Silence

In an earlier post (Depth is Invisible) this was written:    The idea is this one "...as we shall see, virtually all esoteric spiritual traditions insist that human beings possess "inside information" about the universe, to such an extent that discovering what a human being truly is is the key to fathoming the implacable mystery of the cosmos itself."  In a secular, materialistic society that is the modern world this is a radical idea.  Robert Inchausti in his book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People  gives a chillingly accurate view of what each of us is up against.   Here are a few.  He writes:

 " ...A perpetual revolution of economic life that generates endless new individual needs and endless new poverties-laying waste to the planet’s ecology...an increasingly managed information system centered around a mass media that exalts received ideas over direct experience-creating in the process pseudo-environments and modernized stupidity disguised and given credibility through the sheer pervasiveness of their presence...Under a global market economy, the practical reason of ordinary people is largely subsumed within an amalgam of money-making projects and development schemes.  There is no direct commercial pay-off to thinking philosophically and so no reason to be intellectually engaged beyond the demands of

technological innovation."    As Bob Dylan sang,  "It’s easy to see without looking too far
that not much is really sacred"   

The first step might be the hardest.   To really question what we think we know and move beyond the incredible noise that prevents us from going within. Silence is the path to the "inside information" about the universe.  

 

Integral Consciousness

Jean Gebser  wrote his magnum opus The Ever- Present Origin more than fifty years ago.  This monumental book is about the structures of consciousness.  He names them the archaic, the magical, the mythical  and the mental-rational.  He writes at the beginning:  "The present book is...the account of the nascence of a new world and an new consciousness.  He calls this the "integral' consciousness which integrates all of the previous ones.  When ones reads a book such as this and meditates on the ideas one understands that the way humans have experienced reality differently.  He writes about Petrarch who in 1339, describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux (southern France) about the discovery of perspective.   Gebser again: "for his time, his description is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European Man's attitude toward the world."
The idea is that there was a transformed change in the our relationship to space that was different than the previous stage.   Here is Gebser:  "the over emphasis on space and spatiality that increases with century since 1500 is at once the greatness as well the weakness of perspectical man.  His overemphasis on the 'objectively' external, a consequence of an excessively visual orientation, leads not only to rationalization and haptification but to an unavoidable hypertrophy of the "I," which is in confrontation with the external world.  Gebser calls this attitude ratio.  Man becomes the measure of all things.  This is the "Perpectival world that we know so well.

Georg Feuerstein wrote a book that gives an introduction to Gebser entitled Structures of Consciousness which comes recommended.    At the end he writes in a chapter The Spiritual Import of Gebser's work. 
Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence; goal-oriented, purposive thought is replaced by unintentionalness; the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative motion is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process; prejudice  is replaced by the renunciation of value judgements, that is to say, the emotional short-circuit is replaced by unsentimental tolerance...

There is much written about Gebser's important work online.  Here is one site.  http://www.gebser.org/ 

The many crises today demand a transformed consciousness and Gebser is one of those who can facilitate (in his writings) this transformation. 

Mind Jazz W.I. Thompson

William Irwin Thompson is a writer that practices mind jazz.  He is a cultural historian par excellence.  A book he wrote in the early seventies is entitled At the Edge of History has this line:  "one can say almost anything about human culture now and it will be true, for everything is going on at once."  I think because he is a cultural historian he understands that cultures are guided by a narrative.   These narratives inform and give answers to the basic question that humans ask.  There is a shadow to all these narratives usually hidden to the ones responsible.  One of his fascinating insights is the idea that right before a momentous change in consciousness, there is experienced the most evil.  Why?  Because there is major resistance to fundamental change. We see this phenomenon happening today.
He writes in Self and Society:
"Whatever ideological face this mental structure of simplification through emotional intensity takes on, the creature within is characterized by a revulsion to complexity and a messianic sense of self-empowerment that God or, science, or some deified historical process as giving the chosen ones the license to kill...in fact, they would rather have Armageddon than move through a cultural transformation into a new mathematical-artistic mentality of Planetization."

Here are one of his descriptions of our electronic-post literate culture.  "as one turns from newspaper to book to watch the evenings news, one feels as if the news were like Muzak...it's there to lie about the frightening reality of our situation.  Information has become our Second Nature, but in spite of our incredibly advanced electronic media, we can sense that television does not embody the truth, that it is a consensual delusion, a droning Muzak inside an electropop mediocracy.  The citizen, informed or otherwise, no longer exists: there is only the pageantry of celebrities and the media's loyal subject."
Thompson appreciates Marshall McLuhan for his insights. "The Medium is the message."   Thompson writes:  "At each stage in the cultural evolution of humanity, a new medium of communication comes forth, and that medium then effects a shift to a new form of polity.  We begin with origins of language in the African savanna, and we end up with the disintegration of literature on the Internet."
 He writes about the evolution of consciousness in many of his books, especially Coming Into Being and Imaginary Landscape -Making Worlds of Myth and Science.   His website http://www.williamirwinthompson.org/ 

Mind Parasites

Each post leads to other ideas.   I mentioned two books that I feel offer many openings.  The two are One God Under Cosmos (Godwin) and Pushing Ultimates (Paz).  Both authors are erudite but write in a way that can be understood.  They offer compelling visions of life and the human being, but also give, in my view, insightful analysis of what keeps us from reaching this human potential.  
Godwin's book is about four singularities: matter, life, mind and spirit.  He writes in the chapter on mind:  "...we are the only species that comes into the world with an almost infinite potential that may or may not be fulfilled."  What keeps us from reaching this potential?  Here he writes about the new understanding about how the human mind actually develops, "until fairly recently, no one considered bonding and attachment to have any great significance for how the the human mind actually develops."  Modern attachment theory is very significant.  We are born into a matrix.  This matrix is a "a fluid, shifting, unitary space between (usually) mother and infant, as if they were a single organism."  Our "earliest social interactions are imprinted into the biological structures that are maturing during the brain growth spurt that occurs in the first two years of human life, and therefore have far-reaching and long-enduring effects."  This situation can lead to pathology.   He emphasizes this insight "that our earliest relationships, in the degree to which are they unsatisfactory, lead to a paradoxical situation in which the poor parental bond  is internalized and turned into a psychic entity that compulsively seeks to reenact the situation later in life."  
The author calls these effects "mind parasites" -- complexes, fixations, repetition compulsions that operate independently of our conscious will and tend to subjugate it."

These "mind parasites" Godwin suggests, are what keep us from reaching our true potential.  "the belief in these entities is often prelude to action, generally unpleasant.  That is, mind parasites are projected into the outside world because they cause internal anxiety.  But projecting them outward does not actually eliminate the anxiety.  Rather it simply "mentalizes the environment, so that the the objective world, rather than the subjective world, is experienced as a dangerous and threatening place"  What happens on a individual level parallels what happens on a group level.  The book articulates interesting and insightful ideas about the prevalence of group violence in the past/present and the origin of scapegoating and group sacrifices.  This is still going on today.  One just has to watch TV to see the dynamics of "mind parasites" in action.

To facilitate our unlimited potential means that we strive for the truth and this means we must be open and courageous to question what we have learned.  Paz writes: "an open minded person is consistently prepared to revise his/her version of reality, if doing so brings it in line with a more substantial truth of how things really are."