a crisis of consciousness

8/8/2019 A Crisis of Consciousness

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A Crisis of Consciousness

Well lets see here. I think what we have to do is think in terms of the

exhaustion of our own cultural forms. I mean thats what were living through: a

global dying created by the exhaustion of our cultural forms and the vitality of thecultural forms that we see in the so called primitive, I call them preliterate, people.

As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing, but what they seem to have that we

cannot seem to get a grip on is a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their

environment, and peace of mind in the felt experience of the moment; these are the

two things we dont have. As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature.As human beings as individuals its very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves. I

mean I consider my own life, the search for peace of mind forget enlightenment,forget (?), all this stuff, just a little piece of mind would be a tremendous boon as far

as I can see, so I really think that theres a confluence here of themes and

possibilities.

It has this richly plotted texture that always lets you know that youre in the

presence of a higher order of things. Its that the shamans, whom we admire and

idealize, are seen to be at the center of this environment the warm tropics that we

find it necessary to destroy. So, its a perfect image of us being at war, not only with

ourselves, but with nature itself, and youve heard all about how the Amazon and

the Congo basin and eastern Indonesia are all being cleared and lumbered and

turned into cattle ranches; this is a tragedy. Obviously we understand and can

perceive the dynamics of that, but how to make sense of a situation where as the

world bank and the IMF attempt to halt this kind of destruction on the other side of

the coin the United States department and the DEA, these agencies, propose and areplanning to carry out the defoliation of the (???) basin. So, theres a schizophrenia

here that is not academic. I mean, are we trying to get the patient well or are we

pulling the plugs one by one? We seem to be acting in both dimensions

simultaneously. And I think its because we have not in this culture awakened to the

depth of the crisis that surrounds us.

You know, theres a lot of kind of self congratulatory back slapping goingaround these days over the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water, and

have to admit that they did it wrong and this gives a lot of satisfaction to people who

feel that that means we did it right. We didnt do it right. They did it wrong, and now

admit they did it wrong. We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what we are doing. The internal-contradictions of Marxism were

based on a false definition of what people are. People do not respond to central

planning, hortatory-propaganda, and stereotyping, neither do people respond to an

ethos of self-denial or a view of human beings that denies the fact that we have

certain itches which must be scratched. The collapse of Marxism is only the collapse

of the outer edge of the societal, and civilizing assumptions that we have made. After

all Marxism is nothing more that the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism



and so is modern science another secular retread of Christian millenarianism. So our

culture is in trouble, not trouble, we are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can

only go one of two ways; horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough

to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination.

Now where do you look for models? Where do you go? The answer is so

obvious. You go to nature. Nature has been playing this game for three billion years

on this planet. We have been playing the game, we the apostles of Christian

scientism, for about 2,000 years. Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style that if

we could but emulate it, we could rise out of the ruble that we are making of the

planet.

You know it was the geographer Carl Sower(??) who said, Man found theplaneta climaxed primeval forest. He and notice the gender here will leave the

planet a weedy lot. Now this is a metaphor where you exchange climaxed rainforest for weeds, but its also true by clearing land we promote the kind of plant evolution

that stresses very rapid seed production and annular cycles of growth, in other

words weeds. And this tendency to find perfection and then to leave rubble in ourwake has haunted us for the past three or four thousand years of our history. Now,

with the ozone shield disappearing, with acid rain falling on the earth that can melt blocks of marble, with the CO2 levels rising, with the levels of strontium and

chlorofluorocarbons you know the litany. We have now one last chance to catch fish

or cut bait, and the place where nature has provided models for how to respond to

this situation is the climaxed rainforest.

Only the climaxed tropical rainforest had the kind of complexity of signal

transfer, movement of nutritional materials, movement of electromagnetic radiation

that we find in the modern city. It is a cliché of modernity that the city is a jungle; the

problem is it isnt jungle enough, and I think its the task of the new shamans to takethe metaphor of the jungle, which is a metaphor of tremendous wealth, tremendous

variety, a tremendous outpouring of form and of energy and of potential fulfillment of various bifurcation patterns of flow, to take that and enrich our own lives with it

and the way this is done is by empowering the presence of experience. The main

thing that you get with these so called primitive preliterate people, and with peoplelike Nicole who have spent time in this situation is they are in the moment. They

know how to have fun. They know how to work. They know how to live, and thereason they understand this is because they are focused within the confines of the

felt presence of experience. They do not live by abstraction, and abstraction is the

knife poised at our hearts. We are so much the victims of abstractions that with the

earth in flames we can barley rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look

at the thermostat. Thats the level of disempassioning that abstraction has laid upon

us.



Well hopefully this weekend there will be passion, there will be an effort

where ever there is abstraction to drag it down into the felt presence of the moment.

I think basically what we are a kind of green anarchy; an effort to revivify social

forms that have been atrophied in the west at least since the destruction of Eleusis

probably in most places thousands of years before that. This is our last chance. I

have done the best I could in terms of trying to sift through all these options, and, asa communicator, offer the best way out. And you know, I could only do my best, and

so thats what you get. I cant preach scientism because I dont believe in it. I cant

preach Buddhism because I cant understand it. The only thing I can preach is the

felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics,which are not drugs, but plants; its a perversion of language to try and derail this

thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this

way, and as so far as I can tell, this is the only way that they come to us that is rapid

enough for it to have an impact on us as a global population.

This weekend will be different because we will be hewing close to the source.

Nicole is a priceless repository of information, more even than she knows. If I coulddeclare her a national treasure, I would. Who knows what this woman knows? Who

knows how much human suffering, the alleviation of how much anxiety lies in the

hands of perhaps half a dozen people of Nicoles caliber, who have paid there dues inthese jungles.

This information is flowing through our fingers and disappearing. In another

thirty years it will be all gone. Every time I go to the Amazon I can feel the way in

which its slipping away. When my brother and I go off looking for these unusual

hallucinogens, often we have the experience where when we finally find the person

who claims they know what were after, the line goes like this, well Ive never taken

it but as a child I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it and I think I can do it,

if it werent for us standing there asking that it be done it would never have even

risen into the gentlemans mind as a possibility. This is the knife-edge upon which

this knowledge is poised. If it can be saved, it gives me hope that we can be saved. If we cant save this kind of knowledge, we cannot save ourselves because this kind of

knowledge is ourselves. Culture is a garment which you put on, medical systems arepieces of jewelry which you wrap around your throat or neck, religious ideals are

like objects which you push through pierced nostrils and earlobes, if we cannot

come to terms with that which allows us to give birth with ease, to die with dignity,and to live in health then what kind of future do we have? No future at all.

So, this is not a meeting of obscurantists or enthusiasts of some private vista

of transcendence. This is a meeting of political activist, people who are socially

committed to themselves, to each other, to the larger idea of community, and who

understand that when you take about Gaia its only an abstraction unless you talk

about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a

difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants

and animals. Plants are the enveloping feminine matrix of control and

refurbishment. Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around, an



extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. The Archaic Revival

if it means anything, it means reconnecting the Gaian mind witch is a vegetable

mind, a feminine unfolding boundary dissolving planetary mind that is not an

abstraction, not a stereotype, not something used to create hortatory propaganda,

but a living breathing reality. A reality which is the only thing that stands between

us and Armageddon.

History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost, that

there is an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context, that we have out of fear really

have descended into patterns of domination of each other, of the environment, of

our children, of our social relations with exogamous groups. We have descended

into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching on fear, and Im sure

most of you have heard me argue, that this is the consequence of ceasing basically to

do enough hallucinogens in the diet; that in fact, what human beings were flirting

with over many many tens of millennia, lets say from a hundred thousand years agoto fifteen thousand years ago, human beings were in a flirtatious situation with a

symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature.

Now you all know what classic symbiosis is in Biology. Its where: lets take

the example of the little fish and the sea anemone and big fish dont bother it, it gains protection, the sea anemone gains access to larger prey which come to

investigate the little fish that kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in, and if you

take the little fish away from the anemone and put it into an aquarium without

anemones it doesnt die it doesnt go into an immediate physiological crisis, no, what

happens is it simply has a low body weight and a short lifespan, in other words it is

under stress. And I believe, I hope Im not deluding myself, but I believe that the lost

secret of human emergence, the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey

and turned that species into a tormented self-reflecting poet dreamer, that catalyst

has to be sought in these tertiary alkaloids in the food chain that were catalyzing

higher states of intellectual activity, and Ive pointed out to you, at nauseam Im

sure, the reciprocal feedback relationship that was working there, in the case of themushroom in the veldt situation in Africa, it was promoting at low doses visually

acuity which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process, making thoseanimals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful, hence more

reproductively successful, hence, theyre out breeding their competitors. At higher

doses psilocybin actually causes generalized arousal, which includes sexual arousal.Again, it becomes a catalyst for increased reproductive success, more instances f

copulations in a situation like that lead to more successful births into family

structures where the alkaloid has been accepted into the food chain.

Well this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologist were it

not for the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally.

Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce

it fast enough, then the moment of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance

is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in; so we have to have consciousness.



Well, then you look at he smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities and you

discover this institution of shamanism. It is the institution of planner, visionary, of

manager, of large system coordinator, thats what its about: you call it magic on one

lever, you call it curing, you call it folk psychiatry or weather prediction; shamans

have been involved in all of these things, but as Nicole made so eloquently the point

last night, to these deep forest people it is ordinary, it is ordinary. They live in adifferent cultural dimension than we do; dimensions which to us are completely

value dark are to them completely transparent, and dimensions which to us are

extremely rich and complex, the inner world of the nucleus of the atom let us say,

are for them totally value dark. They dont even cognize the possibility of asking thequestion, but nevertheless the specialization in these various domains is not

something where one is as good as another.

Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience. How are we going to

save this planet? How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic technologicaland ignorance producing habits that are loose on this planet and channel them

toward some kind of a sane and livable world? Well, the answer is emerging inculture, out of the collectivity of global consciousness. It is what I call the archaic

revival. It is this very large turn over in the mass mind; some people call it a

paradigm shift. Its an effort to recover the sensory ratios the feelings and theattitudes of 15 to 20 thousands years ago: before fear, before ego, before male

dominance, before hierarchy, hording, warfare, propaganda, child-abuse, all of these

things, and the answer lies in integration into the dynamics of nature.

Well, so far as my analysis gives it to me, the only way you can abandon

yourself to the dynamics of nature is to break through the language shell, you must

cut through the aura of programming and cultural assumptions that surround us

from the moment we are able to speak. The only way this can be done is by

dissolving the boundaries of ego. Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic

individual, who is a member of a neurotic culture, against the facts of the matter,

and culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensusabout what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

Now, you see what I see going on down in the Amazon is a very radicalpsycholytictherapy where they are literally dissolving the boundaries of self,

culture, and ego assumption, and then what you discover is not the white light, orwhat William James called a blooming buzzing confusion, although in the first few

minutes it can be like that, but what you really sentient, organized, living, loving

nature; that nature is a force, a mind, a personality, organized with intentionality,

organized with feeling, humor, grace, and conviction, conviction, and if you can get

right with that conviction, then thats the secret of dancing in the waterfall, thats the

secret of the shamans apparent transcendence of the rules of mundane statistics

because that is what it is. The shaman doesnt violate physics. He or she simply

knows how to push the improbable to its greatest extent and in eastern philosophy

this is called the Tao, you know abandonment to the flow, fitting the small pattern

into the larger patter.



Well, I think these things are very important because I think that psychology,

psychiatry, psychoanalysis, its a good idea but it will never reach any kind of

operational effectivenessuntil we look to these native healers all over the world and

study there methods and there methods are chemical and personal. Its a

combination of care, attention, intention, and chemistry that allows consciousness

to be made malleable and then recast in other forms.

So, I find myself this weekend explaining myself thats what I feel like Im

doing. Why does someone who extols the transforming machine elves of the DMT

space, also claim to be a conservationist, also have a mathematical dog and poodle

show? Well, its because all of these things emerge out of the concrescence of

consciousness, its intention towards its own transformation. Nature is the answer.

Its not enough to be like Wordsworth. Its not enough. Mao se dune(??) said the

revolution is not a dinner party, and certainly the ecological revolution is not a

dinner party. Poetic sensitivity to the death of the planet is not what were strivingfor here. What were striving for is to halt, overturn, and back out of the impending

death of the planet. It is very clear now that consciousness will decide that there arenot rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into

the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become

heaven or hell, one or the other.

I think that this archaic intuition, which I see reaching clear back to the birth

of the twentieth century and the nineteenth century, back to people like Alfred(??),

GuimePolinare(???), and the pataphysicians, the surrealists, the physicists around

Einstein, Freud, modern art, modern dance, Jazz, all of this stuff is an effort to

reclaim the primitive, to reclaim the archaic to reject all that powdered wig algebra

that comes down through the French, English, German tradition of constipated male

dominance, and instead intuit our way out. Now, the intuition is rising to the surface.

We no longer have to operate without the presence of the goal firmly in hand. The

goal can now be stated. What this is all about is a return to archaism with the

lessons learned in history, thats where we were happy. The fall was a fall into a veilof tears, into a world of limitation and pain and suffering and infectious disease and

so forth and so on. Its a prodigal journey into a lower dimension that can now beended by a collective cultural decision to commit to this Taoist, shamanistic,

feminized, cybernetic, caring, aware, present kind of being. Its nothing more than

what each of us is in our very best moments, but we have to extend those very best moments to fill whole lifetimes.

Think of the number of people who suffered and died so that we could sit

under this tree this morning. In the last million years nine times the glaciers have

ground south from the poles freezing the world into ice and confining human

populations to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics, nine times the interglacial

periods have come and human populations have spread out over the earth. They

didnt have radio, antibiotics, contraception, statistical analysis or the partial

differential equation and yet somehow they managed to get us here. Are we then, as

the heirs of that wave front, of the inheritors of a billion year process, are we in one



generation to turn it into a mass of pottage? I think not. I certainly hope not. I would

like to believe that we could make that leap to conscious awareness that would

allow us to take hold.

Now the problem, it was easy the first ten years that I sat before you because

what we were doing was getting to know each other, to verify that we in fact existed,

that I wasnt crazy, you werent crazy, so forth and so on. Now, what looms ahead is

the mess of politics and this Im sure you have no stomach for. I certainly dont. Id

rather be stoned and rocked in the arms of the goddess, but as a matter of fact, this

dominator thing is not going to be unhooked, and put to bed without a struggle.

Everyone is going to have to be counted.

Ive talked to you in recent months about memes; memes being the smallest potential units of ideas. They are like genes. We are the nucleus of a mutant meme,

the meme of plant consciousness, hallucinogenic consciousness, and shamanisticconsciousness. We have to refine this meme, replicate is through repetition, and

spread it through society. In the same way that a plant sheds seeds into an

ecosystem. The idea will compete. The idea is a good one; its adaptive, its clever,its tough, its invasive, it can make use of many contexts to promote its own

existence, but it cant do any of that if we dont replicate it and get it out. So, I seethese kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community, as an

opportunity for people to look around themselves and connect with the other

people who are here. We cannot be told from the rest of the population unless we

self-select, and gather together at a single point in space and time. When we do that

we recognize each other. When this meeting is concluded we will merge back into

the larger stream of the body politic, but carrying this meme of theGaian resurgence,

the Gailanic wave that must come. People say its so wonderful that articulate these

feminist ideas; I do it because I dont want to be dead, I do it because I dont want

my children to have no world to live in. There is no choice. The walls are high and

the current is moving very fast. What we need to do is merely keep our spirits high

and learn to sing the song.

My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called

chaotic attractors or dynamics, and this is the notion that many processes are not pushed from behind by the momentum of casuistry as in the ordinary Newtonian

model of process, but there are what he calls attractors or basin of attraction, andthese are things which lead processes forward. For instance, a somewhat trivial

example would be, if we had a large bowl and a marble, and every time we released

the marble up near the rim of the bowl we would notice that it unfailingly rolled to

the bottom of the bowl and located itself somewhere near the center at the bottom

of the bowl we could say that the bottom of the bowl acts as a basin of attraction for

the marble. In other words, the marble finds that the energy state is most at

equilibrium when it locates itself in the trough of the bowl. So, there is a way of

analyzing processes to see them as though they were lead rather than pushed. I

think its fruitful to see human history this way.



You see what we deny as a culture, as a culture of materialist, positivists,

reductionists, is the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature. And so

Western Science is very concerned to deny what is called telos. Telos is a Greek term

for purpose; same idea of the attractor that I was talking about. If you have a target,

if you are driving a car towards a goal, your goal is your telos. It decides how you

will steer the car. Well, it has been for the past hundred and fifty years extremelyfashionable in sociology and biology, because of Darwin, to deny telos in nature. To

say that any apparent order in nature is made up of the disorder of random

mutation, meeting the disorder of natural selective processes and these two streams

of converging disorder create a kind of apparent, or virtual order, which is anillusion. This is the orthodox theory. And when you take this Darwinism and put it

into historical theory, theory of human processes in time, you get the modern

position in academic philosophy about history, and it is, the official phrase is

trendlessly fluctuating, thats what we are asked to believe we are embedded in, a

ten thousand year old process of trendless fluctuation. In mathematics this is calleda random walk. It means you just go over here a few steps, and then you go this way.

Youre like a drunk lurching around in this phase space, and this is the highest visionof human purpose that the reductionist vision can offer.

Well, what the intuition of religion is, especially Western Religion and Iwouldnt even bother to mention it except that it also is the strong intuition of a lot

of psychedelic experience, that there is some kind of attractor in the historical

phase-space. There is something, which is drawing everything toward it. Its like a

higher dimensional entity that casts an enormous shadow over the human

landscape; so that sitting around campfires 50,000 years ago people felt this vague

tug toward organization, order, cognitive activity, epigenetic activity - epigenetic

activity means coding stuff not in your genes, but in dance, gesture, ritual, and

ultimately in clay and on paper and in electronic storage methods. This proliferationof complexity is a response to and an anticipation of this transcendental object at

the end of historical process.

If it werent for our presence on this planet, even modern science at its

present primitive state could give a fairly good accounting of whats going on; that out of complex polymers arose super-complex polymers, which were self-

replicating and that was life, an then you have an animal population, but the fly in

the ointment in this rational model of reality is ourselves. We are clearly imbuedwith a higher dimension, which we call spirit in a way that ordinary matter when

imbued with a higher dimension is called life. In other words, we represent a

different ontological level in the career of organization because we hope, wedespair, we plan, we remember, and we misremember, we lie, we fabricate, we

delude ourselves and other people; all of these things are uniquely human functions.

Well, I think that shamanism, which is the focus of our concern here, is a kind

of anticipating of the whole pattern, and that this is really the way to think about

shamanism when thinking of it as a force that can steady and complete an individual

human life. The shamans are not in history in the same way that we are. By having



access to this higher dimension that they go to in their trance states and states of

intoxication; they gain a fractal overview on process, on life; after all isnt that we

mean by wisdom. Wisdom is understanding how things really work, how they really

work, love affairs, the raising of children, the managing of corporations, the

prosecution of wars, how do these things really work, not the deluded and fumbling

attempts of the proponents of this or that school, but a Taoistic insight into theactual appropriate dynamics of everything. Well how do you gain that kind of an

insight? The answer is, you must have a superior model.

Now if you believe the world is composed of three levels and they are held up

on the back of a woman who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space, this is a

model of the universe. It can take you a certain distance, but what model of the

universe can actually offer reassurance in all kinds of situations? Well, strangely

enough, I think that these models come from the frontiers of mathematics; that it is

not mere coincidence that the storms of visionary hallucination that the shamanencounters are very much like the storms of form and color that are spewed out of a

Krey(??) 3 supercomputer when it conducts a thousand iterations per second insidethe Julius(??) set or the Mantlebrot(??) set or one of these other compound complex

mathematical objects that we are beginning to see.

Mathematics, up to this point, has been a computational science because

mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk to describe their objects,

and consequently, an excruciatingly difficult vocabulary kept most people from

appreciating what mathematics was about. Now, the computer is to modern

mathematics like the telescope was to sixteenth century astronomy. The computer

becomes a window into domains of hyper complex computability that previously

could barely even be conceived, but that now at a rate of millions, approaching

billions of iterations per second. Ralph works on the mmpp machine, the multiple

parallel processing machine at Godards Space Flight Center, it does 800 megaflops

per second, 800 million floating-point decimal calculations per second. Well, you can

dream dreams with a machine like that, and strangely enough at the edge of thesuper technology of the dominator culture at Godards space flight center with high

priests standing around in white coats, when you get it up and running what you seeis what an Ayahuasca shaman sees on a Saturday night in the Amazon. You see that

you are no longer navigating through a complex higher dimensional phase space

where by varying the inputs of amplitude and frequency, in one case using anelectronic box, in the other case using the human voice, you sing your way through a

mathematical domain, which is a higher resonance of reality, and you learn how the

world really works; how things happen.

Well, how the hell do they happen? Well, on the simplest level they happen

like this, they have a beginning, they have a middle, and then they die away as an

oscillation, a damped oscillation. Now, this simple truth, to which we all nod ascent,

is in fact the hardest thing, the hardest swallow, there is for the dominator ego and

the dominator personality because what this simple truth says, things comes into

being they achieve there inflorescence and they fad away, is as Heraclitus put it,



(???), all flows. Nothing lasts, nothing is saved, and this is our glory and our agony.

The people we love and the people we hate are swept away by time. Empires,

dynasties, continents are swept away by time, and yet our search for security is cast

in the dominator culture as a search for permanence; I wanna buy a house, Id like to

get my trust fund functioning a little better, Id like to pay off x, y, and z, a search for

permanence. So what you do when you do that is you set yourself at war against thecosmos, which is a heroic stance if your trying to produce Malevillian(??) opera out

of your life. You know Ahab(??) says in Moby Dick, hes talking to his first mate

Starbuck who signifies Christian-right reason and he says, hes raving about going

after the whale, and he says well chase it over both sides of earth and roundperditions flame, and Starbuck says, to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems

blasphemy, and he says, blasphemy Starbuck speak not to me of blasphemy I would

strike out the sun if it insulted me for could it do that then could I do the other since

there is ever a sort of fair play. Well, this is locker room talk. The notion that there is

fair play between a man and a nearby star is the finest expression of the dominatorego I can imagine, and of course the story of Moby Dick can be read on many levels,

but finally it is the story of the submergent(??) of the male ego in the oceans of theunconsciousness born to its destruction and transformation by an encounter with

the maternal matrix in the form of the vaginadentata(??) of the sperm whale and

everything that it symbolized.

So, I dont think we want to go that way. I dont think we want to set

ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence, but that means softening to the fact

of the flow and of the impermanence. Nicole has made the point very eloquently that

these people in the Amazon have nothing. The wonderful thing about the Amazon is

that nothing lasts. Nothing is worth having. I mean, a book, forget it, clothing,

houses; everything is just swept away by the incessant recycling of material. So, all

that is permanent are values, personalities, strength, honesty, decency, dignity,these are things which can be erected against the flow and have some hope of

permanence. I think that shamanism is permission to transcend anxiety by

accepting the transience of all form, and this is a truth of the universe that cannot beignored so once it is integrated then its as though resistance in the electrical circuits

that surround your integration into the world begins to fall. You accept that thepresent moment is the richest apex of being that on the down side back into the past

it shades of into memory and its vagaries, in the future, it shades off into a series of

adumbrations and anticipations, but I think that the shamans gain, this tremendousauthenticity that you feel in their presence, the good ones, because they have seen

the end. They have a model of how process happens, and so they dont push and

they dont clutch, and then energy flows through them. Our civilization has to learnthis.

I think I said it one point in this weekend, only Gorbechof(??) is taking the

position that we did it wrong and that we need to deconstruct, and yet every society

did it wrong. We all did it wrong. Capitalism, its wonderful that you can get a safety

pin at 4 am within a half-mile of anywhere in the United States, and I am sure the

Russians wish they had it so good, but is that the be all in the end all of cultural



values that you can walk the florescent lit aisles of k-mart and congratulate yourself

that whether it be gas can or sanitary napkin or whatever its there waiting for you. I

dont think so. I think that we have built in the termination of our world just as

surely as the Marxist world built in a trip wire into its social mechanism. Its just

that were going to have to pay the piper more downstream.

If we descend into the dominator metaphor and play its game, were

probably going to be snookered because theyve had a long long time to figure out

all the angles. What I find myself more and more leaning to is sharing the meme of

the irrelevance of conservative institutions. History is not a process for which you

ask permission. History is just something you make, and then other people pick up

the pieces. Henry David Thoreau understood this very well when he wrote his

famous treatise on civil disobedience.

The growth of culture is something that comes out of the animal body.Rousseau called it the general will. Man proposes and god disposes, but in the realm

of civil polity the people dispose and government is allowed to propose but thats

all. Now what we are involved in really is a debate about human nature. Who arewe? What are we? The French cartoonists Mobius(??) put it very well in his book,

where he asked the question, Is man good? This is what we are going to find out,and my feeling is that it isnt decided yet. H.G. Wells called history a race between

education and disaster. Well, theyre in the home stretch, neck and neck. Its clearly

going to be a photo finish, but there is a responsibility on everyone who sees this to

communicate it to other people, and to act upon it.

a crisis of consciousness

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