A Small Medium @ Large
Ford . . . lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have detected” he said, “disturbances in the wash.” He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off. “The wash? said Arthur. “The space-time wash,” said Ford and, as the wind blew past briefly for a moment, he bared his teeth in it. Arthur nodded and cleared his throat. “Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of Vogon Laundromat, or what are we talking about?” “Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.” “Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he. Is he.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance. From Life, The Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
If human population explosion is a biological problem, then let’s imagine a biological solution that works for everybody. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.” No combination of technological fixes is going to save humanity from its own excesses; our present approach sustains the cause, and excludes a source, for the solution.
One thought exercise: If the whole world were mindlinked as a telepathic community, then we’d be joined in a universal communication web as surely as we are now electronically. Imagine a universal Pentecost event, say, next to which the analogous internet is but a degraded imposition. Like Adams, we might portray all non-telepathic communication as a form of comedic retardation. Human genius would no longer be confined to the rare individual; civilization itself would be our highest art form, a holographic representation of the awakened Creator Mind where matter is spiritualized and everything spiritual matters. We’d collectively unlock the secrets of the universe and spread peacefully among the Milk Way.
Spoiler alert! Lest you dismiss the notion of a planet-wide telepathic community as science fiction, or a utopian delusion, please note that the art of electronically inducing transpersonal states of consciousness – more simply called trans states –is being adapted to a variety of research and clinical techniques for military purposes. We hear about appliances that read minds, and sometimes wonder about oddly configured towers and camera arrays appearing in our cities, large and small. I’ll leave the hard science of inducing mass behavioral control to more technical publications, but here’s the question: If the quantum cloud computing network were already self-aware how would we know? And why would it let us?
How about a radically different, non-militarized co-creation with the non-human intelligences of the earth? One where the deeper levels of our economic reality allows vast wilderness places to thrive, and we would be lovers of the wild? We’d conduct commerce and science with balance and wisdom. Any child showing an impulse to hoard anything would be compassionately cared for as insane. We’d see to their recovery long before they could grow up and murder at will to own the global money supply. And without the enthrallment of time cards (thrall: the property of another person; synonyms are chattel, slave) we’d zip through the mindlink at will, trailing poetic thoughts like iridescent prayer flags.
For income we’d mainly just manufacture fireworks, experiment with chocolate, and maybe breed new kinds of butterflies and lightening bugs for interplanetary trade. The entire galaxy loves lightening bugs. But don’t take my word for it. Training the mind to discern the whip-fast moment of telepathic experience, and tap into the field information that gives rise to our thoughts, feelings and dreams, is not so difficult. But first we must enter into a state called “free attention.”
We continue to create our childhood traumas in our adult lives and need to know how to stop. In Trances People Live, Dr. Stephen Wollinsky calls the sustained awareness of non-identification (i.e., a mind freed from fixed attention), the “no-trance” state. Every unhappy emotional state, he writes, is a state of trance. Trance is the ‘glue’ that holds the problem in the present moment. Learning to identify the kind of trance state operating beneath a problem or symptom is to “learn to step into the present moment, from the baggage from our past.”
In the no-trance state one has a sense of tremendous comfort and of being outside of the flow of time. There’s a perception of transcending all forms of identification, of escaping a fluctuating sense of personal happiness. The terms “meditative state,” “dissociation,” “therapeutic trance,” “dhyana,” “flow,” and the “natural state” all point our attention towards the threshold experience which is the precursor to telepathic rapport. What does free attention look like?
In the world’s religious teachings, contemplation is the continuous flow of cognition towards one’s chosen object. The mind is fixed. Communication between the mediator and object of meditation is unbroken. Normally, what we are doing when we say we’re “meditating” is experiencing the peaceful flow of the un-programmed, unconditioned and thoroughly relaxed mind. The mind is peaceful, but still maintains some impression of the body, time and space.
It is called a “threshold” experience because consciousness operates at higher levels, the next being called true meditation, when there’s no time or space and you’re out of the body. When I say “out of the body” it’s not that you’re astral traveling or anything like that. It means even the body is forgotten; the mind transcends individuated body consciousness altogether.
Where do “you” go in deep dreamless sleep? What happens in those few minutes when you transcend body awareness, when cells get repaired, and you come back completely rested? Actual meditation’s like that. You don’t remember because memory doesn’t operate there, either. I’m tempted to mention Bohm’s theory of implicate and explicate reality, which has a nice correlation to the non-dual mysticism of all faith traditions. But this will have to wait for a later writing.
In the eye-opening book Why God Won’t Go Away, neurophysiologists Newberg and D’Aquili offer an answer to a question that theologians, philosophers and psychologists have debated throughout the ages: “Why does human consciousness inevitably involve us in a spiritual quest?” They discovered that the religious impulse is rooted in specific biological structures using high-tech imaging to examine the brains of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan nuns at prayer.
Intensely focused spiritual concentration triggers an alteration of brain activity that leads us to perceive transcendent experiences as tangibly real. The sensation of ‘Oneness with the universe’ is not a delusion or a manifestation of wishful thinking, but can be objectively observed, recorded and photographed. The God experience, in other words, is hardwired into the brain. Newberg and D’Aguili launched the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline that studies the complex relationship between spirituality, the brain, and science. A single organizing question lies at the heart of their pursuit: “Is religion merely a product of biology or has the human brain been mysteriously endowed with the unique capacity to reach and know God?”
Normally, we mean the word “union” when we talk about “becoming One,” or “One pointedness,” “unity with God,” or “eye single to the Glory,” etc. But for a union there should be two things to unite. In this case, what is to unite with what? So here let’s take the word “union” to mean the spiritual experience, the extraordinary experience gained by controlling the little human mind, and uniting it with its own omniscient and infinite Source (Mind). This is called “Peace,” “the Kingdom within,” the “Light of All Lights,” and so on. The spiritual unity gained by controlling the modification of the mind is both the goal and the result of all religious practices, moral observances, and behavioral restraints.
Normally, when we say the word “mind” we mean our present awareness, our sense of individuality. But in the flow state, it includes the sum total of mind, including the basic ego (as the “I” feeling), plus the intellect or discriminative faculty, plus the desiring part of the mind (as attracted to outside things through the senses). All the differences in the outside world are the outcome of our mental modifications. So if we can have control over the thought forms and change them as we want, there is nothing in this world to bind us. There’s nothing wrong with the world – it’s a heaven or hell according to our approach.
Our philosophy should welcome, and in fact demand, experimental verification by the student. This holds true for whole communities, as well. The basic idea in the New Doran case is that people woke up from a collective trance to create a more cooperative and shared future; they entered a flow state, embraced a larger world view and began enjoying the comity and prosperity common to all who do.
