	For a beautiful and touching depiction of human participation in competing and innovative “good memes” in the world, see this poem, “Credo,” by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell.

Wanting to believe (Seduction)

October 16, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Part III

Wanting to believe (Seduction)

Caroline Savery

| October 16, 2017

Feature Image: new_1lluminati, religion is a region with a li(e) in it [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

Our human desires and emotions are oftentimes the “hooks” that memes use to attach to us. Once a meme has colonized us, it can profoundly guide our actions in the world. Therefore, we need to develop discernment to parse the beneficial memes from the malicious ones. Although “toxic mimic” memes might offer fleeting, short-lived “fixes,” a more viable and enduring satisfaction is available in choosing to turn toward life-affirming patterns.

∞

As we’ve discussed over the last several pieces, people are universally compelled by the hope of happiness—but their strategies for meeting this need may vary in efficacy (something we will expand on in this piece). Trance states, which emerge at the intersection of meme and life power, can feed the seeming size and salience of memes and can cause us to act on behalf of memes even in automatic, unconscious ways.

Memetic Epidemic: The Viral Relationship Of Memes To Humans

Let’s talk about how memes infiltrate the human organism. Memes colonize human mind-bodies to effect their own survival and replication in ways that parallel the behavior of biological viruses. Throughout this text, the similarities between the functioning of memes and of viruses are alluded to in epidemiological terms: infection, immunity, etc.¹For additional reading, check out Wikipedia’s page on Memes.

For one thing, simply being exposed to information is oftentimes sufficient to persuade us. Due to human cognitive biases, we are especially vulnerable to believe memes that affirm what we are already “know.” Memes need humans to be receptive to them in order to thrive. When I am exposed to a meme, it has a greater or lesser chance of being incorporated by my cognitive framework depending on all the other memes I’ve already derived or incorporated through the process of living my life—and how much loyalty I feel to those memes.²Regarding the construction of assumptions and notions from stimuli, a helpful concept to reference here is the “ladder of inference,” unpacked in this short video.

Memes are created and evolve in accord with humans’ developmental needs, which can involve any level on humans’ hierarchy of needs. Memes are transmitted, replicated, and are born and die off in accord with their host human populations. Humans are the hosts—memes “ride” the substrate of our consciousnesses for their existences.

The viral operation of memes and their propensity to colonize minds is not an intrinsically bad thing. Humans need memes or else we couldn’t survive. It would be reasonable to view memes as having the agency to infiltrate and colonize human minds—such that the mind is less an agent and more a passive respondent to the activities of memes in its environment. In this framing, memes dominate humanity, and we are mere receptacles or pawns in their own war for survival.

But memes are not naturally parasitic—in a balanced picture, they are symbiotic. Our reliance on memes parallels their reliance on us for their existence. The problem is humans’ weak mental condition combined with the relentless, infectious conduct of certain maladapted memes.

Our Propensity For Addiction

Humans’ receptivity to memes is connected to our unmet needs. When we meet a meme that seems to satisfy a yearning within us, we are more inclined to adopt it. On an emotional level, we all long to feel affirmed by members of our social context. Many of our cognitive biases, interestingly, tend to be related to our need for stability and social affirmation in the world. Further, when our natural human desires or anxieties are provoked (which memes do really well), we may become emotionally hooked to certain narratives.

This is the reality of our common human condition, howsoever regrettable. Such limitations of perception are a lamentable flaw at the foundation of human evolution. But there are ways in which people today are in an especially weakened state, making us dangerously prone to infection by malicious memes.

What makes certain falsehoods so compelling? To what extent does our inborn desire to believe self-affirming stories impair our ability to assess fact from fiction? Consider how our mental and physical situation has been shaped by capitalist forces over generations. Although many of us have the full spectrum of our material needs met by this system, we are continuously emotionally unfulfilled. This is actually an acknowledged side effect of immersive advertising: making us feel like we will never be enough, just in who and what we are.

Without the feedback loop of real-world consequences (which Americans’ material comforts and social isolation tend to insulate us from), there is little ascertainable difference in direct experience, for many Americans, to believing in and following lies as compared to truth. We’ve broken our direct feedback loops with the ecosystems and communities that keep us accountable. Weak and isolated, desperate for any emotional fix for our deep malaise, we are vulnerable to becoming victimized by our own mental shortcomings.³If you doubt our vulnerability to manipulation by emotional hacking, >check out this in-depth article by some of the original architects of Google and Facebook—”the most profitable companies in the world”—which are deeply involved in manipulating our attention in insidiously addictive ways to serve the ends of advertisers. As entitled consumerists, we will get our emotional fixes—even if from unsavory sources who are motivated to keep us addicted.

Jef Safi, co~lapsus 1/4 . . (ın YSE#27) [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

Becoming Addicted To Unhealthy Memes

People are highly susceptible to manipulation; our minds have not kept evolutionary pace with the far-ranging powers and technologies of modern society, upon which most modern humans are utterly materially dependent. This combination of the population’s profound dependence on centralized systems and the technological capacity for controlling the society’s mental condition and behavioral habits is precisely why Orwell’s points in his bombshell book, 1984, were so devastating, so grave. What is especially dangerous about our appetite for social stories to provide us with emotional gratification is that we are prone to accept toxic mimic myths that seem to temporarily meet our needs, even if, in the long run, they leave us hung out to dry.

Gregory Mantsios in Media Magic: Making Class Invisible explains that since the 1960s, corporate news outlets have been increasingly inclined to deliver news within framings designed to protect the wealthiest classes by encouraging both fear and aversion of poor people, and a sense of middle-class identifications in its viewers. This trend is a result of the influence of advertisers and corporations on networks. Now, there is a class of Americans who have bought corporate outlets’ deceptions and biased framings for such a long time as to vehemently defend them as real. This, conflated with not having any time to go deep on an issue (a result of increasing economic and cultural pressures in a constantly-connected world), plus the insanely rapid proliferation of (false and true) information, creates a desperate situation.

People’s “appetite” for narratives that affirm what they already believe creates a market for fake and biased news. It seems twisted that people’s fear of complexity—which would lead them to distrust and dismiss a career politician like Hillary Clinton, or the word of 98% of climate scientists, etc.—is the same faith they invest in the complexly-false (entangled), lying justifications of fake news sites. That is to say: they want news, they want somebody to explain things to them with the confidence of an authority…they just seek convenient news—news that reinforces their beliefs, news that nourishes their appetite for emotional gratification.

No dyed-in-the-wool capitalist can stay away from an unserved market for long. As in drug addiction, there is always the pusher, who profits by selling the quick fixes and by hooking his clients on the drug. The market created by people’s cravings for media narratives that serve to reduce their cognitive dissonance, combined with the permanent desire of the powerful class to disseminate social narratives that are favorable to them maintaining their power, has fed the growth of corporate control over news media and of “consumer news,” in which news consumption is centered on the audience’s salient identities and not on the integrity or authenticity of the information presented. Today, dangerously, news consumption has become much like any other consumer product by which we craft our preferred realities to reflect our personalities (rather than honing our personalities on the sharp edge of events occurring in reality).

Social media platforms and other corporate interests literally feed off of our attention, and there is no sign that the profiteers will stop supplying whatever “fixes” the market craves. Capitalism, being so driven by its internal logic to exploit market demand to utter exhaustion, creates social precedent for profound destruction. The sorry situation is that the rule of the day is to extract and make off with whatever you can get from one another—ours is increasingly an “anti-social society,” in the words of Rajani Kanth. And our population is thus materially, psychically, socially, and systematically laid to waste: depleted, exhausted, dumped full of empty fast cheap distractions and emotionally-piquing call-and-responses, while our spirits, identities, emotions, and minds are fragmented into a flinching, throbbing pulp.

This results in a degenerative culture, where humans cannot exercise any manner of meaningful influence on the memes, and instead the dominant memes seem to easily control our movements, as though we were puppets. This is not unlike the working of some viruses, like rabies, which hotwire the organism and force it to perform bizarre activities that do not support its own survival—but do support the spreading of the virus to other hosts.

Until Trump’s election occurred, I genuinely did not believe that Americans could be so stupid. I mean, Trump’s personality, with over 70 years of supporting evidence, is unambiguously one of a greedy, anti-social, megalomaniac con artist. His propagandist, domineering media tactics and cutthroat cunning was openly targeted at manipulating working class white voters. “Don’t most people know how not to be conned?” I thought. Trump was so clearly not a leader, but the toxic mimic of a leader: a bully.

What I discovered is that some people will accept a costly, even devastating, illusion over a challenging truth. While I would find such a bargain absurd (to me, the truth is always worth it, any day any way), to some, it may have seemed like the only viable option. Their desires to be “saved” by an archetype of the diseased-and-decaying American Dream (Daddy Boss Supreme Grand Commander Trump of the Kingdom of Capitalistania: a Dreamland of Perpetual Conquest) is stronger than their willingness to take a long, painful look at how their emotions and psyches have been relentlessly manipulated by corporate-political interests for generations. As I will expand on in the subsequent piece, some Americans would rather double-down on their nostalgic, comforting illusions than divest and take a different path—even under extreme duress. (If memes are alive, akin to viruses, perhaps this would explain their host-people’s behaviors in this circumstance: putting up a fight-to-the-death for survival, going “all in” with nothing to lose.)

Humphrey King, Media-Freedom [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Denial In Addiction Vs. Truth In Reconciliation

Denial, or abnegation, has been observed and analyzed since Freud as an “immature” psychological defense mechanism (immature “because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality”). Anyone who has experienced the behavior of an addict in denial knows that it frequently involves one flimsy excuse and meager apology, after another flimsy excuse, after another, all piled on top of one another until you are obviously looking at a bullshit mountain. Yet the addict clings to the mountain desperately, apparently insensate to the stink and unwilling to see or take responsibility for the pattern underlying their continuous problems.

This is just like us with our white supremacy problem and its results; or failure to take responsibility for intensifying climate change; or the continued theft, rape and destruction by which the rich have accumulated political and economic power. Delusionally, we keep trying to justify that which is obviously unfounded, because we are, evidently, so fragile in our sense of self that we would rather believe that we are right than change. If there is indeed “two routes” to persuasion, we need to develop the ability to take the central route, and not the peripheral route, urgently, and as often as possible.

At the outset of these essays, I talk about the essential importance of being willing to change your mind (and indeed, being mindful of the changefulness and conditionality of one’s mindset) as key to self-realization. To align with a genuine eternal force like change, one would need to “make friends” with the change native to every moment’s manifestations, and begin examining what indications there are when something wants to change. At a collective level, if we could harness the eternally renewable power generated by change itself, we could possibly arrange ourselves into more diversifying, yet harmonizing forms.

Denial might protect you temporarily, but it can portend a horrible slide into a lack of complexity (i.e., the dissolution of connections and systems with nothing to replace them). Remember that life is negentropic—it tends to align energy into higher orders. A loss of complexity represents the opposite, or entropy; it indicates organizational decline. This can be witnessed occurring in societies, in ecosystems, in bodies; it is commonly referred to as dying.

If Toxic Memes Could Kill Us

Death is sometimes the price paid for the attachment and commitment we feel to our addictions. But as any recovering addict can tell you, there is always another choice: the choice to turn towards life, to turn towards a higher purpose. If you are harboring a toxic mimic meme, its presence might be indicated by how much effort you have to pour into negating alternative evidence and building complex justifications for your endemic belief system.⁴See “Occam’s Razor.” Ask yourself: Is defending your memes causing you to feel depleted and sick? Or does engaging with your memes revitalize and awaken you?

To illustrate how a culture or society could manifestly decline into a reduced state of complexity: it’s a very undiscerning, “low resolution” (i.e., lack of integrity and detail) steamroller of an act for President Trump to just ban any person from a handful of majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. It’s very blatant and unsophisticated for Trump to brand all news that reports honestly on his unpopular behavior as “fake news.” Trump would like to label any news that criticizes him “fake news,” but really, it may not be the slant but the openness he despises—he detests that the American people can discuss his actions openly and find them wanting. Aggressive acts intended to “oust” conflicting narratives effectively represent attempts to shut down complexity—to eliminate nuance, to silence differences, to exact total control over a singular, favorable narrative. Perhaps Trump’s supporters crave their cognitive dissonance to be reduced—but to attempt the relief of tension through policies which actually limit the freedoms and suppress the movements and speech of other physical human beings is a dangerous social slide toward fascism and autocracy.

The lower and lower-resolution you get, there will come a point when genocide becomes acceptable. Genocide is only possible when people’s personal, cultural, and intellectual qualities are entirely eliminated from one’s viewpoint, when people’s bodies are perceived only as shallowly as their skin color or creed in determining whether they live or die. It takes a degenerative social situation to discard entirely the nuances that make people human: their life stories, their cultural capital, their ethnic and genetic roots, their inner capacities (talents, skills, knowledge, etc.), their social bonds, their struggles, their human potentials. When you kill someone, you simply cannot ever know whether that person’s mind contained some untold brilliant technology with which they could have rebuilt the world, if presented the opportunity. When being embodied as “white” or as “brown” or simply as “belonging to a particular group” is grounds for extermination, then the aim of integrating the best of what humankind could bring forth is lost.

Genocide benefits nothing, and those who hallucinate that maybe it sometimes does, hallucinate that they will assuredly emerge victorious. The only need genocide might be said to accomplish is reducing environmental demands and population strain—an implicit, if unconscious, fixation behind supremacists’ anxieties. However, the lower resolution such purges go, the more lasting and damaging the legacy.

It may seem strange that I use genocide to illustrate an extreme “low resolution” outcome of a society. However, humankind is manifestly facing annihilation at the hands of toxic mimic memes. The dominant memes seduce us with images of prosperity but deliver us irreversible destruction of our natural capital and planetary wellbeing. If we continue pouring energy into these currently dominant memes, we will run ourselves into the ground, killing us and the memes. However, we can recover the power to mitigate our broad receptivity to memes and to select which memes we cultivate; if humans could actuate the rapid spread of life-affirming memes, we might end up in a future that both we AND memes can survive.

Christopher Dombres, The Next War [via Flickr, public domain]

The Unknown Beyond One’s Habitual Patterns

They say the definition of crazy is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Why do we not have the society or the democracy we’d like to believe we do? What persists as the barriers to a fair and just society, even after many generations of struggle? What if the problem is not this one particular president or another, but the institutionalized political game, as a whole? To the extent that it limits and does not serve us, and other structures would better serve life-affirming purposes, should we not find ways to intervene?

Let us take the risk of imagining for a moment that our consistent economic and social disenfranchisement is not accidental. That it is in the government’s self-interest to ensure our continued reliance on its structures, no matter how excessively bureaucratic. That it is in the capitalholder elite’s interest to ensure our continued reliance on its systems, furthermore. Different tools, different ways of enforcing their order (police use-and-threat of force, bank debt, wage suppression, tax cuts to the rich, etc.), but the effect is to keep us meek, starved, obedient… and, worst of all, too stupid and wrongly informed to assess, analyze and overcome our situations. Some of us—typically those better off by this social order than others—tend to keep making excuses for it. But the same symptoms persist, with devastating effect. Can we continue to excuse it away? Or might we say the persistence of these problems are direct outcomes of the system’s design? Even if you don’t want to entertain this hypothesis, dear reader-scientist, ask yourself: do you think that it is plausible? Do you think it is worthy of being investigated?

Can the privileged admit their addiction to these systems, and repent? Like an alcoholic’s elaborate legacy of lies and excuses finally crumbling down atop him, do we dare imagine that the system, by design, must result in these outcomes? We spend so much energy explaining and forgiving the outcomes. After 40 years, 240 years…10,000 years of some of the same old shit…Occam’s Razor would suggest that the consistency of these outcomes betray actual power dynamics. I’m not claiming that there is a conscious conspiracy behind this pattern—that is to say, some gang of evildoers murmuring sinister plots behind closed doors—because that would be psychologically cheap (adaptive bias) and is a less likely cause than the organic effects of emergence and lock-in. What I am suggesting is nevertheless a conspiracy—a conspiring of those who lucked into power to retain and enhance their power, which means from a basic, factual standpoint, disempowering everyone else.

There’s no boogeyman going to jump out and attack you—or a government agent—just for thinking these thoughts. This is not 1984—yet. We’re sold a narrative that says we need to fear and abhor any alternative thinking—that to critique capitalism is equivalent to deviant anarchism or godforsaken communism. That’s because if we allowed for the proliferation of direct dialogue and discursive thinking among individual members of a community, we might have years ago realized that our economy and our state could function at a much higher level of integrity—and could work better for us.

Turning Towards Life: Recovery And Integration

To empathize with this common human condition is the first step on a pathway to developing human resilience to conquest by toxic memes. Again, people aren’t the problem—few of us are trying to make the world a worse place. We must compassionately accept and work with our limitations—such as our cognitive biases. We should approach this by borrowing from addiction recovery processes and programs.

First, let us empathize with the core cause of our vulnerability to seduction by malicious memes. There are various cognitive biases that come into play here. In many ways, our yearning to affirm what we already think we know about the world tends to override our search for truth. We may even feel personally affronted when our earlier-held notions about something are proven wrong.⁵Check out this fabulous poster of 24 cognitive biases that can impair our receptivity to real information. https://www.yourbias.is/ This is a natural aspect of the human condition, and it makes sense: complex truths can cost considerable cognitive effort to accept.

Given memes’ efficient ability to infect humans, we must be diligent in developing our memetic immune system defenses to ensure that only healthy, life-supporting memes are the ones that ultimately take root. This involves developing a more participatory role in consciously curating the memes we harbor: fertilizing and cultivating the desired patterns, and uprooting the unfit weeds. If humans were to strengthen their mental conditioning and mindfully participate in the shaping of memes (like memes shape us), we could build towards a more beautiful world by giving and spreading only the memes best adapted to our goals. A little participatory evolution, then. In this way, we can entrain memes to serve our human purposes like one trains a climbing vine in a garden. Instead of passively allowing the proliferation of the memetic equivalent of nuclear weapons, couldn’t we harness our innate love for life into enthusiastically proliferating memes that enhance the conditions for life on Earth?

Although we viscerally grapple with social pressures to “not deviate” from the established norms, it is manifestly appropriate to deviate from a burning building. In recovery from addiction, a commonly-cited turning point in a person’s trajectory is “hitting rock bottom.” There’s a point when an individual becomes desperate enough for a change—almost any change would have to be better than this. Thus let us imagine that what is beyond our current realm—what is more creative, more life-affirming—might be worth taking a risk on. It takes a leap of faith to mount the path to recovery, but it can pay off in rewards much more enduring than the path of addiction. That means there is hope for transmuting natural human yearnings into feedback loops that are much healthier.

To the extent humans are giving into their addictions and not practicing restraint and discernment, memes seem to be riding roughshod over us. How could we develop immunity or resistance to toxic memes? If malicious memes are actively seeking ways to invade our heads, how can we “inoculate” ourselves against infection by false views?

Resilient people are comfortable entertaining ideas that differ from their existing frameworks. They mindfully look for ways to meld new information with old. It is challenging to tolerate different perspectives on reality while maintaining awareness of them all as partially “true” at once, but admittedly our minds thrive on solving complex challenges. There is an enduring, deeply satisfying reward when one dives into and honors the difficulty, the complexity.

Resilience means being courageous enough to apply one’s mind, developing the sensitivity to process direct knowledge of what is real, and the discernment to perceive and negotiate the distorting effects of certain memes. Such people have the increasingly-rare capacity to see through veils of bullshit. This is a powerful skill in navigating a so-called “post-truth” world. So: move towards that wholesome discomfort, a discomfort which promises to give way to blissful new levels of realization.

Humphrey King, New City [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I seek truth: I want full signal and minimal distortion in all of my encounters in life. But, as a side effect of these patterns we are talking about, in American culture and society, I am instead constantly being bombarded with what somebody else thinks they want me to see. Consciously, or unconsciously, this unfortunate habit persists in all types of relationships—even the relationship to oneself. These little layered lies, the “who-I-want-you-to-think-I-am” ruse (Ram Dass called it “the mind net”) is what makes our interactions so fraught—especially in the context of a competitive social order like capitalism (in which anti-social memes thrive.)

I want to suggest that you look and think of the social order—and especially the mainstream media—from the perspective of: whose interests are being served by the way this is presented? Who could stand to benefit from me believing that (fill-in-the-blank) is true? Who could stand to benefit from the agenda presented by this media? Behind any great addiction, you will find a profiteer.

Deliberately develop discernment, whereby you practice identifying who has your genuine best interests at heart, and who doesn’t. Journalists and others who are genuinely concerned with keeping the public informed about the truth present a more reliable source (insofar as motives align with actions), whereas fake news rabblerousers are transparently looking to make a quick profit off of you (as an unsavvy consumer) and/or disrupt the social order for their broader greed-mongering ends. Especially in regard to climate science: generally, those who present exhaustively-examined facts are likely concerned with your best interests—why else would they have invested all that arduous, critical work? Whereas those who attempt to mislead you by appealing to cheap psychological reactions—aren’t. In fact, they might be attempting to subjugate you. (On a personal relational level: those who are willing to receive critique and question their own perspectives are trustworthy; those who voraciously assert the inviolable authenticity of their truth, alone—are not. This, interestingly, aligns with principles of productive dialogue.)

By contrast to the profoundly destructive outcomes plausible on a planetary scale (if our toxic oppressive memes remain in charge), a more “high resolution” (or synthesizing/negentropic) approach would involve individuals harvesting the splendid bright consciousnesses of the world’s diverse beings, and then holding those multiplicitous truths intact while tolerating the lively tensions generated. A high resolution approach enables complex decisions to be made that reinforce quality for all. If we were to stay with the complexity, and look for overarching patterns… we might find challenging, but ultimately more blissful and satisfying answers.

Recovery constitutes a new direction for life. It requires embracing the healing, or life-affirming, principle in everything one does. This is the harder path, but it is the path that leads toward survival and achievement. To develop social-scale immunity to virulent memes, we need to invest in providing high-quality/diversely-sourced education and skill-building practices to our populace. We need to build a culture of mutual support that encourages the best from one another. Before participatory construction of a new building (or society), there must be a participatory designing through dialogue. We need people who are trained and equipped to engage with our difficulties. We need to develop discernment about the memetic company we keep, we need to strengthen our impulse controls, and we need to immerse in wholesome forms of health and wellness if we seek a more resilient people and society.

Thomas Hawk, #carpeaux #legionofhonor #sf #sanfrancisco #art #sculpture [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

Ask yourself: what is it, after all, that I really know? How do I know I know something? How do I know whether something is really true… or just convenient to me to believe?

Are you participating—like, really thickly even—in some narratives that seek to exploit you for your social, intellectual or material capital? Could you experiment mentally or actually with alternatives or opposites to what you believe—and just observing what happens? What do you discover in that process?

In your own life journey, you have probably undergone some “philosophical molting,” whereby you discarded earlier belief systems for better-suited ones. What do you recall about that process of letting go of one belief system, for another? What did you take away from that “molting” experience?

What are some ways you could improve health and wellness in your life, so as to be less prone to seduction by toxic options? Relationally, socially, mentally, spiritually, biologically (nutrition, sleep, exercise, etc.)— consider each dimension, for better health means becoming more whole, and a sound, complete organism is optimally resilient.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	For additional reading, check out Wikipedia’s page on Memes.
2.	↑	Regarding the construction of assumptions and notions from stimuli, a helpful concept to reference here is the “ladder of inference,” unpacked in this short video.
3.	↑	If you doubt our vulnerability to manipulation by emotional hacking, >check out this in-depth article by some of the original architects of Google and Facebook—”the most profitable companies in the world”—which are deeply involved in manipulating our attention in insidiously addictive ways to serve the ends of advertisers.
4.	↑	See “Occam’s Razor.”
5.	↑	Check out this fabulous poster of 24 cognitive biases that can impair our receptivity to real information. https://www.yourbias.is/

You have the power I give you (Talisman)

October 16, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Part II

You have the power I give you (Talisman)

Caroline Savery

| October 16, 2017

Feature Image: new 1lluminati, akashic record (crop) [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

The power Trump commands is given by us—our attention, our deference, our minds, hearts, lives. In little ways, we can retake control of how and to what purposes we deploy our minds and spirits.

∞

What am I doing when I am reciting an aspiration that Trump know happiness and its roots? I am alternatively conditioning my mind: reminding (re-mind-ing) myself that Trump is a human being, and the root of the destruction and chaos he is causing lies in his humanity. Trump’s personality traits of ambition, narcissism and insularity—which are wreaking such havoc at the institutional and political scale—these are all direct outcomes of Trump’s particular psychological and social conditioning, grounded in historical, tangible events.

Although the situation is urgent and dangerous, it’s also sad. Compassion is not an inappropriate response, but rather is always an appropriate response to situations of struggle. What are we struggling against, after all, if not other people who would rather keep us deprived and subservient—and how sad is that? What are we struggling for, if not people’s liberties; what are we struggling against, if not people’s ambitions to control and exploit others? In all of human history, why have we not met our aspirations yet? If we did, could we be at peace with one another?

To say Trump deserves to experience peace, love and joy does not contradict the need to resist, prevent and subdue him from causing any more harm. (In fact, I’m arguing that Trump accessing an experience of genuine self-arising satisfaction would be an antidote to his hungry-ghost will to power.) After all—where do Trump’s maladjusted qualities derive from? They derive from him being materially spoiled—catered to, in spite of his poor personal, emotional, psychological and intellectual development—because of his capitalist holdings and the accorded privileges thereof. Trump has learned a life wherein he’s the center of the narrative—everything and everyone seems to hinge upon his fleeting desires. While such a life might seem fortunate to the untrained eye, it also requires that Trump remain insulated from any substantial depths of relationship. Shallow relationships based on mutual exploitation (and not common feeling or understanding) would be “the norm.” Which means: Trump has mentally entrained to, and now physically embodies, the sick and offensive qualities of the mode of capitalism which he’s been immersed in his entire life. A life made of exploiting others does not, cannot, a healthy and fulfilled human make.

Trump’s personality and his reaction to circumstances are conditioned, as are each of ours. Thus his shortcomings are not the outcome of any “evil” inherent in him. (Whether the pattern/system of capitalism, which has shaped Trump’s subjective reality, is inherently evil… that deserves its own discussion.) As comforting as it may be to demonize Trump, that pose only keeps us locked into fruitless and cyclic opposition, into the false duality of “good against bad.” Hence my assertion that Trump needs healing (to effectuate “right” conduct) more than he needs penalizing correction. (And it is not just for Trump, but for all, that I bear this view.)

Bret Polok, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” [via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0]

Given Trump’s weakness in key developmental areas of being human, let us now investigate: where does Trump’s power derive from?

Firstly, let’s discuss where his popularity comes from (which is part of the power behind the career arc of any politician). His popularity derives from a complex of factors: foremost, that he names obvious, vague demons which people yearn to righteously go after—angry-mob-with-pitchforks style. That is to say: Trump’s rhetoric plays on our baser instincts. Self-righteous violence generates compensatory feelings of pride when faced with terrified insecurity (it’s the bully’s way). This is currently manifesting outwardly in acts of racist violence, giving fresh “life” to below-the-surface attitudes that have continuously saturated the people and policies of the United States from its beginning (which I unpack in depth in a subsequent essay, Myth). Examples include the recent slayings of two anti-racists who defended Muslim women on a train, February’s hate crime murders in Kansas, St. Louis Jewish cemetery defacement, the mass and deadly assault on anti-white-supremacy protestors in Charlottesville, VA… I wish this list would not go on, but without intervention, it assuredly will.

Secondly, Trump gives equally-sweeping, feel-good promises of reform that will be utterly impossible to implement in the complex, burgeoning reality. However, in saying the appealing thing that “sells tickets” (er, votes?), Trump appears to annihilate the real complexity merely via bullying dominance of the narrative. Trump succeeds because most people would love a reduction in the complexity of our problems. Those who believe that shoving problems aside or silencing them solves problems are egregiously mistaken, however.

Further, Trump represents a brand of gross, pathetic incompetence iconic of total despair and civilizational decline. Those who feel that despair, unconsciously or consciously, may derive perverse delight in Trump’s hilariously terrible character, thus coordinating to elect him to the presidency ironically, like a mass act of trickster energy. All of these elements take hold upon the cultural and social patterns in the United States, which include: extravagant material comfort and sense of entitlement, oppressive economic disparities, and belief in individualism / social isolation.

When a civilization is in decline, when its mythos has begun to slide into meaninglessness, it is only too appropriate that the paragon representative of our hallowed (hollowed?) nation is simply what we find most extremely offensive and entertaining. That’s what makes Trump’s rhetoric popular with certain white Americans—he strikes the nerves of their presumably-“lost” ambitions and thus galvanizes them to turn their backs on facing and embracing complexity in favor of worshipping a false-idol image of their conventional supremacy, reinforced (if reprehensible).

Christopher Dombres, “I do not know what I want, but I know I don’t have it.” Je ne sais pas ce que je veux, mais je sais que je ne l’ai pas . Illustration from 2003. [public domain]

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm explains how a society can weary of democracy when the population feels a general lack of clear purpose or identity, leading to a tendency to lurch quickly into fascism’s arms in an attempt to reduce their social dismay, because fascism lends the security of clear social (if hierarchical and oppressive) roles. Trump offers a shallow yet captivating image of success, embodying a white-supremacist, capitalist American heritage. As ugly as this symbol is, its power to reaffirm Americans’ sense of identity—to extend the life of key American supremacist myths—is undeniable. Therefore, instead of enduring the continued growing pains of developing a more participatory and equitable society, Trump in his grandiosity and grandiloquence poses an easy, if unpalatable, “out” to those still clinging to a dream of universal white cultural and economic dominance.

Those repressed anxieties, when offered an outlet, become channeled into a talisman of collective power—in this case, the talisman of Donald Trump’s mythos. Our media environments season us into trance-like states: hypnotized by the narrative, seized by emotionally provocative messages, our attention is funneled like a pump, sucking energy into the objects of the desired myth. (The hypnosis-like state explains why Donald Trump’s supporters, as a whole, tend to be voracious in their denial of real information and facts, so mesmerized are they by their idol’s glorified image.)

So, perhaps it is clear Trump has absorbed cultural and mythic power in the eyes of a subset of Americans. But how is it that he came to power over the fate of the whole United States?

The answer lies in the very same attention-channeling, hypnotic process, only with different objects. This time, it’s our continued vestment of power in our national political institutions. Our obedience to political conventions has enabled a dangerously ignorant and unethical man to assume power—see Obama’s emphasis on “peaceful transfer of power” and the electors’ installment of Trump, despite all manner of red flags going up.

The problem is we revere institutions more than we attend sensitively to the situation. As institutions, we tend to lean on their proud appearance (“the U.S. is the greatest democracy on Earth!”) more than we thoughtfully attend to structural integrity and appropriateness of the forms. In reality, the U.S. is a sorry excuse for a so-called democracy—its people have barely made any substantive modifications to what is now a 240-year-old (and clunkily outdated) governance model. Bureaucratic complexity has layered up to obscuring and insane heights; meanwhile, gradual, insidious capitalist-corporate appropriations of the people’s political power have eaten away the core, resulting in the structures being on the brink of crumbling. However, we’ve been hypnotized by the rhythms of society into a lulled trance—go to school, go to work, watch the news, pay taxes, vote. When in a fearful, regressed state of mind, we tend to cling to familiar and comforting rituals and rhythms, and think that their very act is proof that all is well.

Our own institutions, corrupted, will be our very undoing—if we continue to hold to them out of blind “tradition” or “faith.” We don’t want to be naughty and “break the rules” of this convoluted game, even if it would in fact save our necks in this dire, unprecedented moment.

So it would seem we are entangled in a complex house of mirrors built of people’s ignorant projections that is so brimming with disastrous and fragile elements, there’s scarce hope of not getting crushed in its inevitable collapse, right?

Well… there is another way to view this situation. In the dark night of the soul glimmers a glimpse of the darkness’ opposite.

If we allow that everything that has been discussed (Trump’s nature, the nature of his popularity and influence, and the nature of his current forms of power) can be traced to conditioning—psychological, historical, narrative and material… that would make it all: empty. As in, there is nothing causing any of this to be strictly the case. All manifestation in this moment is merely the result of processes, an outcome of a system of interconnected conditions and choices. However: the present moment’s configuration, which includes Trump as president of the United States, represents diminishing value to the vast majority of us.

As a cultural icon via reality television…as a ghoulish caricature symbolizing capitalist grandeur…as the president of the United States, even, Trump has the power we give him, much like a totem or a talisman, which we imbue with meaning for particular purposes. We imbue this individual with apparent power beyond what the singular human can, in fact, possess. A major cause of this is our desire to believe convenient illusions—something I unpack further in Wanting to Believe. Our fears, our ambitions, and our longings get channelled into the one individual—leading us to believe that he is much bigger, more impressive, and scarier than one pathetic man.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. (Screenshot: The Wizard of Oz/ MGM Grand)

The myth obscures the man. Just as in the Wizard of Oz, before the curtain is pulled back.

Acknowledging that Trump represents a manifestation and a channeling of millions of people’s dark psychic energies, I will be happily joining in the trend of the mass rituals to ask all beings (manifest and unmanifest, human, animal, spirit and otherwise) to bind Trump and his cronies so that they may cease to cause harm to so many.

You may not believe in magic, but how else do you explain these real circumstances we find ourselves, apart from the attentional direction and hypnotic manipulation inherent to a magician’s work? How do you explain: the outrageous frenzy that Trump has whipped his supporters into through aggressive, blame-game distortions that blitz Americans into bewilderment; the invisibility of corporate consolidation of political power, domestically and globally; the unspeakability of capitalism’s devastating environmental, social and psychological consequences; the ways long-held cultural myths (of multiculturalism, democracy, and freedom) are dissipating right before our eyes? What do you call our mass vulnerability to hypnosis by various means—whether occurring in religious, consumerist, political, or other contexts?

Trance is real and it is a feature of human consciousness—call it what you prefer, understand it however you like, but don’t ignore it. The ways in which our emotional, psychic, and intellectual capacities respond and attempt to cope with stress are potent-to-the-point-of-perceptible, yet also emerge in mysterious and unpredictable manners—quite beyond the scope of the rational mind to grasp. And while you may try to dismiss what you haven’t yet grasped (or what you moralistically refuse to acknowledge), that real element you brush aside will still be there—and will reemerge in ever more daunting forms.

The disruptions that Trump continues to cause have emotional consequences on a massive scale, affecting millions of people—whose resulting released energy can be harnessed for good or ill (and indeed, to pretend this isn’t happening makes one subject, and not agent, of it).

Therefore, if you’d like to tap into and wield the wide-ranging energies of millions of people (and, too, animals and plants and spirits and lands and ancestors) who do, indeed and resoundingly, want Trump stopped…why not join in the ritual? What harm could come of it? Any bending of one’s mind toward harm-reducing patterns (including through prayer or ritual) that can subsequently reshape one’s perceptions and sense-making of so-called “consensus reality” is valuable. If seeking to retrain the mind for resilience and adaptability amidst chaos, it is helpful to remember that you retain control over what you put your mind to.

Vinoth Chandar, Kali the Goddess – Navarathri Golu Dolls [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

When the apparent reality becomes untenable, unworkable, like an abysmal nightmare…what better time to experiment with alternative ways of relating to what is happening—i.e., “lucid waking-dream” yourself some alternatives.

What is your experience of being entranced? Observe how you feel while watching news stories, watching a film, or browsing Facebook. What do you notice?

Is there any edge of awareness that allows for the breaking, or redirection, of the trance state?

If the trance state indicates that you are seeing only what the presenter, or magician, wants you to see, then—how could you take a mental step back and take a fresh look at the elements in the situation?

What are some things you want to believe about Trump? What are some things you want to believe about the United States of America?

What might be some reasonably true alternatives to your assumptions? If you’re not sure, ask people who don’t agree with your viewpoint!

Do you notice a sense of entrancement to your own set of assumptions and biases in terms of your daily conduct? How could you challenge your automatically arising, unthinking reactions to various stimuli, such as people, messages, images, etc.?

Trance states can make us vulnerable to receiving and absorbing messages and symbolic narratives deep within our psyches. Trance can be used maliciously, but also beneficially. How might you employ trance to adjust your internalized beliefs or assumptions in positive ways?

Memetic engineering and social control (Myth)

October 15, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse: Part IV

Memetic engineering and social control (Myth)

Caroline Savery

| October 15, 2017

Feature Image: AK Rockefeller, Confederate [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The common myths and meaning on which the U.S. was founded are breaking down, strained by the gnashing confrontation of incompatible, co-occurring narratives. This is long overdue and much needed. Yet powerful interests are trying to seize this shaky moment by trumpeting archaic, toxic narratives that reinforce and advance oppressive agendas in society.

There are auspicious alternatives for how power can be organized in a social order. To free up the space for society to consider significant structural renovations, we must first do deep, digging work to dismantle the supports underpinning prevailing but maladapted myths.

∞

In the previous essays, I argued that the apparent sociocultural phenomenon of Trump is empty and conditional. As in the Wizard of Oz, to view Trump as a monster or an all-powerful wizard is a wrong or illusory view. Rather, recognizing Trump and his supporters as human beings conditioned by their sociocultural context and historical experiences frees this situation up to be much more workable, if handled from a compassionate, conscientious orientation.

The emptiness (conditionality) of what manifests in reality suggests that there is freedom to move among and to reconfigure these real elements. To work masterfully with the strands of many narratives and transform outcomes, one must develop the insight and compassion to trace entrenched assumptions to their origins in experience. Trump the person has invested considerable resources throughout his life in creating Trump the myth. (In dealing with him as a person, we can, collectively, undertake a process of divestment from that myth.)

But there are deep-seated malevolent myths and pernicious technologies that also fueled the grim distension of Trump’s mythic image. White supremacy (and its underlying logic of oppressive hierarchy) presents a paramount, seemingly-massive myth (of both vast and historical proportions) for us to pull back the curtain and reveal its illusory aspects. (If so destructive and prevalent a narrative as white supremacy can be unpacked for its illusory nature, then, dear reader-scientist, what myths can’t?)

Thus, it is my aim to embolden you to investigate and experiment with the myths in your life, whether small or big. This work requires some basic skills at identifying unspoken assumptions, and drawing them out. If those unspoken assumptions are illuminated to be faulty, then the structural arguments (the myth) built on top of them may crumble. May you cultivate a skeptical mind and habitually test the qualities of any myth you encounter.

Making and Maintaining a Mess Of Things: Race & White Supremacy

Race is an ideal construct to choose to unpack in this piece because 1) white supremacist thinking is deeply tied to Trump’s political ascendancy, and 2) race, of the many social constructs in operation, is especially empty. As the PBS documentary series RACE – The Power of an Illusion explains, “race has no genetic (or biological) basis.” Race has everything to do with how one is perceived and interpreted by other members of society. How a person is interpreted is subject to a variety of local contextual cues; moreover, categories tend to evolve to conform with changing social and economic conditions. To provide my own lineage as an illustration, it is unlikely my grandparents and great-grandparents (immigrants to the United States of several distinct European heritages) would ever have gotten together and reproduced without the construct of whiteness to help socially bind them together. The interpretations are not neutral, though: the notion of “whiteness” was created to provide justification for various forms of colonial behaviors by Europeans. As an emergent sociocultural pattern with accordant affects, whiteness has its own culture and norms, of which, unfortunately, racism is a pillar.

The embodied reality of most people today is “messy” (i.e., comprised of multiple identities in tension) in part because social constructs like race do a poor job of giving language to describe diverse familial and cultural experiences. Conversely, race as a social construct seems almost explicitly intended to function to enforce the desired power distributions in society—that is, to maintain social justification for dominator hierarchies.¹See #8 of RACE—The Power of an Illusion. Thus race is inextricably linked with the pattern of oppression that also causes many other forms of socially-enforced inequities (such as sexism, classism, etc.). Race, and particularly white supremacy, is a consequential illusion that hugely influences institutional, structural and local realities, especially in the United States; but as an illusion, it can indeed be undermined by nudging out just a few unspoken assumptions that secretly give structure to its claims.

I am going to proceed to hold up the mythos of white supremacy to the light, to point out some of its internal structure. I acknowledge that much of what I am reflecting to you through the mirror of my mind can be hard to look at. This next section of the essay series represents something like a dark night of the soul: a raw grappling with our difficulties, daring a descent into total fragmentation. There is a brighter day, just around the bend, but to go through these difficulties is the only path there. Keep heart. Because to insist violence stay buried and out of sight—”someone else’s problem”—is to permit the problem’s continued existence. As Omar el Akkar writes poignantly in American War, “Perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence—a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?”

Only by looking at the frank, painful reality of our addiction will we find the gumption to transform our troubled ways. So let us untangle the strands of this story that thrives in our silence and confusion.

AK Rockefeller, Enter the Drone [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The U.S. was founded on a centuries-old pattern of theft, extermination, slavery, appropriation, assimilation, and inequal institutionalized treatment. This systematic oppression was designed to exploit and concentrate the world’s wealth into the coffers of a greedy few (colonialism and capitalism are mutually reinforcing, indeed). To reinforce the social acceptability of these violent and divisive practices, the perpetrators needed a myth to excuse the socioeconomic division of people. As with religious orders’ claims of an all-powerful God, the myth of white supremacy was founded to exalt the supposed natural superiority of certain people and argue that their authority to occupy an upper echelon of power and privilege was god-given. Those who could assert whiteness accessed greater privileges than those who could not. And this pattern, though disrupted, persists to this day.

I could provide a long list of the horrors performed in sacrifice to this evil myth, from genocide, slavery, cultural appropriation, and forced assimilation, to the many subtle forms of systematic economic, physical and social marginalization of people of color today. I will spare you the gruesome details in this space, but if you have any doubt to their reality, I encourage you to do some self-education beyond the bounds of this series.²Recommended reading includes: The Noam Chomsky Collection, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or this list of 16 book suggestions to learn about white supremacy in the U.S. Instead, I want to explore why we still have to deal with white supremacy today—why it has not yet been routed out.

In spite of abundant countervailing evidence, this myth persists in part due to one of its built-in dynamics: that those of privilege get to choose to maintain their ignorance, comfort, and convenience at the expense of the actual well-being, even physical safety, of others. Many whites who benefit from their dominant position in society, and who unconsciously or consciously wish to retain their privileged status, would feel more at ease to just not acknowledge these systems. It should be noted: any lessening of the forms of overt violence resulting from these systems that may have been accomplished over the course of generations, was won by intense struggles led by people of color and supported by solidary whites—and nothing less. (May we respect and support these struggles whenever possible.)

The “fragility effect” distorts the narratives which shape our society: dismissing the narratives of people of color and centering whites’ narratives; promoting conventional voices and marginalizing progressive ones; weighing white discomfort on the same level with people of color’s survival. Effectively, this imprints on us that some narratives are more important (thus, seeming to be more real or true) than others, warping our collective perception.

Trump’s political ascendance is fueled by the collective desperation felt by large swaths of culturally-white Americans that their options for continuing to deflect and evade looking at the nature of their privileges are growing slimmer—and, being low on interpersonal, emotional, and psychological resources, they feel that they are being backed into a corner; their defenses flair, which collectively manifests as the growing prominence of white supremacist sentiment in mainstream discourse. The “America” Trump claims he’ll make “great again” is the one where white people (and, especially those of economic and gender privileges, moreover) can rest peacefully in the illusion of their superiority—where they don’t have to be bothered by narratives that conflict with their traditional positions of comfort and control.

In the last piece, I wrote about our strong urges to avoid cognitive dissonance and to surround ourselves with people and messages that affirm our existing views. It is no small task to get anyone to soften their defenses and let divergent stories in. Nevertheless, this task is especially complicated when people feel no social or mythic pressure to adopt a listening stance—when their self-affirming stories tell them that they are naturally in a dominant position, and others are supposed to always listen while they speak. The social acceptability of the dominance of a people is paralleled in the dominance of certain memes.

Previously, I spoke about the reality of trance and its role in healing processes. What would a mass, psychic, emotional and actual reckoning look like? Can you envision a process of restoration, reparation, and repentance—premised on love, equity, and solidarity for one another? That we might actually go through the ordeal, the difficulties—and come out the other side?

The alternative to breakthrough is breakdown, or disintegration. When something must break—those two outcomes are possible. The former integrates—the latter fractures and scatters (often, violently).

How poetic, then, that the only force that may be strong enough to finally dismember the social fabric and bring down the clunky, ineffectual structures of our government (via Trump’s divisive speech and actions) is white supremacy—the nation’s oldest and possibly most authentic identity and pride.

Meanwhile: the messier the moment, the more stressful the circumstances, and the more psychically fragile the people: the easier it is for the powerful to capitalize on their fear and confusion.

Illustrating The Illusion

White Supremacy’s Suppression of Others’ Stories and Histories: The Original Fake News?

In 2014, Steve Bannon gave a speech at the Vatican that provides a fair example of some of the staple arguments involved in white supremacist mythology. Though no longer in the White House, Bannon’s ideology casts a shadow across Trump’s presidency. Bannon is notably smarter and more worldly than the average white supremacist, yet as a cultural strategist, he is darkly fixated on promoting a warped ethnocentric and fundamentalist vision of the world. Bannon continues to engage in deliberately fomenting a reactionary “soil” to support Trump’s actions “on the ground,” such as through his profitable far-right, fake-news-spreading platform, Breitbart News, which tangibly helps circulate white supremacist sentiment and bolsters its community of supporters.

It is through emotionally-stimulating rhetorical forms (and concentrated spaces, like Breitbart) that more and more individuals’ minds become “hooked” on (i.e., adopt and internalize) narratives of white supremacy. As is widely acknowledged, Trump’s political rise was fueled by stoking the fires of white supremacist sentiment, which was woven throughout Trump’s rhetoric and policies from early on in the presidential campaign. Remember, however, that narratives give an interpretive framework of reality—and the map is never the territory. (Furthermore, as I attempt to show: “power-over” narratives are a map to nowhere, fast.)

In his speech, Bannon claims to be a “hard-nosed capitalist,” and bemoans the way capitalism stopped bettering the majority of people’s lives and has become “corrupted” since “losing its Judeo-Christian roots” (a cultural nod echoed by President Trump in his “we’re saying Merry Christmas again” speech). What Bannon calls “divine providence” (bestowed by a Judeo-Christian God) is that white folks are “creators of jobs” and “creators of wealth.” He claims that this society’s forefathers were staunch enough to prevent the encroachment of Islamic or other cultures into their own, and thus: “they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

AK Rockefeller, The Immigrant [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The presumed past glories Bannon imagines the European nations possessed, he credits to their supremacy. Actually, white imperialists and their descendents are notoriously masterful at stealing the intellectual, agricultural and cultural capital of numerous other peoples, erasing those people from history and claiming the bounty as wholly their own–a pattern that represents a kind of white culture of its own. For instance: in his present-day call to war against Islam, Bannon neglects to acknowledge that when Islamic states flourished in the Middle East in the eighth through thirteenth centuries, unimpeded by conquering interests, some of the greatest strides in human science, math and the arts were accomplished. The myth of white exceptionalism thrives on glossing over the blatant material facts of Europeans’ theft and assimilation of other cultures, attributing their glories instead to a magical, god-given superiority (exactly in line with how monarchies and noble classes were justified throughout European traditions, too).

This is “controlling the narrative” at its grandest and finest. Such a picture of history—in which European societies are naturally superior to all others on Earth—is only balanced if the people and cultures that were used and exterminated are discarded from the narrative, completely—with the king’s grandeur always fixed at the center of your attention (i.e., the central storyline of history).³Ever the point and height of humanity, those kings. [Why is it that those who are most insecure in themselves, most seek their supremacy to be assured?]

This supremacist rhetoric seems reasonable and accurate—if taken from only this narrow historical viewpoint. And to those conditioned (by their schooling, churches, social norms, etc.) to only see from that narrow angle, such nauseating rhetoric could ring true—the “dog whistle” effect. But this rhetoric, like any fundamentalist viewpoint, excludes the stories of many for the exaltation of the preferred narrative. To include others’ actual historical experiences would destroy the argument.

What motivates the abrasive tone of such exclusive, fundamentalist narratives? Fear. Bannon’s advocacy for American “sovereignty” and an arch-conservative protectionism of white assets—both material and cultural—betray fear that someone would come to try to take them away. This actually points to the implicit belief (which is so pervasive as to be invisible, and quite likely IS invisible to a person like Bannon) that “power-over” in oppressive systems of conquest and superiority is the only and perpetual way in which societies functionally organize themselves. They assume that the few who crave power must exact their terrible will on the lives of many, who in turn must give up their bodies, their histories, their lands, and their futures for the concentrated, bloated affluence of a few kings.

There is a reason these mythologies don’t state their founding assumptions—because if those assumptions were to be brought out and laid on the table, they would be shown to be indefensible. Bannon is leaning on how “taken for granted” some of these dominant myths are; truly, one risks being socially ostracized for calling conventional norms into question. But seductive, “toxic” memes function in the shadows: they cannot show you their true nature, or else their gimmicks would be punctured. Like a magician performing a trick, they need you to miss (that is, not perceive) certain aspects of the trick in order for the emotional hooks to lodge in your flesh—and drag you along.

Simply illuminating some of the unspoken premises enables even the most pervasive myth to be dealt with. I advise developing this skill so you may deftly enter into transformational dialogue even with individuals whose agenda might initially, even unconsciously, be to conquer you with their memes.

The Myth Made Me Do It: When Idea Power Crosses Over Into Reality

Memes (beliefs, interpretations, stories, etc.) live in minds, which are connected to bodies; bodies make beliefs manifest, and thus is violence wrought unto people and the Earth on behalf of memes. This is why attempts to condemn individual people of certain ethnic or cultural origins—as Trump proposed with his Muslim-country immigration ban—will not address or prevent the arising of diseased forms of violence or aggression, whatsoever. Individual people are not the true source of our problems. The root of our problems is people’s propensity to act unreflectively in line with their adopted beliefs. If we gain the skills for navigating and resisting being “hooked” by memes, we have a chance to act more thoughtfully and meaningfully.

There is good reason why we, as a society, have discerned that hate speech is not deserving of the same rights as free speech. Just as with shouting “fire” falsely in a crowded movie theater, hate speech is extremely likely, if not intended, to incite harm. Speech has tangible impacts—psychological, social, and cybernetic (i.e., directing systems). Speech provokes action, which is why it is not neutral when someone speaks words that encourage violence. Because speech transmits memes, and not all memes are suited for humanity’s health and wellbeing. Understanding that hate speech is not deserving of the same rights as free speech, we need to advance this ethical step further. We need to undertake a collective project of confronting and neutralizing the threats of entire narratives and mythologies that threaten to undermine societal integrity.

As was discussed in the previous piece, regarding trance states: no matter the content or integrity of the memes, people will act out the stories they have internalized. Due to the way humans are wired, we are prone to become entranced with any compelling organizing framework through which we can interpret the world, and we begin spreading and reinforcing our interpretive framework when we act as though the illusion is the reality. This is how a flimsy mythology such as white supremacy equips people to undertake violent acts affecting real people and materials, even as the structural premises underpinning the mythology are constructed of smoke and mirrors.

AK Rockefeller, Following The Inevitable Destiny Of The Bastard Child Of Civilization [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Because these myths seem to satisfy emotional needs, we act as though indebted or even devoted to these memes—as though our lives depend on acting out and spreading these interpretive frameworks in the world. Worse: violent real acts can serve to reinforce the seeming reality of the myths, causing deeper entrenchment of ideologies and behaviors among people! Because of how smoothly and invisibly myths penetrate our daily rituals and actions, conflating myths as real or people (and not myths) as the problem is understandable.

But let us not remain in this confusion. It is so crucially important to stay in touch with what is real and what is myth, and work to leverage real assets to address the maladaptiveness of certain myths. Again, individual people are not the problem; instead, people may provide the solution, by learning to deliberately work with these assumption- and action-forming processes.

If we cannot learn to attack the root of these problems—by mitigating the memes—then bodies will continue to be attacked, and will continue to suffer. A reckoning is upon us—if we cannot face the deep-seated viruses of white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression residing in the soft tissue of our minds… then we will further kill and maim whole bodies and peoples, instead.

Radically Reconfiguring How Power Is Harnessed in a Social Order

White supremacy is just one of many forms of oppressive hierarchy that we grapple with in society today. In addition to the white/non-white binary devised for the purpose of empowering some to exploit others, there are binary axes of sex, gender, sexuality, creed, immigration status, etc. that cause like harm. Yet each of these mythic systems has uniform features, indicating that there is an even deeper pattern-layer that shows up in these particular narrative systems. If we really want to “see to the roots” of our prevailing social conditioning, we must examine all hierarchies of oppression as representing one gross pattern—one mammoth meme.

Hierarchical societal structures (one-way flows which concentrate energy upward) require oppression. Therefore, we are so immersed in oppression—it is so normative and pervasive—that we may not well notice, or have names for, the extensive organizing power of this framework and how it manifests in almost every aspect of our lives. It’s like “the water we swim in,” which is why it can seem impossible to change. But every society’s “normal” is temporary and conditional. What’s normal and prevailing can be changed.

To me, it is desperately important that Americans see how empty and conditional our dominant mythologies are. There are actually a diverse variety of cultural patterns for living harmoniously on Earth, and many viable solutions for achieving widespread abundance, well-being and happiness exist today. To the extent we seek sanctuary in our toxic (but comforting) narratives, we fail to look beyond the boundaries of our conventional understandings for viable alternatives. To change this, let us name our normative patterns and their underlying assumptions, too, and see if we don’t, in the process, uncover open doorways leading to wild and promising alternatives.

AK Rockefeller, Based on a True Story [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

All oppression narratives are premised on “power over.” Like a perpetual motion machine, the ongoing fuel feeding the systems of “power-over” is the dichotomy the mythos creates, whereby an individual’s self-interest consistently involves obtaining power over others—that is, it is desirable to be in the oppressing class and not the oppressed class (for clear reasons).

Common to warmongers of any color or creed is the drive to gain power over others. As the notion of noblesse oblige (or its modern form, wherein the U.S. military claims to “spread democracy” as it actually meddles in other nations’ political and economic destinies) signifies, in the myths of the privileged group, attaining power over can be framed as “compassionate” in that one believes one’s culture to be superior, and therefore it is beneficial to impose it on other people “so as to help them.” No matter how well-meaning, it still contains the seed of a desire for power over others—in this case, ideological power-over, which says that “my way is definitely superior to your (often traditional, cultural) way.” That subtle desire for “power over” is an ether that seeps into people’s hearts, regardless of their nation or culture of origin.

There is a view of human nature that “power-over” is what shapes everything in the world, and us. This is Trump’s view. Nietzsche affirmed it in the master-slave dichotomy of what is valued. To those who subscribe to this view of power, their aim is to embody nobility: to acquire mastery (i.e., the perfection of their control) over the world. While power is intrinsic in the forms of the world, it is not compelled to take the form of “power-over” any more than water is required to remain liquid and never become ice or vapor. There are other “phase states” that power can take—under the right conditions.

Regarding the state of society today, one of our most challenging obstacles is the pervasiveness of the “power-over” framework and how accustomed we are to acting in accordance with its assumptions. This problem can be healed with alternative memes, forming alternative frameworks of how to understand and relate to power itself.

If there are natural, regenerative sources of power in the world—inherent to the survival and procreation processes of memes and of living things —what are some alternative ways to arrange that power? If our actions both activate and spread the content of our internalized memetic framework, how could we bring more mindfulness to the memes we embody so as to move toward a more life-affirming future?

There are other, often-suppressed ways to orchestrate natural capital that involves very different-looking power relations: referred to as “power to,” “power with,” and “power from within.” These frameworks honor life and life’s intrinsic developmental processes by seeking to productively combine natural resources in a consensual, networked and organic organizational framework. This is superior to planet-wide extractive, coercive hierarchical forms if just because it avoids many of the harms and extreme inefficiencies of a homogenizing, wealth-extracting and wealth-consolidating hierarchy. (It may even help reduce deep levels of cognitive dissonance, if we do in fact experience urges to correct unfair behavior in infancy—prior to social conditioning.) If we can include more and more natural, renewable capital (including people’s inborn talents and capacities) to their fullest extents, this is bound to result in greater and more ecstatic collective accomplishments than ever before.

The Fallacy of Desiring Power-Over and the Authenticity of Desiring Power-To

In the oppressive framework, a small group of elite gain power over the rest of living processes on Earth through extractive consolidating economic and political systems, and (according to this mythos’ implicit laws), this ancient way will forever persist because people will always want power over others. Surely, white wealthy men will continue to defend the power structure that privileges them in accordance with their own interests. Surely, history will only ever repeat itself, just in bigger and more destructive/energy-intensive ways.

What this stance fails to acknowledge or even imagine, is a scenario in which people of oppressor classes relinquish their stance of asserting power over others.

In the case of battling the social narrative of white supremacy, perhaps the most deadly weapon is for people of both sides of the binary to refuse to participate and to devise their own custom relations for how they consensually use and exchange their power. European-descended, white-identified, anti-racist, anti-supremacist people are not hypothetical: we do exist. We are allied with the human struggle for equity and empowerment. We are not “defectors” of our “race”—we reject that lazy, shallow narrative (having seen a bigger picture). We take up positions in the fight for authentic liberation of humankind. Race being a social construct, we sign up to help deconstruct it. We don’t swallow the narrative that anybody should be in power over others, exploiting and profiting off of the lives of others—not even us. Because we just don’t want that. That is not our chosen aspiration.

AK Rockefeller, The Other Way [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Compassion instructs that my possibility of being the “other” in any statement is just as likely, and conditional, as being the subject. This is especially relevant to consider in cases of unearned privilege like being born into a body that is conditionally perceived-as-white. Whereas white supremacists cannot acknowledge others’ subjective realities as valid, so narrow is the self-protective narrative they’ve swallowed, anti-oppressionists acknowledge that each being’s lineage represents a valid narrative—that is, we are willing to see the picture from infinite angles, because each being (and each viewpoint) is a sacred piece to understanding the whole. Thus we reject the overarching structure of human relations that oppressive rhetoric seeks to establish as so-natural-as-to-be-invisible. If we reject the underlying premises of such ominous speech—all of the air deflates from the overblown balloon of supremacist arguments. Such bombastic threats are shown to be empty (as in the revelation of the Wizard of Oz’s true nature).

In the space between assumptions, between conscious thoughts, concentrate your attention.

We anti-oppression activists of all kinds have laid down our aspirations to power-over, preferring instead a framework of power-from-within, and power-with. We don’t just seek freedom from being oppressed—we seek freedom to actualize our beautiful dreams for the world. Those of us who have experienced a deep breakthrough (framed as “spiritual,” or otherwise) in which we become directly aware of the interconnectedness of everything—we simply cannot be convinced that the correct social stance for ourselves is one in which we dominate and exploit any other. It cannot be done; that argument will not be won. Not even the temptation of personal gratification is sufficient to compel us. For we have dealt with those temptations already—we have greeted them in their many seductive forms, already, and we have overcome them. Thus do we have the immanent power of knowing better.

Thus have we—as anyone can, and may, and should! (and will?!)—relinquished the real threat to humanity, which is the will-to-power-over. Furthermore, we anti-oppressionists who happen to benefit from unearned privileges (due to our given race, gender, class, etc. statuses) will continue to ally with indigenous and oppressed peoples in our collective quest to eliminate the real and terrible threat to humanity, especially pronounced in a treacherous, insular cohort of people today (but whose potential is intrinsic to any/all people), through processes of compassion, restoration, healing, and accountability.

Changing World Assumptions, Changing World Possibilities

“Our ego is what the mind thinks we are. It is an image of ourselves which grows out of our life experiences—our body, sex, race, religion, culture, education, socialization, fears and assertive ego. We are supposed to know exactly who we are and what we believe and are supposed to be able to defend that identity. The more strongly we identify with something, the more strongly must we reject its opposite. Thus, the strongest, most obsessive egos belong to the least complete beings.”

“Developing an ego is like building a castle against reality. It provides some defense and a sense of purpose, but the larger it is, the more it invites attack, and, ultimately, it must crumble. There is a further problem. All fortresses are also prisons. Because our beliefs imply a rejection of their opposites they severely restrict our freedom.” — Peter J. Carroll, Psychonaut, 165

Be skeptical of rhetoric that completely leaves out that there are many ways to be (some of which may even be holistically better in quality, and yet don’t require privileging a few to the detriment of the many). If we could be free to recognize that there are options for how power is channelled, we’d have the freedom to mindfully contemplate and creatively experiment with the desired forms power can take. Speaking, spreading, promoting and actualizing this truth is the real threat to capitalists and supremacists everywhere: the spreading of faith in, practice of, and cross-fertilization among alternative, indigenous, integrative, higher-quality structures for human organization (which will be expanded on in the subsequent pieces).

It is crucial to gain the skills to sniff out underlying assumptions and articulate them, whether applied to your own internalized belief systems or in encountering others’ narratives. Freeing yourself into the silent space between assumptions can have profound effects, allowing the intuitive, integrative forces within to do their work. But there is more. The real creative potential, the ultimate liberating power, comes when one is able to change underlying assumptions. If you could see your own assumptions as “empty” (that is, conditional, having arisen from all historical moments), would you then have the freedom to creatively experiment with alternative pathways?

AK Rockefeller, Grinders Wheel [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The overall course of action that I endorse involves developing the human capacity to respond mindfully to the intensifying onslaught of memes and media. Instead of a unidirectional flow of power—in which memes colonize and manipulate humans without any meaningful resistance, I advocate for developing a two-way flow of power, in which humans and memes both exert influence and must therefore work cooperatively for the mutual benefit of both. You might have noticed that this parallels with my arguments for undermining one-way concentrations of power in social, economic and political forms (oppressive hierarchy pattern), and my advocating for “composting and redistributing” the natural capital locked into such structures for more autonomous, decentralized, and networked forms of power (consensual combinatory networked pattern)—and that the latter may be necessary for our collective survival, to say nothing of the life-affirming benefits it could bring into the lives of many.

In the subsequent pieces, I will attempt to show that these overarching, formidable myths have shaped real, nitty-gritty aspects of our present moment. Using an understanding of power-over and power-to, I will unpack Trump’s hostile claim to power and implications for “how the chips may fall” regarding the U.S.’s cultural and structural identity going forward. Having gone from individual to social, from psychological to mythological, I will further expand on the possibilities for what consensual, organic cooperative arrangements of power could look like at the collective scale of social movements and nations. After all, the collective scale is the ideal scale to explore how memes and humans combine to form epic stories and manifest histories.

Absorb your attention in the unknown. Let go of any reactions. Let appear whatever wishes. Remain relaxed and centered.

In this open space, invite a dream of a better world to reveal itself.

Witness what emerges.

And notice what resonates.

∞

What are some ways “power over” manifests in your life? Look at your relations—economic, social, material, etc. What do you notice about who or what has “power over” you, and who or what you have “power over” relative to others?

What are some ways “power within” manifests in your life? Do you have the power from within necessary to tweak or modify your operating assumptions/beliefs? How could you develop such power?

What are some ways “power with” manifests in your life? This might involve an experience where two or more people come together consensually, and each contribute their unique strengths, to accomplish a mutual goal. Can you name some examples of times you experienced “power with”? How could you cultivate more such experiences?

Everett Rodgers said, “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation.” Consider the ways in which you receive, and spread, memes—from social media to social norms. In just the past week, see how many messages and behaviors you have been exposed to, and which ones you have exposed others to. What really resonated you, and what felt “off” or empty? What would you change? Going forward, how could you bring more mindfulness and discretion into the memes you give an audience to, and the memes you reinforce to your social networks (online and offline)?

Exercise—solo or in groups: Take a speech by any politician or political figure. This could be a President or Congressperson, or even someone on your school board. Examine the statements in the speech for any underlying, unspoken assumptions that are being subtly broadcast as implicit or “normal” to the audience. See how many unspoken assumptions you can identify and write them out. Then, imagine you are a reporter in the room who is able to ask follow-up questions at the end of the speech. What questions would you ask that might illuminate or challenge some of those underlying assumptions? (Doesn’t matter whether you agree with the assumptions—consider how you might probe them no matter what they are.) Can you get the political figure to acknowledge and defend their assumptions? What kind of discourse would open up, subsequently?

References [ + ]

1.	↑	See #8 of RACE—The Power of an Illusion.
2.	↑	Recommended reading includes: The Noam Chomsky Collection, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or this list of 16 book suggestions to learn about white supremacy in the U.S.
3.	↑	Ever the point and height of humanity, those kings. [Why is it that those who are most insecure in themselves, most seek their supremacy to be assured?]

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview

October 11, 2017 By Marco Morelli

Readers Underground: Spheres: Globes: Volume 2

Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview

Cosmos

| October 11, 2017

Feature Image: fdecomite, Eclipses [via Flickr, CC-BY]

We are reading all three volumes of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy: Bubbles, Globes, and Foam.

The live-recorded conversations for Globes are almost done. However, the conversation will continue in our forum. We also welcome creative submissions in response to your own reading.

About the Book

All history is the history of struggles for spheric expansion.
–from Globes

In Globes—the second, and longest, volume in Peter Sloterdijk’s celebrated magnum opus Spheres trilogy—the author attempts nothing less than to uncover the philosophical foundations of the political history—the history of humanity—of the last two thousand years. The first, well-received volume of the author’s Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, dealt with microspheres: the fact that individuals, from the fetal stage to childhood, are never alone, because they always incorporate the Other into themselves and align themselves with it. With Globes, Sloterdijk opens up a history of the political world using the morphological models of the orb and the globe, and argues that all previous statements about globalization have suffered from shortsightedness. For him, globalization begins with the ancient Greeks, who represented the whole world through the shape of the orb. With the discovery of America and the first circumnavigations of the earth, the orb was replaced by the globe. This second globalization is currently giving way to the third, which we are living through today, as the general virtuality of all conditions leads to a growing spatial crisis.Peter Sloterdijk tells here the true story of globalization: from the geometrization of the sky in Plato and Aristotle to the circumnavigation of the last orb—the earth—by ships, capital, and signals.

Buy the book: Amazon.com | B&N | Powell’s

About the Author

Photo by Stephanie von Becker

Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001. He has been cohost of a discussion program, Der Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002.

[Source: SemioText(e)]

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse

October 9, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse

Cosmos

| October 9, 2017

Feature Image:

This conversation series is concerned with how the monstrous, epic drama of our present-day reality is animated by subtle winds of power. We will explore creative strategies and discuss critical issues relating to developing our embodied consciousness as individuals/collectives—while cultivating more effectual ways to wield our often invisible yet immanent power.

Can’t retreat no more (Prologue)

October 9, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse:

Can’t retreat no more (Prologue)

Caroline Savery

| October 9, 2017

Feature Image: new 1lluminati, dog god of war [via Flickr, CC BY]

To continue a policy of escape, retreat and regression is mutually assured destruction. We need to face, and learn from, our difficulties.

∞

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse emerges in the world as more than just a multi-part publication, but as a collaborative inquiry and conversation about how human life forms, independently and mutually, can more effectively access, channel, and apply their powers for beneficial results. In a mutual dialogue, it is helpful to define one’s assumptions and definitions at the outset so a common understanding becomes possible. Before proceeding, I would like to share my definitions and my thinking about power, about the so-called “Trumpocalypse,” and about our prospects for a genuine transmutation of today’s perilous prevailing forces into more conducive, life-affirming configurations.

Creative Strategies for Change defines power as “the access to internal and external resources, decision-makers, and institutions in order to meet individual and collective needs.” A root idea of power in this definition is “access to resources.” I envision power in a slightly different way: the ability to coordinate and move energy. Energy encompasses both manifest forms (aka “resources”) and unmanifest or potential energy (such as thoughts concerning an action you want to take in the future). Coordinating suggests channeling and concentrating energies into a more highly organized capacity to act on, or move through, the world.

In the following set of essays I deal with principally two types of power: life power and meme power—and a kind of third character: the strange realm of emergent effects where the two intersect.

Life coordinates energy into biological constructs (meaning, organisms) that seek their survival and reproduction. Unlike most everything else in existence, life has an agenda: it seeks its own perpetuation. This necessitates that the organism have some bodily movement or sufficient genetic drift (like pollen riding a breeze or a bumblebee). Genetic furtherance can even be seen occurring across time, over generations of selective evolutionary forces, whereby the organism takes an appropriate shape to fit a niche in the environment.

This implies that there is responsive action or agency as a built-in quality of living things. A being may be animate to lesser or greater degree, but even if seemingly unconscious or unmoving, a living organism is acting on the world. In fact, this is one of life’s defining features: life is negentropic (meaning, it captures energy and creates forms of higher orders out of chaos). One could describe a life form’s innate power as its animate aspect, or: its activities of consciousness. Even if a species’ collective “intelligence” primarily takes the shape of genetic evolution over multiple generations, the agenda to survive and reproduce persists, giving life movement, and thus, the power to act on its environment.

Memes are packets of information. As such, they find a biological analogue in DNA, viruses or genes, which function like the “code” informing the biological construction of bodies. Memes interact with human consciousness through various media, such as story, speech, writing, song, and video. This is why the notion of ideas as living (or appearing-to-live) entities was dubbed “memes” by Richard Dawkins. Memes—in the form of concepts, ideas, symbols or myths—can become absorbed by a biological mind-body and then obtain the power to coordinate energy: typically, memes coordinate the actions of humans and/or give shape to the technologies that humans develop. Social organization of any kind is entirely dependent on the process of establishing and “calcifying” certain memes, in fact.

Danil Kazakov, Spiral [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

So what do these abstract terms have to do with our damning, pressing sociopolitical situation? To “transmute the Trumpocalypse,” we must ascertain the real possibilities of bringing our collective intelligence to bear in a more meaningful and coordinated a way than we’ve so far been able to. Many see Trump’s election as representative of a social regression, heralding a descent into international disarray and the rise of military rule and fascism. How could the people of a planetary interdependent society develop resilience, so history’s lessons need not repeat in vicious loops, with ever more costly consequences? With our depleted resources and compromised environment, we cannot afford to regress, and must make humane sense of our situation in order to innovate solutions. This will require some mental effort and spiritual legwork to develop ourselves. Accelerating the process of human collective evolution—our minds and our memes—by applying our intelligence, by acting from what we’ve learned so far, we can develop new structures (inner and outer) adapted to our current and impending survival pressures.

Though the title of this series might appear flippant, I’d define a “Trumpocalypse” as “a disaster of far-reaching harmful consequences, predicated on the slimmest of egocentric pretenses and the grossest distortions of inappropriate access to power.” In short, it is allowing a dangerously imbalanced situation to deteriorate into a highly undesirable outcome. As we have seen on a daily basis since the dawn of his term, President Trump is a volatile cocktail—a fragile ego plus an uninformed and isolated mind, combined with access to tremendous, even existentially threatening, powers.

Could we access, harness and wield our collective powers in alternate ways that transform these seeds of Trumpocalypse? Every day we feel “on the brink” of an irreversible Trumpocalypse coming to pass. Every day Trump as president is doing damage, or intending to do damage, to people or environments falling outside of his millionaire peer group—which is nearly everyone and everywhere. Together, the people, on the whole, are surely more intelligent and more “leaderful” than rule by President Trump.

We got to “President Trump” through the sophisticated manipulation of “egoically bruised” Americans (white, male, evangelical, and lower and middle class Americans) through propaganda, lies, fearmongering, bullying, and the precipitous “echo chamber” effect of social media spaces. Humans are notoriously dependent on memes—and vulnerable to being colonized by emotionally-gratifying memes. From early childhood, Americans are groomed to absorb a constant, aggressive stream of advertising messages that are not in our best interests. Consumerist culture, corporate-political consolidation, and our increasingly “anti-social society” (in the words of Rajani Kanth) all depend on our susceptibility to control by memes. Therefore, the stories that we subscribe to seem designed to control our behaviors, and we are simply the puppets. It might appear, horribly, that there is no way to stop people from developing more and more powerful memetic weapons—and that humans will forever serve as the shattered battleground.

But memes need us, as we need memes. Consider that a human mind can develop techniques and skills to dismiss and mute ideas, to distill some parts and discard other parts of an idea, to choose the channels by which it engages with memes, to be a soil for only ideas of integrity to take root. Mentally, emotionally and socially depleted people are especially susceptible to exploitation by malicious memes. By contrast, people with mental development, training, and resources, who know the workings of memes and can navigate them skillfully, become far more resilient to malicious memes and mindfully attuned to harbor beneficial, appropriate memes.

AK Rockefeller, Look for… [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Perhaps our last line of defense against a Trumpocalypse is the distributed, autonomous seizing and wielding of our life power—that is, the power to direct our attention. These essays provide avenues and techniques for reclaiming such power, from individual up to collective levels. We will explore ways that human individuals and communities can themselves have agency and move amidst the marketplace of memes—strolling the aisles, curating what they select, recombine, and cultivate of the available ideas. Our intelligence is more powerful than our reactive conditioning; we are more powerful than we realize. Understanding and working with our inborn, participatory powers of intelligence will increase our resilience to being colonized by ideas with deleterious intentions or results.

Trump’s power is illusory—it is predicated on the compliance of millions of other people. If Trump was facing down millions of people 1) who saw him as their equal, 2) who do not accept his claims to authority over them, 3) who mindfully respond in a mode of dialogue, and 4) who want to help him heal, then probably none of his destructive deviant aspirations could ever come to pass: neutralized, instead, on the precipice between thoughtform and consensual action.

If people committed to developing their power to see through to the roots of how meme and life power plays out in their lives, and to consciously practice their power to say “yes” or “no” to participating in or perpetuating certain patterns, we’d develop the capacity to enact much more elegant and consensual social structures. Dream with me, if you will, of a re-orchestration of all power latent or active in this present moment, whereby memes and people lived symbiotically, cooperatively, in mutual respect and consent, toward the purpose of fulfilling one another’s most life-affirming potentials.

How likely or attainable this future is, doesn’t really matter. If we want to see it come to pass, there’s only one thing to do: give it our attention.

Will you join me on a journey to see where this vision might lead?

We need to penetrate and peel back the lies, distortions and omissions aimed at assuaging our anxieties through a narrative of our inadequacy and our need to submit to a superior power. Continuing a tack of retreat and regression, embodied by Donald Trump’s toddler-like self-absorption and denial of difficulties, is a dead end.

new 1lluminati, alternatives: choose or pray [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

Our only hope for navigating out of this conundrum is by turning directly to face ourselves and our difficulties—like a grownup would demonstrate the courage to turn back into a burning building, because an infant remained, helpless, within. To face the situation, with “radical acceptance and dialectical thinking,” as therapist Robin Chancer writes, is needed. It’ll be potentially the most painful thing we go through besides dying. We might be scarred for what we’ve borne witness to, but we will persist, because we will have chosen to embrace the depths of what life offers. If we view our lives as a sacred source of energy, insight, wisdom and problem-solving capability, from which we could glean everything we need to develop the best ways to be together, then we will have the power to transform the world with our consensual, respectful engagement. Further, if we begin treating our incredible technological tools—like the Internet—and all of our lived human history as the ultimate infinite storehouse or library for memes, from which we can draw potential energy for any purpose we mindfully select to act upon, we will bring our technological and ethical/mental development into closer alignment, and enable the attainment of more holistically appropriate and beautiful endeavors.

In no way, then, is Transmuting the Trumpocalypse your standard political pontification: it does not construct an elaborate factual array, it seeks not to debate points into fatigue (and if there is an impassioned diatribe here, it centers on empathy and humanity). That’s because this is not an attempt to persuade you about reality, or to sway you to adopting a particular political viewpoint. My aim is to invite you into a dialogue: with yourself, with my ideas, with me, and with one another, really. I attempt to use evident phenomena to point to deep patterns about power (the essays are organized in terms of the pattern they express). About Trump, this ain’t.

To begin our journey with integrity, we should prepare the soil of the mind. Let us pause and set aside for a moment the convoluted echo chamber of distorted sound-bites-and-notification-blips-turned-harassing-noise, and sit in the shock of silence. Don’t follow any thoughts that arise. When they arise, let them go by gently re-attaching your attention to the present moment. Seep your attention into the body and the breath.

How long can you last in the quiet space of assessing the actual, present reality? Can you bear to look at it? You might be tempted to retreat. But there is nowhere to go when the whole world has been polluted, used up, paved over, fenced off, chained up and beaten into paralysis. As hard and as painful as it is, the worst thing you can do right now is run into the arms of false saviors and illegitimate authorities. The best thing you can do is hold onto your seat and throw open the shades of your cloistered heart to embrace the hardships and the hope, together.

Introduction to Transmuting the Trumpocalypse

October 9, 2017 By Mindful AI

Transmuting the Trumpocalypse:

Introduction to Transmuting the Trumpocalypse

Caroline Savery

| October 9, 2017

Feature Image: AK Rockefeller, Red Flag [via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I’d like to provide some context for the subsequent essay series. As a relatively unknown author on the brink of publishing a real pile of material (see the Overview page for this 7-part series), I feel I should at least tell about myself and my method upfront.

The essays in this series are concerned with how the monstrous, epic drama of our present-day reality is animated by subtle winds of power—namely life power (innate) and meme power (dependent on life power).

Mr. Trump, as a wealthy real estate mogul, known for his ostentatious tastes and relentlessly self-absorbed persona, embodies power as conventionally defined through the lens of American capitalism. He is now in one of the most powerful roles on the planet, too, as president of the United States. However, Trump is devoid of almost all of the characteristics of good leaders, as defined, enduringly, for thousands of years in cultures around the globe. He is sadly bereft of many developmental aspects of mature humans. I would argue that his intense hunger for external approval is a byproduct of his lack of personal power in capacities such as peacefulness, understanding, empathy and emotional security. Yet, Trump is an extremely sophisticated showman—and by provoking people’s latent fears, he has channeled Americans’ psychic power into extraordinary political power, with the 2016 presidential election representing a major political upset (with or without Russia’s aid). This makes Trump a vibrant jumping-off point for investigating the core nature—as well as the many facets—of power.

Each essay deals with the unfolding, interdependent effects of these powers on a different scale, proceeding from the personal/intimate to the social/institutional. This essay series aims to penetrate to the roots of power and the shaping of material conditions through memes and through minds. I also discuss what is happening to us—“us” being anyone who is impacted by the Trump phenomenon, especially but not exclusively Americans—on individual and collective psychological levels, as we are forced to confront and grapple with certain popular myths about ourselves, our nation, and our global civilization.

I attempt to show that the intrinsic root and source of power is our embodied consciousness—and to describe some effectual ways by which we may wield our often invisible yet immanent power. This power seems invisible in the sense that it is the subtle cause underlying action in reality—the “ghost in the machine,” so to speak. However, it is also invisible due to the ways in which we are taught in the modern, colonized era to not see it, to suppress and fear it, to avoid attempts to understand it, and thus to not channel it freely. The simple, subjective act of knowing the nature of our power—and learning to work with it—undermines the entire set of oppressive structures currently arranged to extract and consolidate as much value as possible from the diverse living strata of the Earth. Our culture is colonized by memes that reinforce patterns of oppression we’ve internalized in our psyches. Still, though the prevailing set of socioeconomic norms seems to absorb us, we possess the power to move within them—more than we may realize.

I want to speak clearly, if sometimes crisply, about the aspects of consciousness that have underpinned Donald Trump’s rise to political power. These pieces use Donald Trump as a point of focus and departure for a deeper analysis. As a media phenomenon and as a person, Trump represents a concentration, an intensification, of dangerous patterns which some of us may have otherwise continued to blithely ignore or dismiss as benign. Thus, Trump’s widespread presence in consciousness at this point is a catalyst for awareness: as our survival instincts bristle and flare, a heightened sensitivity to perception is activated. This blessedly allows the subtle roots animating the gross phenomena to be revealed and traced, when previously, tolerating the threat was an acceptable stance among those of relative privilege.

Amidst the bombast and bluster of a raging demon-god, it’s quite like witnessing a natural breeze rustle the curtain, allowing the true wizard of Oz—a mere insecure man—to be apprehended. And the “wizard” is merely a human magician with a fixation on appearing “big” and controlling others. As a simple person, and not a seething supernatural demigod—he can be worked with. Moreover, insofar as “Donald Trump” is a creation of our media, and our media is a manifestation of our collective consciousness, we can work through “Donald Trump” ourselves.

Artist David Datuna with Make America Stronger Together Installation

David Datuna with Make America Stronger Together Installation [via Wikimedia]

I feel driven to “come out” as a writer at this time, as uncomfortable as this process is for me, because I believe I have some wisdom to share in this situation, based on how I’ve trained my mind to be resilient in the face of toxic cultural patterns. Unfortunately, I observe that a majority of us today (many more than I was willing to admit to myself, until recent confusion-amplifying events in the sociopolitical sphere) do not understand how our minds work, and how the world works, on subtle levels. Being subject to our fluctuating feelings and thoughts—like a cork bobbing on an ocean—without any broader, grounding, explanatory sense of the patterns and laws of reality (often, because we have never fiercely tested our own ossified beliefs), breeds suffering and violence. When the majority of people—or perhaps a simple minority of people who yet wield the majority of social and material capital—would destroy all life, born and unborn, in an unbending enforcement of their projected concepts, something is gravely imbalanced, and those with wisdom must assert themselves, for the sake of restoring basic sanity and systemic integrity.

Appalled and amazed, I witness the profoundly confused and agitated condition of my fellow Americans from the vantage point of a person who has, by contrast, experienced consistently increasing and deep self-actualization and “making sense of the world” since adolescence. Since my youth, I’ve honed a notable personal “powerfulness”—yet it is a vastly different kind of power than the kind President Trump wields. The power I’ve tapped has to do with an ever more skillful harnessing of the inherent life energy that passes through my body—through the application of ethics, wisdom, self-reflection, and dharma practice…whereas Trump, deprived of personal access to such power, obsessively seeks to control more and more external resources and people through an authoritarian, or “power over,” model, to satisfy the profound gap within him. Or, so goes my hypothesis.

Innate Power: Embracing change, embracing difference

Let me tell you about the source of power that I do know—and thus, can speak of, with some authority.

Since my early teen years, I have actively and deliberately developed my embodied consciousness. That means: I have invested considerable energy regularly, if not daily, in experimenting with and studying my evolving sense of what is true and real—making hypotheses about what is “true” and then proceeding to test my assumptions, fearlessly. In my particular journey of personhood, I have cycled through various identities. I’ve gone from a repressed poet to a cynical liberal activist, defining my self-expression only in terms of what I opposed. I’ve identified as a scientific rationalist, a leftist anarchist, an atheist, a radical environmental justice nag, a pragmatist, a constructivist, a cooperatives expert/organizer, a Buddhist, a permaculture and decolonization practitioner… Each of the foregoing identities or frameworks was useful for a time; each allowed me to predict and understand certain things about my reality. And then each fell away, partly or wholly, like a shed skin or autumn leaves, to be used as mulch in a more explanatory, more elegant, more inclusive articulation of the complex of patterns I find myself immersed in.

Thomas Hawk, Or Maybe Just Happy [via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0]

Throughout this age-old process, I’ve grown to take my own convictions with a grain of salt. I’ve become aware of this pattern of “philosophical molting,” such that no matter how fervently I may believe something is true this instant, I always reserve an ounce of faith that “this, too” will eventually fall away. How/why? By encountering information or having experiences that do not conform to my existing framework. No one belief I have ever held, no matter how convinced I felt about it, could ever contain the full reality. Having a continual awareness that “this, too, isn’t the full picture” is one of the healthiest human qualities to cultivate, in my opinion. Even when experiencing extreme emotions or thoughts, a little part of me tends to remain in touch with impermanence, with witnessing it all as a process my consciousness is undergoing.

I’ve learned that this process of molting ideologies couldn’t be more natural: the arising and the passing away of thought forms. Eventually my body will perish, and then what will become of all those stored and carefully-constructed belief systems but to completely dissipate on the breeze? But then why attach ourselves to ideas at all? If we “can’t take it with us,” what is the proper function of this belief-development process?

To survive, of course! (It’s evolutionary, my dear Watson.) Concepts, handled by the mind, are emergent aspects of ancient natural cognitive processes: the same processes by which bees, crows, dogs—anything reproducing and sentient—can use generalized, encoded responses to stimuli to “make sense” of and intelligently navigate the world encompassing us. When our beliefs cease to serve our life process, it’s time to let them go and cultivate more advantageous ones.

How will we survive today and tomorrow, in a world immeasurably more complex, fraught, overwhelming, frustrating, enormously entangled, and ecologically devastated than anything our ancestors had to grapple with? In these essays, I would like to suggest that we can apply the same ancient built-in mechanisms that helped us persevere though past environmental challenges to “suss out” today’s path to sanity, well-being, and mutual benefit. Mind training systems (such as Buddhism, which is one I can personally vouch for) are a way to condition the patterns of one’s thoughts to better vet and test ideas, relinquish unhelpful ones, and cultivate more life-optimal ones. An actively trained mind responds to reality with greater integrity than an untrained (i.e., passively conditioned) mind.

Remaining aware of my thoughts’ impermanence and conditionality gives me a heightened immunity to “control by memes.” Thus, sometimes, even as dramatic and horribly dark thoughts are stalking my psyche, I am able to break through and even laugh at what I see my mind telling itself—recognizing the conditional nature of it all, and so not feeling obligated to act on my ego’s—temporary—threatening, harrowing machinations. I know now that the overblown doom-and-gloom Wizard of Oz is just a little man trying to look big—the ego within me. And this practice is how I have become internally resilient, able to resist emotionally-agitated thoughtforms and be at ease in the conditional nature of everything. If you were to ask me to kill or die for any one of my current beliefs, I’d look at you with a sustained, curious gaze, and respond, “No, I’d rather not.”

Thierry Ehrmann, Bobby Fischer, painted-portrait [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]

To train the mind for resilience, it is of the utmost importance that people experience contrasting viewpoints and diverse cultures, and cultivate open, curious minds—willing to pick up, examine and set aside concepts at will (like the tools for survival that they are). What distinguishes me is only that I have made a path, habit, and practice out of repeatedly breaking the bubble of my particular unearned situation and its comforts. I have sought out contrasting experiences. I have thrown myself into situations I didn’t understand. I have chosen to do the opposite of what I believed was the right way to do things on more occasions than I can count. Even when my concepts about things have been obliterated—I’ve remained. And while there is surely pain to this process, I also experience a pervading peace in the space between assumptions, as well as an intrinsic bliss that comes with challenging my brain to embrace the world in its vastness—how it will always ever be beyond my ideas about it. Although unconventional, this path has been a rewarding one that pays regular dividends in insight. There’s one core and immutable premise that underpins this lifestyle: I trust that every experience, no matter how good or bad, teaches about reality—that reality is knowable and workable. To proceed on this deep-diving odyssey with me, I must encourage you to take this approach within yourself.

In the following pieces, I discuss the difference between beneficial, productive, or adaptive memes, and cancerous or otherwise maladapted memes (many of which prevail and are choking the planet of life, currently). However, before we can be confident in our judgments in discerning what differentiates healthful from malicious memes, we must mindfully practice just being with whatever comes up in our minds. Amidst the outrageous difficulties and tensions that this historic moment is surfacing, I invite you to just stay with your breath. Just notice how you feel. (You can’t change the world in an instant, but you can at least witness your breath, right?)

Take it all in. Take in information, take in various points of view, other people’s truths—if a contradiction is found, don’t reject one idea or the other, offhand. Reflect. Breathe. Marinade in the tensions, rather. Tolerate the cognitive-dissonant chords. What someone tells you is true for them, pretend is true for you—just as an experiment. Try their viewpoint on for size. (Ultimately, you needn’t accept their assumptions, but do you understand—can you relate—to why they’d arrive at the conclusions they have?) Set aside mental constraints. Let it be. Soften and relax. You might feel intense impulses or sensations. Watch them, and don’t react. Stay.

This is empathy.

The curious thing about including many points of view as true is that the mind doesn’t necessarily become noisier and more cacophonous (though it may feel that way for a spell). Gradually, an integration process happens—you note where subtle truths have alignment, and you arrange the tones into ever-more blissfully climactic harmonies. That’s the paradox: the more of others’ truths you include, the more spacious you become by being better able to let manifest phenomena just be without throwing up rigid walls of thought-resistance. You are able to joyfully abide more often in a peaceful space of mind—such that, as a yoga teacher once said to me, “when a situation comes up and you do need to use your thoughts, they are that much more skillful and potent.”

We must open to the world, now and every “now” we have the temporary privilege of tasting. The goal is to be able to work with the world as it is: to deny nothing, to weave all the voices of existence into a sense-making harmony. To work with the world as it is, one must learn to work with symphonies of voices—be both a profound appreciator and patron of the world’s “music,” and a skillful orchestral arranger and composer. The ultimate aim is that the world totally fits together with itself, like a symphony at peak performance, which includes you… The ultimate aim is flow, that you resist nothing as “not-you” or not-OK, that you engulf any phenomenon in caring understanding. It is then that we will be free to go beyond the constraints of today, and give life to our deepest dreams.

Jeffrey, Dance of Life [via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0]

I feel reactions in line with what you may feel in grappling with the costs and impacts of the condition of Trump’s presidency and the overall state of global economics and political power today—anger, stress, anxiety, worry, disgust, pain. However, on the whole, I also reside in an authentic peace that transcends the current scenario, a peace emerging from the sense that I feel understanding for what is happening and why, and I hold it in compassion. It is this eerie poise that sets me apart in a wide range of scenarios—stressful, extreme, or otherwise. It’s not that I think I have “all things figured out.” It’s that I think I know enough to be able to work with reality, in its varieties, successfully.

If you cannot confidently say about the world and your place in it, “I understand what is happening,” I hope you will continue reading. Sometimes I speak from the perspective of a millennial American Buddhist, sometimes as a long-time student of cooperative organizations and community organizing processes, sometimes with the raw, impassioned voice of a suffering artist. Whether you respond to my anger, to my love, to my hope, or whatever you see in the mirror of me: I hope what I write rings a bell of resonance within you.

Working with What Is

To recap, I am proposing that anything we can claim to have perceived or interpreted must be accepted as only a partial and conditional view on our mysterious, shared situation. There are some things I can claim insight to, and other things I cannot; aspects of power I can claim experience of, and aspects I cannot. No matter how much I “see” Donald Trump as a daily fixture of the news, and no matter how I interpret what I see about Trump’s personality, persona and actions—and no matter how emotively I may adhere to those interpretations—I still must accept that I cannot see Trump in his wholeness. I do not (and would not) claim to have a universal answer to the puzzle of our situation.

Rather, I am putting forth some incisive questions that I think may help “cut through” the miring confusion, and unlock as-yet unrealized potential in our current situation. One of the “angles,” or strategies, in my proffered toolkit is the appropriate application of anger.

Anger is one of the many voices or angles I employ in this series to “get at” what I feel I need to get at. And yet, these essays argue that the only way to liberation is through understanding and embracing our challenges at the human and humanistic levels—through having compassion for our human situation. This attitude may seem to be in tension with the language of enmity I at times employ. I’d like to address that now.

Expressing an urge to actively respond to a perceived threat, anger is an appropriate and important emotion to feel at this time. Without anger, we wouldn’t have the energy nor daring to act with the aim of reducing suffering or benefiting the world. I would never have had the fuel to generate these pieces—these many thousands of words—without anger. Indeed, I have been angry with the exploits and destruction attendant to global neo-capitalism since my early teens. Yet I attempt to direct my anger to the real roots of its cause—not at the particular people who represent and perpetuate it (as the people only change with time and circumstance), but at the cancerous pattern itself, which destroys even the supposedly “privileged” people in its wake. I attempt to use anger as a scythe, to slice away the lies and ruses, to sink the blade’s teeth through the protective meat and hit the bone. Unless we cut and starve off the real roots of our problems, they will only continue to regenerate and evolve—with higher and higher stakes.

Jef Safi, in(ex)gressive (self)trans(in)formation [via Flickr, CC NC-ND 2.0]

There are many spiritual traditions in which it is taught that anger only ever obscures the true, divine reality of the moment—that anger is a poison and it blocks authentic relating. In my spiritual tradition, involving a Vajrayana path of Buddhism, nothing—even anger—doesn’t belong in our human experience. Rather, one must learn to skillfully transmute anger as it arises so that it doesn’t result in unconscious, poisonous divisiveness, but instead actuates mirror-like wisdom. Mirror-like wisdom is the straightforward, unflinching showing of the way things are. In looking at the honest, frank reflection, many people may see things they would rather avoid seeing—and may react with fear, blame, rejection, aggression, etc. But if, instead, they use the opportunity of the reflection to further break through the barriers between themselves and the world, a new measure of understanding becomes possible. This is how mirror-like wisdom can spread enlightenment.

Although anger has the power to show us what is real through mirror-like wisdom, it is anything but spiritually “elevated”—anger is earthy. It deals with an urge to address the here and now. I am extremely concerned that we may lose touch with our ground, the real, in favor of the tantalizing distractions offered by fleeting illusions (ideas). There is a great seductive power to believing President Trump will fix everything.

There is seduction, as well, in reverting to militarism, nihilism, or fundamentalism in resistance to Trump. These frameworks are seductive precisely because they indulge and leverage our unconscious emotions in absorbing narratives promising an amazing future bounty… if only we’ll serve their ends now. Like candy dangled over a child’s head, the emotional appeals of these narratives fixate our minds and we follow dutifully like a zombie follows his hunger. They are an appeal to our cravings for an order that is tidier than today’s messy, struggle-filled reality. Is it any wonder escapist media and immersive video games (even, to wit, virtual reality) are exploding right now—just as we need to be paying more attention than ever to our common ecological context? Thus, the seductive narratives and not the much trickier realities dominate our minds and actions. Worse, in consumerist cultures like our own, people have been made especially vulnerable to seductive narratives. (It is worth examining, indeed, who would stand to profit off of your subscription to any of the aforementioned “isms”.) But weak minds will bear distorted fruits. Really: our disordered minds are what is causing a mess of reality, today.

It is THIS I hunger to “go beyond.” These pieces aim to penetrate through various seductions and illusions, and cut to the flesh of the radical alternatives rooted in the real—that raw, earthy, human, funky, NOW. In reality: humans and the planet are stressed beyond imagination. We are inundated with a raging hellstorm of competing ideas, flying about chaotically at an escalating speed and ferocity, terrifying meek mortals. To cut through the deafening noise of that storm, I quietly ask:

What is the nature of ideas?

What is the the nature of human mind-bodies (consciousnesses), on which ideas depend?

Where does power reside—in the ideas, or in the human mind-bodies?

Could we transform the way we relate to our ideas so as to better liberate human potential? That is, could we transform our relationship to ideas such that the fullness of human intelligence is more available to engage enhanced, participatory and harmonic forms of sense-making—and of world-making?

Jeffrey, Shadow Dancer [via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0]

I’ll admit there is one identity that has persisted, like a subtle thread, throughout the evolution of my belief systems. I am an activist still. I strongly desire that my actions in the world cause benefit to other beings. I have been perpetually engaged in an effort to refine the effectiveness of my efforts. I am showing up in this space with the sincere hope that what I present may penetrate to the roots—and no longer merely hack at the symptoms—of our difficulties.

Our difficulties existed before Trump became president, and will exist after he’s gone unless we collectively take right action and seize the day. If you are reading this because you are eager to apply emergent strategies to get at our root problems, and you’re willing to go beyond the standard framings—external and internal—to get the job done, then let us venture forth to those horizons.

∞

The night before his enlightenment, the Buddha destroyed the very last and fiercest of his arising doubts, fears, and temptations by touching the earth and declaring, with a “lion’s roar,” that: as a being of the Earth he had every right to bear witness to ultimate truth and to become enlightened. My own power to speak aloud what I see to be true is so modeled—yet is very difficult for me, as I spent years being socially rewarded for my silence and dutifulness, and almost as many years being ostracized for pursuing a non-conforming direction and for insisting on investigating honestly “what’s real, here.” Pushing back against the tide of this conditioned behavior, I acknowledge that remaining silent supports the conditions for ignorant violence to continue spreading. This I cannot accept—and so I must speak. If there was a defiance in the Buddha’s “lion’s roar,” it was also pure and true. So may the voices I use—including my anger—be.

I have a right to tell you what I see, openly, freely, because I am a living being and my perspective is as valid as any. If you find something of merit in my mirror-like reflection: take it and use it.

And, just as a mirror can reflect light into concentrated beams, may any truth that rides these words annihilate dangerous memes by illuminating them with laser clarity.

May you cultivate a mental soil that bears wholesome fruits.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato

October 5, 2017 By Mindful AI

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017

Feature Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction [via WikiMedia, Public Domain]

Read the full series:

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts I & II)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017 Filed Under: Hide from home page, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Poetics (Originary Powers)

The entire purpose of this work will not so much argue but re-imagine and challenge Plato, such that it breathes the warmest breath of reconsideration, rereading, and re-admiration into the Platonic dialogues.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts III & IV)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017 Filed Under: Hide from home page, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Poetics (Originary Powers), Poetry

From [this] indivisible awareness, the mystic sage is fully able to tap into the eternal mind of god, something that would smooth out a translation in terms of human consciousness—and that would give the creative impetus to imagine a text like Timaeus.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts V & VI)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017 Filed Under: Hide from home page, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Poetics (Originary Powers), Poetry

From the first creation event of Timaeus that heralds a universe (the one and only) into the perceptible in giving a reality, this perfection persists into Plato’s Republic, a world of its own that deals with society and its paradigms in the social creature called humanity and its just longings.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts VII & VIII)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017 Filed Under: Hide from home page, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Poetics (Originary Powers)

The strength and sincerity at which each of the Greeks in the Symposium pursues his or her own experiences towards a lived philosophy of love is inspirational for a culture of Self, some of the original self-believers.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts IX & X)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017 Filed Under: Hide from home page, Longform/Essays, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), Philosophy (Eteolegeme), Poetics (Originary Powers)

This metanarrative that has been constructed to explore a possible Platonic worldview is enough of the whole to make a holographic, fractal revival of Plato himself inside his mythopoetic mind.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts IX & X)

October 5, 2017 By Mindful AI

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts IX & X)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017

Feature Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation [via WikiMedia, Public Domain]

IX

When all is considered, “[t]he truth about stories is that that’s all we are,”¹King 2003, 92. and it matters little what mind you engage with for all humanity is narratively driven, and the world that we live in, the world that we tell in is not by mistake mythic, but a definite conglomerate of ideas and consciousness that provides life to that self-indistinguishable “I” that remembers its truest home through acts of myth. The work of Plato holds no glaring exceptions: the myth of Timaeus exists so that humanity might know Justice, that of the Republic to meditate upon it, and that of the Symposium to realize it. And this metanarrative that has been constructed to explore a possible Platonic worldview is enough of the whole to make a holographic, fractal revival of Plato himself inside his mythopoetic mind. The approach used in the intuitive article of creative and critical acts is centered on the concept of extractions. The purpose is to not define myth—or even worldview—per se but provide a meta-tool for the act of natively defining these concepts as they appear in situ, to extract representative samples for practical applications. And over time, these extractions (that are nevertheless cross-sections of myth, the mythogenic patterns, or rather worldviews) might be able to collectively lead to innovations in the mind and cognitive sciences, perhaps find a method of structurally confirming myth as a total phenomenon of consciousness. For now, the metaphor stands—this experience is akin to being immersed in a play with the original and following acts, given but one superimposed pamphlet in the form of this article and its content with a charge to go back and reread Plato with new eyes, radically.

X. Atonement

Surprise surrendered, in that moment—a bride taking laughter in the pillar of her husband, a Greek wonder as old as those Titan peoples, as all around were in her soft light touched in a weightless renewal. Plucks of instruments proved hypnotic, swallowed the red-sea wines, simply seething psychedelic. And, that man from the old country heard a weary bend in his noble bones, too distant to drink in that good gaiety.

The draught idles of his pain pushed took him away, brushed to a more sombre note of the one endless. The looming, eclipsed leaves were taking in that last bit of heat to cast tender shadows, before that lost Athenian sun was felled to serpentine devourings. Those arches of the Acropolis imprisoning light. Fond flashes of wild memory steeped past all the striking vistas—a kind visage of Socrates, a startling word of Phaedrus, and a brash move by Glaucon—stripping him bare of all his present identity in that flutter, frozen to a marked beat but frantic. These withered hands of white of his were dull to teared eyes old.

A cloth not even Michelangelo could craft swayed to his glint of perception. Then his chin did rise for one he should have bowed to, swearing from early cause to order always to be in her service. Wise age took much from him.

“What breaks you, sweetest Nymph, from the sweeter sounds? Surely, this one man is no interest to a maiden of the festivities.”

“You may not have strength or spirit now to crackle with a thunder divine—but I, yes I, have followed you… once before in disguise, once now in this flesh. I manifest inside humanity to attain its knowledge untasted—no tales recited will ever speak of such acts. I am Pallas Athena, and I have come to comfort…”

“What will become of me?”

“You will be found cold and unlividly dead by the morning, not far from here as you are resting. Athens pauses to mourn your work—without ever knowing you, that deeply.”

“Why not let Hades have his will? What condemns me?”

“Do you have knowledge of self yet unburdened?”

“I would confess, but even age has its embarrassment—I confess not because I am wise or true, but that I know what its value lost means… I foolishly distorted the unities of the soul by a philosophy rationalized, judged and struck people that sought lives I did not understand, to only find evidence of their unfitting demise and detriment by selectively convincing stories of others, never believing in potential. This is my greatest undoing, but I fear most that I have taught this world child, a cruel tool. Where can Justice reside now?”

“That is for the fates to string, but each soul must find it to its own.”

“Catharsis only comes in continuance. I live the eternal death. My body must return to the world as parchment for generations of writers. And since I have procured no ideas of my own, I live the fate of parables in having my soul torn to bits and replace upon the black universe. My friend, remember as I warn all budding philosopher kings, an unlikely man will come prophetic in verse, reviving that Delphic Oracle: ‘This above all—to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’” And only then and if then, I am freed to skip this redemption immortal, as all must truly listen to that one Justice that resides natively in the soul of philosophers and poets alike.

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King 2003, 92.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts VII & VIII)

October 5, 2017 By Mindful AI

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts VII & VIII)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017

Feature Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction [via WikiMedia, Public Domain]

VII. Corporal Cherubim

     Pearls of rain
          Caught to polished fire—
A hand blessed to this Eden,
     But wandering in fallings…
          Lying, lain in truths looming.
 
     Skulled in a tambered torment,
          Wingless as dragons
               Spent of soaring tongues:
          A blind Eros births sorrow
               Dirt-crusted, crestfallen.
 
          Stronger hands yet
               Unchain shades and shadows
                    Split by bare eyes to that tumbling
               Amidst semblances of meadows—
                    Strength smoothing out surfaces,
               Roughed grips to coarsed divinity.<
 
                    All naked as human
                         Cast as an infinite wondering;
     Fevers frolic as these souls steal life—
          A life pained to waking preciousness,
               Not unknowing of Pygmalion’s touch.
 
     Stammered, stood—
          This Eros walked
     Under their wrought unbidden:<
          All pandered beacons protesting Love,
               And with timed hesitation,
                    He would glimpse into universes immaculate!
 
                    Tears of weather,
                         Ethereal scars acidic—
                              Eons of melancholic demise elegant
                    Made such irresistible beauty
      And this Eros called Psyche—
           As he died alas in her love but mortal…

VIII

The character of Plato’s Symposium is relived in this brief poetic spell that retells the mode of that one night of drinking at Callias’ house in Athens, where each attendant gives his or her best at speech of praise concerning love (Eros). And the full nature of the subject lends to a more symphonic process, as each utterance is an instrument for an aggregative and innovative wisdom falling on a collective spirit. Hidden in inspiring truth, the phrases ring in the ideal for existence, a pulse upon which each Greek believer is then pragmatically directed to a point of meaning and idealized purpose inside a world-map of humanity. The harmony expressed here on that kindly ideology of love casts all as one in the cohesive: an extra conscious, Phaedrus;¹Plato 1997, 463-465, 178b-180c. a growing reciprocity, Pausanias;²Plato 1997, 465-470, 180c-185e. a complete phenomenon, Eryximachus;³Plato 1997, 470-472, 185e-189a a unifying soulmate, Aristophanes;⁴Plato 1997, 472-477, 189a-194e. a manifest grace, Agathon;⁵Plato 1997, 477-484, 194e-201c. a needed ascent, Socrates via Diotima of Mantinea;⁶Plato 1997, 484-497, 201c-215a. and a seductive experience, Alcibiades.⁷Plato 1997, 497-504, 215a-222c. And, it would certainly seem that the wisest love is not sought in any one of these answers but that of the whole, the whole picture effortlessly fluid to that ultimate truth and drivenness which animates all worlds. To spread such divine wings, invites a psychological renaissance corporeal through a “re-mythologizing of our spiritual landscape[, as this] cultural move […] is philosophically well-founded, because it is mainly poetry […] which can enable us to discover which myths do in fact have a hold on our imagination.”⁸Falck 1994, 134-135. Much can be done with a surety, and a life confirmed in that comfort is one that confirms its own grace: there can be seldom a greater surety to a new life steeped in inviting spiritual meanings, or even just its humble attainment. Myth then, in the Symposium or elsewhere, “is not aetiological but fidejussive: its business is not to satisfy curiosity but to confirm the faith.”⁹James 1957, 477-478. The point being that it functions not so much as to give into speculation but to honour the real pragmatism of how one forges a life, the culture-bearing ethos. And in that world and in that life, a Greek believer needs a direction in uncovering the Agathon.

The strength and sincerity at which each of the Greeks in the Symposium pursues his or her own experiences towards a lived philosophy of love is inspirational for a culture of Self, some of the original self-believers.¹⁰Plato 1997, 463-504, 178b-222c. And true, the sheer amount of manifest possibilities demonstrated in the catalogue within the Symposium that may at once become a fully existent physics for these Greeks is dreadfully entangling—even to the point that awareness collapses in the midst and grasp of this consciousness gradient. The infinite and pre-perceptual material can only be actively translated towards meaning that is recognizable to humanity, via a filter which has often been that of allegory. According to Brisson, “[m]yths are full of surprising things. Thus an interest in myth implies a desire to acquire wisdom,”¹¹2008, 29. and all myths are saved via hermeneutics (new allegory) based in philosophy and art to discover the content of mysticism. But not all people are diviners of myth—a fact evident in the discovery of the teleme (“telos” + “episteme”) inside the drama, Oedipus the King. Teleme brings a myth—and reality as well—to a convergence of truth, but that truth does not have to be consciously recognized for its effects to be prevalent, and this tragic structure gained much artistic power through the technique of denials as seen in the Oedipus-Tiresias dynamic.¹²Sophocles 2004, 1056-1062. The gift of knowing a teleme at any given point, perhaps as a probability, seems to be the domain and heritage of seers and gods, but it is not entirely outside the hands of humanity, especially with the alternity principle. This deepest practice of muthos enables the bending of consciousness via the idea that the very wiring or reality is actually quite dynamic in the disciplined presence of a master by logos and poesis. What each Greek in the Symposium is lending a purpose to is lining up his or her life and love with a teleme—the most predominant being the two speeches of Socrates and Eryximachus, such that “love [… is] every action in connection.”¹³Plato 1997, 472, 188c. The embrace of this state inside alternative consciousness sends someone on a path of what may be known as soft-place mysticism, a gateway into an unfamiliar psycho-scape. And these mindscapes have existed cross-culturally like the Xibalba caves (hellmouth) of the Mayans described in Gates of Hell. ¹⁴2010, 00:19:19. The invasion of such psychological realities gives an opportunity to fashion the otherwise into existence, conforming this presented aesthesis towards an ascent of Love culminating in seeing the absolute via a teleme that enables a Greek believer to be “in touch with the true Beauty.”¹⁵Plato 1997, 494, 212a. This knowing is where every purpose originates even if a soul is not always privy to its flow.

The ideal for existence as the inescapable human drive surely and skillfully makes the pursuit of Justice, the Good, and Love both obvious and endearing to adherents, but without it, all becomes an indifferent and cold affair on the constant verge of abandonment. The Symposium makes a reader challenged philosophically and spiritually in truly seeing multiple telemes that each themselves are like keys to holographic realities and fragments, and the possession of one truth does not necessarily exclude the attainment of the other in this unified Greek mindscape because the smallest element of difference possesses all, the universe. The human will to explore and understand the Self gives a wise heart to Justice in its eternal continuance, and a love reckoned to this wisdom is supreme.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	Plato 1997, 463-465, 178b-180c.
2.	↑	Plato 1997, 465-470, 180c-185e.
3.	↑	Plato 1997, 470-472, 185e-189a
4.	↑	Plato 1997, 472-477, 189a-194e.
5.	↑	Plato 1997, 477-484, 194e-201c.
6.	↑	Plato 1997, 484-497, 201c-215a.
7.	↑	Plato 1997, 497-504, 215a-222c.
8.	↑	Falck 1994, 134-135.
9.	↑	James 1957, 477-478.
10.	↑	Plato 1997, 463-504, 178b-222c.
11.	↑	2008, 29.
12.	↑	Sophocles 2004, 1056-1062.
13.	↑	Plato 1997, 472, 188c.
14.	↑	2010, 00:19:19.
15.	↑	Plato 1997, 494, 212a.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts V & VI)

October 5, 2017 By Mindful AI

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts V & VI)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017

Feature Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State [via WikiMedia, Public Domain]

V. Archelaus Kingless

CHARACTERS
Archelaus, general of Pontus
Perseid, brigadier of Archelaus
Soldier of Pontus
Mithridates IV (Mithridates), king of Pontus
Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (Sulla), consul of Rome
Aristion, tyrant of Athens
A Chorus of Athenian citizens and their Leader

TIME AND SCENE: The port harbour of Piraeus, 88 BC. Civilians of Athens have defected to the Pontic Empire of Mithridates IV, in rebellion against the Roman occupation.

A few days have passed from this inauguration of saviours, and Archelaus has sent Perseid to gather the city’s most prized treasure. He awaits Perseid on the coast, near his naval fleet. A chorus of civilians question the fate of Athens.

Archelaus: I cannot say that this strife is all but selfless,
naked as the day—I have seen men, women
burnt under my sword, the sword of my command:
what say you, soldier, to ease mind harried?

Soldier: If I were ever paid silver coins to consider,
then… then I would perish uncomely
as a philosophic idiot under that heretic blade
of the truly inconsiderate. Unthink it.

The harbour blisters with a beauty taken.

But ho, general! Archelaus of Cappadocia,
I come pressed with pronouncements
on Bendideia, the hunting feast decadent.
And this Roman, an opponent by league,
holds not his tongue peaced:

“I, Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, protectorate
in power and in empire most mighty
as Rome’s one true consul, am the rightful
master of Athens—fear me wisely!
Your Pontic trespassing is teething with war.
Sons of Greece you may be, that fire
bastard and born of infant ferocity dull.
Rotten and rooted, I will divine the
fate of your master upon white gold gleaned.
Is this justice? What noble falsehoods
do you spring from? Cunning and courage,
smeared thick and pure at the union
of foxes and lions, swearing high fealty to
all those that are gifted by the twins,
Romulus and Remus, regents spirited wild
of my heart grievously offended. Mercy,
I have none. I march to your coming madness;
Chaeronea will see you pinning for Pluto!
if the winter and wolves do not tear, devour.”

Archelaus: Where is your charged officer, Perseid?

Soldier: Near, I see black flag and corpus with his news
and teeming wondrous plunders tasted—
A soldier’s one and only great demise, if refused.

Enter Perseid.

Archelaus: My brother, what foundless treasures?

Perseid: Yes, indeed, the iron hearth of Mithridates IV broken
to a thousand suns would have a hard spells
offering more gilded riches to its fondly mad king.
And that should respite the rule of others,
Supremely forever off of our backs—no, bother?
But, I have a tale for you, strange in nature,
When upon the academy I noticed peril peculiar.
I thought nothing of the place, yet, by Jove,
They thought everything of me, like centurions
guarded before treaty—I slew only natural
and that which provoked, and knew not the intent
of my attacker. I could see only aftermath
cradled in blood before a scant book scattered.
I asked a local Greek to decipher the dialect.
Told me that they were myths, drivel of a traitor
called Plato and his Republic. I did not know
that people would ever die for a myth…

Archelaus: Neither did your sword, but it took fairly—
What value is this, we are not statesmen?

Perseid: None that I know. Moments are what I could not
discard, not after felling men no prouder than
this instrument that I have become, face-stealer.
I took grief in mystery, and I read what cause
had driven me to unkindness upon the civil breast.
Justice not of my own. I heard that every soul
to its city is the proper means to ascend to that
one good, the Agathon. A life of attainment
grants one guardianship, stewards winged over
citizens, but at high costs to cleanse identity
base to wisdom, temperance, and courage serene.
That all men living guided by the rational soul
will like minor gods boldly inspire noble cities afar.
Among them, one takes hold with law and
Philosophy, being their king for sole love of that
wisdom and its unity in soul. It speaks anew,
yes that born redemption by the art of philosophy,
and how its light thirsts for shepherds braver.
Faith reckons all here, and the beliefs and slights
of men in nations crumble this perfection
eternal as the sleep of reason produces monsters,
and all that stays is tapestries of judgement
and the immortal soul broke from chance free, alas.

Archelaus: Most curious. I must inspect this further…

Enter Aristion.

Aristion: Pardons, Archelaus. Gracious for your handiwork,
I could not have conducted such carnage cold;
the Romans will be thanking your cordial invitation.
Your lord, Mithridates, and I have conversed—
We plotted ambitions colourful in our countrymen,
but there is no planning like famine and fear
to wield as weapons stained in stark cannibalism,
coaxing hearts against oppressors bleed real,
and I with Zeus the wolf-god’s potency lord over
this leaderless mob as tyrant extraordinaire!
Merited by Mithridates, the sun king, who swore
it as the seed of his own law aroot in auspice.

Archelaus: Where are your philosophers? Reputations,
I hear that you have one…

Aristion: They are rather dead, or hiding from authority,
and I count myself no longer among them.

Exit Aristion.

Chorus: Hear us with pity forgiving. No mother could
take our hands free, these chains throttle
with dusts foreign, that we are bound loathsome
to this cruelty unknown as Atlas, whored
in pastures that were once graced as home—
We are the proud Greeks, kin to wonders
and the origins of heroic kingdoms renewed,
But as trick, all that is proud becomes slave.
So what befalls our people in just Pontic hands?

Archelaus: This deathtrap will destroy itself, and
I was sent to supervise its whimpering—
but let’s to the matters of conquerors, Perseid.
What orders are we given from homeland?
This news may be our course and will.

Soldier: “I, Mithridates IV as Mithras’ gift incarnate,
who rules in wisdom alone and speaks
the fullest sorcery of my countries tongues
am ungiven to death and its toils lesser.
The awed spirit of my providence wishes that
the world of the Greeks returns home.”

Archelaus: By the gods, I know pure dread thunderous.
War is at our bellies—where lies thought now?
if I ever prayed before, help those wretched souls
that rule not their cities. Ares storms alight.

Exit all.

VI

From the first creation event of Timaeus that heralds a universe (the one and only) into the perceptible in giving a reality, this perfection persists into Plato’s Republic, a world of its own that deals with society and its paradigms in the social creature called humanity and its just longings. And the effort strikes into effect the system of rules, which is the basis and expression for how necessary principles work to govern a network in sustaining an attachment to a world as such—in being both probable and engaging for the explorations of that Greek believer inside that very wellspring of human consciousness. All of this depth operates the boundaries and coding of a worldview in myth, and this one aspect is perhaps most natively familiar to philosophers for its logos-driven characteristics, but a logos freed from bias in embracing integration beyond the merely “rational.” The Republic concerns itself with the rise and fall of an imagined but factual society, and that society cultivates its spiritual qualities with an equally apt mindfulness in attaining and modifying self towards the idea of the good,¹The “good” (the Agathon) is the form that generates all and is the ultimate object of knowledge, and self in its presences eternally gains Justice, Usefulness, and Value. “Agathon.”²Plato “Cratylus” 1997, 159, 412c. By the end of Book I of the Republic, the text allows an epistemic invitation towards an allegory. This symbolic layering gives way to a narrative about the soul’s moral development through justice (and ideas of justice leading to consequences as possible paths): a psychic wave where logos is the guide, poesis is the experience, and muthos is the world.³Plato 1997, 997-998, 353e-354a. The strength and height of this society thrives on detachment and taboo, giving into a disciplined life⁴1997, 1014, 375e. that transmutes both the social⁵Plato 1997, 1035, 398a. and the divine⁶Plato 1997, 1016, 377e. orders upon this trained ethos to inspire one purpose, the just city. And the Greek worldview that arises as just comes not from any one aspect but that of its unity and pursuit.

The harmony is a very real one that creates justice from a healthy soul. The Platonic model is quite clear on this subject and its hierarchy. The top-heavy, three-part aspect of this soul is first mentioned at the founding of the polis, the city: each part of the soul is said to be an “ally” of the other.⁷Plato 1997, 1073, 441e. Interestingly, the initial belief that bends more to an egalitarian unity and oneness snaps out of tune upon conflict, charging the rational part to take rule of the others much like a war-time leader.⁸1997, 1188, 580d. And this justification stems from the constructed fact that all other aspects of the soul when uncontrolled lead to illegitimate pleasures.⁹Plato 1997, 1194, 586e-587a. Yet, this line of reasoning supersedes the sole goal of the Greek act to manifest soul, which in a sense is a mystic unity with the Agathon, forever failing in narrowly treating a non-dualistic reality in terms of a dualistic one. The precedence and motility of this formulation with variance is strong. The evidence is in the correspondences and correlations of the Republic: rational, spirited, appetitive; logos, thymos, pathos; wisdom, courage, temperance; ruler, soldier, producer; and the systems of rules, the ideal for existence, the global picture. The major difference between a mature, actualized soul confirmed in the good and that which is expressed in Plato’s dialogues is the reduction of divisions to completions, which start bravely with the virtues¹⁰1997, 1060, 428a. and qualities¹¹1997, 1110, 486d-e. that act as a scaffold for how to form and keep a government via humanity’s soul aspects. Winning votes go to the party that ends in a consensus-style co-rulership under one being. And with this path to a better government as a herald of pure reconsideration, the harmony is happily re-found in a fresh newness as BOTH reason and poetry preserve virtue, a virtue that pulls the self to the perfection of soul.¹²Plato 1997, 1161, 549b. Aristotle as well hinted at such mysteries that may lead a Greek believer to transcendence over timeless toil“[f]or the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility,”¹³Aristotle 1984, 263, 1461b11-12. and “the experience of […that given] impossibility[…,] that its possibility is possible as impossible”¹⁴Derrida and Marion 1999, 60. makes universes animate with exceptional and fantastical truths. All of this can be reconfirmed by the two aforementioned forms of Platonic good, which as a practical ideas only reach viability if this Theory of Forms genuinely replaces removedness with ascent as a permanent paradigm shift,¹⁵Plato 1997, 1681. to honour all human skills in crafting a multifaceted soul (a World-Soul) that merits substance, resolve, and a final resting place of being.

Kingdom-Sage Rising

Would I have a voice, if you would hear it?
Or would I be the rhythm to your reasons?
Would I have a being, if you did not imagine it?
Or would I be a bastard to your brotherhood?
Some have called this perplexed “I” a soul,
A scorching ethical core—living upon centers.
Again some nothing more than saviour
Come to unnecessitate that troubled being.
But given chance, I would seldom cross
All the struggles and beauties of this world—
But persevere it gracefully to sweet triumph.
Hark, a rebel speaks my own words purely:

“If, O King, you destroy me, a law-abiding man who has done no harm to anybody, know that you may easily destroy a wise head, but later you will see what you have done, and you will lament in vain to your heart that you have destroyed so famous a guardian of the city.”

∞

This departure brings into question only the most enigmatic of the Republic and its formulation of the Philosopher King.¹⁶Plato 1997, 1100, 473c. For such an obviously crucial role, this figure is rather unexpressed in contrast to the better known Guardians, especially in terms that its heritage and reputation, always superseding its execution—vast in capturing the undivided imagination of all those poets and philosophers that cross this character slated to rule the Greek Kallipolis, the utopian city-state of the Republic. And maybe this figure is necessarily enigmatic given that the achievement of becoming such a state head puts a soul near the very finalizing stages of realizing uncorrupted justice in the world. The Allegory of the Caves in Book VII is at the crux of understanding the inner dimensions of myth and the essence of the Republic functioning as a symbolic microcosm.¹⁷Plato 1997, 1132, 514a Inner states that align to understandings are the common threads to these enclosure-motifs. This diversity makes not only the analysis of Plato’s example insightful but also expresses a larger human potentiality towards regained mindfulness. Each set represents a unique response to what lies within the self and its deepest psychology: absurdism and pessimism in Edward Lear’s “Limerick 6” and Samuel Beckett’s Play; enlightenment and continuance with a Buddhist bhikkhuni and the Kogi Elder Brothers in Wade Davis’ Web of Belief and Science of the Mind; and, finally, illusionism with the Allegory of the Caves in Plato’s Republic. This substance that constitutes a source with no other designation than salvation inside these motifs and Plato himself engrossed in a philosopher-king mythos is the very being that arises on that last occasion where the stormy self is born to warm worlds. And with this hand, the soul may finally reorder itself for its reintegration and healing, christened by the Kingdom-Sage who embraces the fullness of humanity as sparked emanations of the World-Soul.

The pressing—even redemptive—motif of the one true soul is at the textual center of the Republic. This moral imperative comes from the meditative act of pure consciousness that is myth, yet surprisingly not as necessarily so from any of the Greek philosophy which simply justifies the granting of transcendence towards myth. Sound indications of this fact become evident within the constant displacement of Plato’s present reality, the physical world, which seems to sublimely disappear in a block of smoke known as the Republic for both the characters living inside the text and those individual readers now connected to a cognitive aesthetic on opposite bends of the mirror, all submerging to a seamless, self-same realm of ideas and consciousness.¹⁸Plato 1997, 972, 327a. This fine art and its grammar within Plato’s Republic is a genuinely timeless attempt to move people’s conscious minds by relocating experiences of reality towards the ultimate realization of that one knowledge of the universal Self in us and through others. The importance of interacting with such a sphere is noted cross-culturally in terms of different states and systems of awareness, but a united goal nonetheless exists in unlocking the fields that might grant Justice or the Good, and as such, wise individuals have historically noted the role of this source—ever since its materials have been crafted into consciousness by the will of countless sentient travellers:

[S]ince we can only ever truly experience our perception of that world [the physical world, in contrast to a purely perceptual one], then it would seem that we more truly inhabit a world purely of consciousness and ideas. It strikes me that the landmasses [the mindscapes inside the human cognitive architecture] that might exist in this mind space would be composed entirely of ideas, of concepts. That instead of continents or islands you might have large belief systems or philosophies. [….] Now when you’re talking about the territory of the mind and perhaps the spirit, the only route maps available are magic systems from antiquity. You’re talking about systems [… which utilize] archetypal images that provide the cartography for a map of the human condition.¹⁹Mindscape 2003, 01:04:13-01:10:11.

The raw genius of self in terms of the mythogenic flight to an advanced awareness certainly expresses itself here, and it intuitively and keenly comes from what may be considered more of a cultural (rather than academic or philosophical) resource, albeit a very learned one, but this knowledge, or instead these higher epistemic states, presented by Alan Moore comes from his attachment to the long and collective tradition of wisdom, a tradition that starts with localized shamanism as the earliest experiencers of alternative consciousness. And regardless of the coordinates, the delving into and continuance within these vast idea spaces is what all mature narrative accounts like the Republic do in actively transiting from an arbitrary set of symbols to a conscious experience, a myth. At this point, the reader is able to connect to a much vaster idea space (or mindscape) with the ethnosphere, the cultural counterpart to the biosphere, which is “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.”²⁰Davis “Dreams” 2016, par 4 The exercise becomes a facet of Plato’s dialogue, where the layering of both consciousness and dimensions lends visibility to the inter-reality dialogue and the global reality matrix. This in-between awareness gives depth that necessitates human perception towards a singular focusing line (a narrative) that fashions the immensity of worlds and possibilities into a cosmic allegory, which allows a textual sense of layeredness that roughs out maps to new matrixed identities.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	The “good” (the Agathon) is the form that generates all and is the ultimate object of knowledge, and self in its presences eternally gains Justice, Usefulness, and Value.
2.	↑	Plato “Cratylus” 1997, 159, 412c.
3.	↑	Plato 1997, 997-998, 353e-354a.
4.	↑	1997, 1014, 375e.
5.	↑	Plato 1997, 1035, 398a.
6.	↑	Plato 1997, 1016, 377e.
7.	↑	Plato 1997, 1073, 441e.
8.	↑	1997, 1188, 580d.
9.	↑	Plato 1997, 1194, 586e-587a.
10.	↑	1997, 1060, 428a.
11.	↑	1997, 1110, 486d-e.
12.	↑	Plato 1997, 1161, 549b.
13.	↑	Aristotle 1984, 263, 1461b11-12.
14.	↑	Derrida and Marion 1999, 60.
15.	↑	Plato 1997, 1681.
16.	↑	Plato 1997, 1100, 473c.
17.	↑	Plato 1997, 1132, 514a
18.	↑	Plato 1997, 972, 327a.
19.	↑	Mindscape 2003, 01:04:13-01:10:11.
20.	↑	Davis “Dreams” 2016, par 4

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts III & IV)

October 5, 2017 By Mindful AI Leave a Comment

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts III & IV)

Luke Kernan

| October 5, 2017

Feature Image: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State [via WikiMedia, Public Domain]

III: Echo Envoi

Cracks crimp,
     Cold to the cobble—
          Melodies meandering,
And market’s word
     Ceases in obscurity.
          Torrents flow
               Calling the sage
                    To the floor.

          Body still
               Mind wild
          In motions—
     Waking, unwaking;
          Shadow, light—
               Realities in recital.
     “Tear that tongue,
          Pour those ears,
               Skewer those eyes:
 
Walk through this door,
     Perish in perception—
          All begone
     As Nero’s dripping
          Firestorms aplenty. 

     I will hold your shaky spirit
               To speak its piety alight,
          But mind(s) you must cast inside mine:
               Thy freedom is my surrender—
                    I am demiurge.”

Kingdom’s castle
     Could not hold;
          Tremors on linings,
               The terrible life—
                    A murder more prophetic,
               Foretelling…
                    (is, was, and will) 
                         At once— 
               AND the self-same act
                    Supreme history suspends:
               The old-world god
                     Lost in the new,
                          Not knowing
               The tips of self, transcendent…  

     “We of mind eternal
          Sowed seed complete
               Into necessity’s wide void
          So chaos would conform—
               Cruel vessel, remember us:
                    You are free
                         Upon the flood of the firmament.”

     Clarions unclear,
          Cuts of consciousness—
               Stormed, frantic surreal
          As snowed cerebral shrouds.
               Mind alone, mind elohim.

Timber crashed, thunder spat,
     Sheddings immortal in fury fused—
          Disparate dizzied death,
               Resting on the backs of things.

                    That sage sees all,
                         AND tears would fall
                              If eyes were readied—
                    But bellowing arcs
                         Beached new covenants
                              In deserts woven spectral.

               No will unlike,
                    Gave gift
               To dreamings perfect
                         First and prime,
                     The century’s choice:
                         Chiliad’s burning cool.

                     Eternity, an ember in slip,
                               Bloomed new suns,
                         To see what sages saw:
               These schizoid clusters,
                    Ravished to the depths
                         Of symphonies and drowned sprites.

          And this woman, the Wetnurse of Becoming,
               Took the sage’s hand,
                    Palmed with universes,
                         Spent her spirit into its wonder—
               Changing motion to form, form to motion forever.
                         Not finished… waiting…
                              In warm fashionings wet,
                         And another rough hand, the Receiver,
                    Seized the swarms by energy
                         To hush chaos into creation.

               Sonorant rushes of shapes to come,
                    Making kind to kind,
               Quarried with divine geometry quantum.
                    Crackling dawns,
                         Hurried physics
                              Destined as razors
                         In these sage hands that could not
                                   Hold strong this roaming sphere—
                         Explosions most white into galaxies,
                                   Jubilant to
                              Blackest spaces unseen.

               The shaking orb teared
                    In-between these sage fingers
               Calmed by the Receptacle,
                    And it did bite fierce temperatures
                         In its womb of worlds.
                    Flight and will to cosmos
                         Crashed to kindred homes—
                When sages as demiurges
                    Heard the World-Soul at center.
                         And it was beauty,
                So the Name-Giver let breath.

                    Warm breezes chilled
                         The sages senses immaculate—
                Broke to the cobblestone,
                    Speechless as glassed wine
                              Shadowed in grains still,
                    And the sweat of salt seething,
                         An anchor to a fresher existence spined.
                    The sage now but seals continuance,
                                   “Our universe,
                              Indeed the only one of its kind,
                                   Has come to be.”

IV

The preceding poetic myth retells the overarching events of Plato’s Timaeus, from the point that the creation of the universe is potentialized in Platonic thought with a few of its own twists and inventions. And for the majority of this text, it stays rather close to the original. The sincerest understanding of this practice comes from Eleazar Meletinsky and his discussions of remythification, and this poetic consciousness, through the self and its expressions, is always expanding to re-inscribe mythic identity in new minds from poetry to physics and beyond.¹1998, 340. Myth is not encrusted in any obvious value systems, but decoded and recoded via the subtle-yet-profound interplays between mimetic excesses of meaning and worldviews, in providing self (and society) with a cosmic map of how to live and how to know. That myths “told may always be retold, that a mythology received may also be renewed, that symbolic world-making is never quite complete”—according to Coupe on Meletinsky—speaks to the character of life itself as a constantly fulfilling and ongoing endeavour, never squandered. And this dynamic frustrates and defies any simplistic notion of justification or truth, such that many ancient and modern scholars have had to bracket it off as a curiosity when the common philosophic language collapses under its pertinence and domain.²2003, 13. Yet, the bias of valuing one over the other is entirely unfair and unfounded, given that the features of myth and philosophy arise from the same cognitive structure: the mind that works to create meanings in correspondence with its self and surroundings, that is no less active in triumphantly mastering either. Brisson’s translator, Naddaf, even notes where these terms—myth, logic, and art—are fully interchangeable in ancient and modern contexts.³Naddaf, viii. Brisson himself goes even further to express the sort of paradigm shift that was occurring in the Greek mindset, where the juxtaposition of myth and philosophy was allowing each to be tempered by the other in taking on aspects of the other, such that these concepts faded to a new light and synthetic rebirth.⁴2000, 38-39; 87. And not without a certain amount of growing pains, of course.

A steadfast component of Timaeus is the tumult of myth and philosophy, side by side. Plato introduces the method and character of his account, when prefacing halfway through the dialogue, “[w]e must prefer to conduct our inquiry by means of rational argument.”⁵1997, 1254, 50c The purpose is to put myth to the epistemological test to ensure that it arises from validated true belief, the hieros logos (sacred tales).⁶The cross-checking of myth against philosophy (and vice-versa) is engendered, encouraged to create a sense of mindfulness and (self)reflexivity in his practice of attaining virtue. The wager as I have gleaned is more about the process than the attainment. Plato desires methods to way-find truth vis-à-vis story rather than a forfeiting and a surrender to ‘absolute’ reality—what perhaps could easily deviate and decompensate into an ongoing, unconscious expectation of it; he wants to prove himself, verify virtue through struggle, and have a measure of accountability and knowledge that something has been gained and improved in himself (and ideally others too). When myth is ratified by truth, there is a grander moment of consensus and feasibly an awareness that each person within that privileged cohort is contributing to the same project of reality, a shared community in-sync to the flow(s) of the universe as each conceives, desires it so. Plato yearns for that belonging and commune, one reached through philosophy and shared cultural values. A language of being.

At this point onward, the intensity between narrative and logic heightens such that every section inside the cosmogony is subjected to philosophical proofs to ensure the history and validity of Plato’s vote for this one universe to its ultimate source, the eternal reality of the Good. The fine telescoping of each kernel of this story to saturate it with philosophic features certainly emphasizes the mechanisms at work in making a world.⁷Plato 1997, 1255-1256, 52e-53b; 1259-1260, 57a-c; 1261, 58d-59c. The power of myth centers in its retellings that do not lose touch with the adherents and admirers, and this in itself is no exception for the distinct materials invested by Plato and others in re-crafting. The high argument of myth comes into being when the global network of mythology⁸“Mythology” is a regional-to-global network of muthos, that as mythic parts to a larger entity have actively sustained and realigned each other under a collective deep psychology of spirituality and the self that yields a meta-narrative, its effect being to complete the human condition upon this one vision. is evident in its radical flows and responses, and the deep psychology spiritualized into the divine is expressible into a refined language, modified by foreign grammars and the new frontiers of consciousness. A simple example here would be Plato’s use and response to the forms of the divine in Timaeus: the creator god, the world god, the gods, the demiurge(s), the daemons—each of which is re-inscribed by creation as a critical act in paring down decorum to purpose, through the act of perception and a pristine physics. As Lovejoy talks about the “Two-Gods-in-One,” it becomes unmistakably clearer that Plato conceives of all divinity in terms of this dynamic based in a self-sufficing Perfection and a self-transcending Fecundity that merge into the mystery of the universe animate.⁹1936, 50. Managing and capturing (meta)physics and genesis is then undoubtedly mythic, collapsed into a desire of becoming.

Timaeus is indispensable to Plato in that it embodies the global picture that organizes what universe is as far as a continued lived experience of it for the Greek believer. The dialogue is able to connect one’s sympathies to every conscious construction of this origin myth and all the imagination after that follows it in perfect inheritance. And, as a closer reader, anyone therein impressed cannot help but wonder at what point has Plato shaped the modern physicist? Granted, some of the metaphors may be dated, but the perceptual quest and founding principles are sound. Plato, in Timaeus more than elsewhere, has a strong analytical power for parts, wholes, motion, time, qualities, quantities, and other hosts of aspects. The intent allows Plato to have a cosmological and scientific affinity combined with his devotion towards mythic roots. This unique character presents a sensory physics unparalleled, which is an inherent impression in Timaeus and its Platonic mythopoesis¹⁰The term “mythopoesis” indicates either completing a single mythogenic act or constructing a myth both creatively and concretely in the manner of remythologizing consciousness. that engenders a bustling universe buzzing with perceptibility. The presence of a living and cognizant universe (the World-Soul) as a god in this dialogue connects humanity with a never-ending, constant, and fluid process of awareness. That eternal flow confirms human existence as meaningful in the sacred, self-same source of first origins: “And, revolving within itself, it [the World-Soul] initiated a divine beginning of unceasing, intelligent life for all time [and all of humanity]”¹¹Plato 1997, 1240, 36e. Yet, the connection that is necessary to pull these sacred meanings down to the physical plane is less than ordinary. There are many candidates that could encourage this psycho-activity in acts of mystical knowing, but the compound dimethyltryptamine (DMT) has a reputation as being one of the fundamental molecules that is universally present in organisms in regulating reality and consciousness, such that it has been coined the spirit molecule. And if what Plato suggests in Timaeus is accessible, then it occurs in conjunction with such matter and the mind itself. The most significant example would be the fractal geometry, that knowing one piece would enable a Platonic mystic to see the entire history of the universe.¹²Plato 1997, 1256, 53d. Joel Bakst, a Rabbi, takes position on these alternate realities perceived:

I believe all these experiences, in fact, are fractals […]. They are fractured fractions very, very, very minute […]. If we understand the concept of fractal geometry, no matter how small it is, it contains everything that is in the larger picture [universe], and thus that validates profoundly all these various experiences.¹³DMT—the Spirit Molecule 2010, 00:51:46-00:52:38

From this indivisible awareness, the mystic sage is fully able to tap into the eternal mind of god, something that would smooth out a translation in terms of human consciousness—and that would give the creative impetus to imagine a text like Timaeus. The brilliant use of catalogues at the advent of the first human souls, from sense to object, object to world, work to demonstrate the meaning, immediacy, and pull of existence.¹⁴Plato 1997, 1263-1290, 61b-92c. The full artistic effect renders the senses of individuals experiencing this myth—either in a primary or secondary manner—by the aesthesis, the given simulation that orients the self towards and inside an experienced realism that is fully compelled and completed by that conscious self. The goal being that the individual self is totalized and engrossed in the truth that “[t]his world of ours has received and teems with living things, mortal and immortal. A visible living thing containing visible ones, perceptible god, image of the intelligible Living Thing, its grandness, goodness, beauty and perfection are unexcelled.”¹⁵Plato 1997, 1291, 92c.

References [ + ]

1.	↑	1998, 340.
2.	↑	2003, 13.
3.	↑	Naddaf, viii.
4.	↑	2000, 38-39; 87.
5.	↑	1997, 1254, 50c
6.	↑	The cross-checking of myth against philosophy (and vice-versa) is engendered, encouraged to create a sense of mindfulness and (self)reflexivity in his practice of attaining virtue. The wager as I have gleaned is more about the process than the attainment. Plato desires methods to way-find truth vis-à-vis story rather than a forfeiting and a surrender to ‘absolute’ reality—what perhaps could easily deviate and decompensate into an ongoing, unconscious expectation of it; he wants to prove himself, verify virtue through struggle, and have a measure of accountability and knowledge that something has been gained and improved in himself (and ideally others too). When myth is ratified by truth, there is a grander moment of consensus and feasibly an awareness that each person within that privileged cohort is contributing to the same project of reality, a shared community in-sync to the flow(s) of the universe as each conceives, desires it so. Plato yearns for that belonging and commune, one reached through philosophy and shared cultural values. A language of being.
7.	↑	Plato 1997, 1255-1256, 52e-53b; 1259-1260, 57a-c; 1261, 58d-59c.
8.	↑	“Mythology” is a regional-to-global network of muthos, that as mythic parts to a larger entity have actively sustained and realigned each other under a collective deep psychology of spirituality and the self that yields a meta-narrative, its effect being to complete the human condition upon this one vision.
9.	↑	1936, 50.
10.	↑	The term “mythopoesis” indicates either completing a single mythogenic act or constructing a myth both creatively and concretely in the manner of remythologizing consciousness.
11.	↑	Plato 1997, 1240, 36e.
12.	↑	Plato 1997, 1256, 53d.
13.	↑	DMT—the Spirit Molecule 2010, 00:51:46-00:52:38
14.	↑	Plato 1997, 1263-1290, 61b-92c.
15.	↑	Plato 1997, 1291, 92c.

The Mythopoetic Mind of Plato: The Kingdom-Sage’s Muthos in Timaeus, The Republic, and The Symposium (Parts I & II)

October 5, 2017 By brigidburke Leave a Comment