A Small Medium @ Large
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” – Rumi
The consciousness of a separate self is based on language. The various consciousness-shifting exercises that appear this column are offered to achieve the desired results solely by the use of language. That this should be the case seems unremarkable, but this observation is not: consciousness comes after language!
The idea that consciousness is a metaphor-generated model of the world may take some getting used to. It suggests that the seemingly stable reality of our individualized perceptions is an illusion. The Hindus call it Maya – God’s infinitely inventive dream that has no beginning, but is said to end when an individual mind achieves enlightenment. Closer to home, the presidential debates provide further evidence that no obvious connection to reality is required to run for president.
The 2006 film satire, Idiocracy, puts the case to rest for all time.
So what’s really going on? The big question “What makes mass delusion tick?” often leads to another, “How can I get into the control room, even theoretically?”
But fact is, the last thing people want is to massively self-alter the contextual connection of the five senses that you and I walk around in, take for granted, and continuously use to invest the world with meaning. Except maybe weekends and holidays.
“Improve your mind son,” dad would exclaim, “it’s the little things that count!” We Americans, of course, believe that with the most expensive educational system money can buy, we’re doing nothing less. Yet our understanding of how, and to what, humans assign meaning remains sadly under-valued.
Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, surmised that a submerged mythology scripts the day to day drama of our collective trance. That is, all our thoughts, feelings and actions – regardless of cultural divergence or origin – are organized within a monomyth. Meaning, the same basic script plays itself out over and over again as the sweep of history. He writes:
“The composite hero of the monomyth is a person of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain gold ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling into ruin.”
Our perceptions – and certainties – are framed within a cosmology of strategic separation. A telepathic society, on the other hand, would eliminate the need for the hero and antihero altogether, along with the endless pathology of human-on-human violence. But the scientific investigation into field consciousness was in its infancy during Campbell’s day.
Nowadays, we can contrast the differences between our present, apocalyptic perception of consciousness with alternatives. The quest to awaken a viral telepathic culture may actually be originating from a non-apocalyptic, mythic endgame- a strange-attractor drawing us forward through probabilistic time.
We have to consider the nakedness of telepathic societies. Given the dualistic framework of the present, the rate and depth of comprehension would take time to integrate into a new social organism. How we would utilize the dormant brain structures and powers we all possess is an open question.
The many accounts of Native American mind reading by early European explorers are well known. And the Kahunas, the native priests of Hawaii, say that the aka, or the etheric body of one person sends forth a “finger” or “thread” aka substance, a finer matter, to the solar plexus of another to connect the two people like a “silver spider web.” With repeated contact, these threads eventually become braided into a strong telepathic bond, a “cord,” between them.
Aka threads, they say, can be sent to strangers by means of a glance or handshake. To the Aboriginals of Australia, it is their miwi, or “belly brain,” that is the connective substance used to cast out illness, visit spirits and distant places, and see visions of the future.
The telepathic mentalism of the African Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert asserts that all living creatures are connected by a silver stream of energy that extends from one belly button to another. Anthropologist Bradford Keeney says they use this connection like “telephone lines to send and receive telepathic messages. Albert Schweitzer once noted that bushmen read minds “as fast as you can think.”
American businessmen use the term “gut hunch” to describe instinctive reactions to an idea or proposal, just as police detectives refer to their “blue sense” in the same way. In all of these examples, distinctions can be made between types of telepathy. “Instincts,” such as humans possess, may resonate from the solar plexus or emotional center. The mind-to-mind, or “mentalist” level, is said to be of a higher order, but still far below the soul-to-soul contact of “spiritual” awareness.
Whatever it is, the space that separates us also connects us. More mind exercises are to come, along with notes from scientific research, to advance the topic. I’ll also be detailing the value of a journey room where a solo vision quest is combined with a healing vacation. Imagine a comfortable and light-proofed living quarters designed to permanently awaken the inner light of the pineal gland.
The military, of course, has long sought ways of inducing the brain to operate in different energetic states. LSD experiments were performed on thousands of non-consenting U.S. servicemen in the 1950s, to say nothing of the mass brain wave modifications coming to everybody soon, through 5 G technology. Like it or not, identity will soon acquire a whole new meaning.
“Do not be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force,” Darth Vader warns, in Star Wars IV, A New Hope
Now where was I? Oh yeah, given the finite number of the brain’s cognitive organs and senses, logic suggests there might be only a few energetic arrangements that can be stable, mythic, or favored for the widespread inducement of a favorably altered consciousness. I propose that each arrangement leads to a distinct Endgame, each with its own happy or tragic culmination. Just Google “mass hysteria” for examples throughout history. These include viral laughing attacks, phantom bug bites, witch trials, and “Manifest Destiny.”
There is an intertwined (implicate) quantum-entangled order that correlates to, and is structurally limited as, its expression in the brain’s physiology. This order has defined us as human, but not what kind of human. This is not simply an academic concern. There have been a number of self-aware hominid species in the past, some of which may have proved “tasty” to our own ancestors.
“Free will” in the West is roughly bounded by chronic desires, or chronic fears, because chronic separation is our actual condition. There seems to be a taboo that instructs us not to question the operational downside of a punctuated mode of communication. Our clocks would be more accurate if, instead of numbers, the word “now” was painted upon its face. Every time you checked, it would still read “now.” There is only Now.
At some point, when you no longer need to remind yourself of this fact, and the watch gets ditched in favor of the timeless peace that comes from successfully stilling the mind. We all have an intellectual (read monetized) concept of this “now,” but getting a stabilized, cognitive re-perspective of time requires setting aside a lifetime of meanings we’ve assigned to an externalized system of reference points. To think about time itself is to create a stream of punctuated time in action – a trope.
Our words, follow the space -shaping function that underlies thinking itself, and performs the same space-shaping in the minds of listeners. Still, if everyone threw away their watch today, civilization would still function apocalyptically, and probably as efficiently.
The Tenochas (Aztecs), had another variant of the Apocalyptic Endgame. Get one good calendar stone and millions of people will create pyramids, pay tribute, and enslave their protein rich neighbors on a vast scale. And they didn’t even need to use the wheel! Now, that’s the kind of government efficiency all voters can rally around.
