A Small Medium @ Large
Today, I was all set to write a recap of my first year of articles. But it turns out this would require rambling through a looping itinerary that covers too much terrain. I soon discovered that just compiling an index of topics, references, and thank yous could occupy a dad-gum column all by itself. Still, readers can download past issues of the Herald and relive the journey we’ve enjoyed so far.
The thrust of certain themes, such as restoring local food security through sustainable agriculture and economic decentralization, is easy to follow. And the good news is the Farm Resettlement Congress movement is growing in several new and independent dimensions. Permaculture Nation in Our Generation!
But it’s also true that other topics may prove more challenging. Things like changing the consensus trance and inducing non-dual states of consciousness may stress the limits of imagination. If so, I encourage readers to not get worked up, but take these offerings as science fiction. And if so, consider this my homage to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and his 1941 suspense classic, “Nightfall.”
The Foundation Trilogy weaves a galaxy-spanning tale that offers an inspiring dream of an advanced social science that could save civilization. I make no comparison between his great writing and the corny musings of A Small Medium@Large. Still, it’s my job to present compelling ideas in a straightforward and sometimes humorous way so as to not come across as arid and didactic.
How am I to tie it all together in an episodic fashion even though presenting this level of complexity is an unwieldy business in any format? Well, it’s tricky. The best advice I can give to the reader is this: Just take the arc of today’s article very lightly. It’ll be good enough to get some overall impressions but not enough to wear all the sand off your paper. We’ll circle back from different angles hoping to find a way to collapse complexity one layer at a time. Expect recognizable shapes to emerge in the coming weeks- kind of how an Etch-a-Sketch drawing is made.
So, today I’m telegraphing the coming journey. I’m offering a highly compressed map for those uncommon individuals who anticipate what the sketch might look like in advance. For now, just know we’re circling the mystic’s domain wherein the most passionate ideas about the world combine with the most intellectual, and which give rise to sensations we can often feel, and thereby intuit dimensions that are beyond words.
Here’s how the composer Gustav Mahler describes this feeling of nested thresholds of incomprehensibility that touch upon our limits of perception:
“Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible . . . . Life may appear senseless to you.”
The exercises are gentle, not frivolous, and they are self-directed (Next week: awakening Blind-sight). They create both a shift in scale of perception and the loss of meaning required to cross an energetic threshold of chaotic disorder. Then the mind reconnects to a higher level of stable equilibrium. Our brain is a room temp, 2½ pound, universally connected quantum computer that needs an owners’ manual after all, for every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small.
The exercises build in a logical progression; the selected samples I’m giving are not in sequence and in no way represent the full practicum. But when delivered properly, the expected state of free attention reaches an energetic threshold where the brain shifts into a more efficient modality of consciousness. It “turns on lights” in hitherto unsuspected “rooms” to operate at a “higher” state. This escape from Kansas requires a both supportive setting and a relaxed mindset.
All of this is preparation for more advanced stages that follow. The overarching goal is for the brain to recognize its own causal operations. The intentional self-boosting of one’s own endogenous (internally derived) neurotransmitter level, and a descriptive process of how to anchor these capabilities, will come later.
On one hand we’ve got an urgent need to revive an adult perspective in America. Who’s an adult? It’s anyone who can independently feed himself or herself in harmony with nature and fully pass down this capability to his/her offspring. Juveniles, regardless of chronological age, money or position, cannot do this.
Our teeming hive mind, and the scary exigencies certain to befall it, will not end just by instituting regenerative agriculture, local currencies, and a watershed-based (bioregional) system of direct democracy. Things will not change for the better with legalized marijuana. Instead, higher functions in consciousness must awaken in order to enact peaceful change.
So, on the second hand we need a parallel track, a seemingly unrelated and non-hierarchical approach to higher (or participatory) consciousness. Unlike the time-jumping aliens armed with blasters from Area 51, this involves the ground/field reversal of the location of identity in interiority. And this state is characterized by the cessation of time, mental permeability, and agape (universal love). Count on it: There is neither male nor female in this telepathic kingdom.
In Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, Jorge Ferrer writes that the purpose of trans psychology is to “midwife an intersubjective shared reality, a transpersonal reality. The ultimate aim of the transpersonal vision is to bring forth a transpersonal world.” To achieve this end, these exercises represent the first step towards a meta-identity trance, which can only emerge from the collapse of naïve realism and the identity stratagems that sustain it.
The initiation of a vertical movement into a telepathic, multilocal identity in a state of radical non-dualism, represents a biological solution to the present day default “reality” of modern psychoculture. This implies a non-violent chaos event, one that deliberately initiates the autonomous (or viral) spread of telepathic consciousness from a higher state. Thereafter, all incarnations are deliberate and all birth is sacred. It is also paced to achieving a steady state population through self-restraint. It’s difficult for us to image this genre in our present world but one can find roots in both prophetic Christianity and Eastern non-dual mysticism.
Success could be defined as a stable and life-affirming cultural holography, one which instructs and informs its children at levels that few can now only imagine. The well-considered actions of a few mindlinked adepts, understanding in heart and wise in spirit, would be sufficient to launch a new futurity. Mindlinking events such as Pentecost and the Transfiguration on the Mount initiated Christianity, after all, and similar phenomenon are central to the explosive stories of other major world religions as well.
The third hand is the egocentric mindset itself. We are a species in full planetary swarm. We agree upon no life-affirming, inclusive or sustainable vision of the future, no larger purpose than maintaining our certitude that the mind is unique, private and inviolate. However much evidence to the contrary. Given that we are rapidly burning down the planet, so to speak, our dilemma is more than acute. It is the measure of a failed modality in human consciousness and appears to be the last thing we are ever going to admit to ourselves.
Following are aspects of the Self-Anchoring (Auto-Mimetic) Trance of egotism:
1) The ego is a pre-given objective fact, and the individual subjective experience is the starting point for any understanding of reality.
2) The ego, as locus of perception, exists independently of culture.
3) There is an independent and objective reality from which the subject’s separation is asserted and it is to be understood mainly in terms of individual subjective experience and epistemic acquisition of knowledge.
4) There is a single, absolute truth and a uniquely private experience of an independent, universal, spiritual reality.
5) The sequential, time-bound cognition of subjective experience is the only self-evident structure upon which civilization can be based.
6) The deep structures of the individual self can progressively influence societal evolution through its experience of spiritual reality and thus, ultimately overcome the competition/warfare system of human history.
7) “Free will” is an intrinsic quality or property of the individual subjective awareness and the basis of deliberate experience.
8) Belief is ultimately causal; the subjective mind (perception) creates reality.
“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.” Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia.
