One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve or understand or penetrate or appreciate or come to terms with the conundrum of being; this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.
Every day, in thousands of ways, we betray our impulses toward wholeness, toward community, toward freedom, toward the spirit, by genuflecting to cultural values that are squirrelly, or toxic, or simply wrong-headed, or obsolete. Culture is not your friend. It’s an illusion.
A place to begin is the body. You have one. It isn’t ideologically defined. It can be ideologically defined—you know, in Catholic school, the nuns used to tell us we should dress in darkness so we wouldn’t be an occasion of sin to ourselves. That’s an example of the body becoming ideologically defined. But it precedes culture. Culture has to deal with the fact that your eyes are on the front of your face and your anal pore is located near your genitals. Culture would probably rather have it some other way. It would be so convenient—but hey, it’s a given. I’m so happy our rumps don’t swell in estrus, the way some of the other primates’ do. Can you imagine Giorgio Armani trying to create a line of fashion that comes to term with that? But I digress….
Coming with the body is this amazing thing—which everyone wants to give away, throw away, get away from—called the felt moment of immediate experience. The felt moment of immediate experience: this is you, now, here, in your body—with the cheeseburger slowly dissolving, the caffeine, the bladder, all of these things. Collisions. Concrescences. The crossing of trajectories of mental process, digestive process, metabolism, intent, income, emotional state. The felt presence of immediate experience, lodged in the body-mind system, in the moment: that’s who you are.
The presence of these substances and plants began to alarm the order-keeping forces of the high-tech industrial democracies. It’s an issue separate from the issue of stimulants and depressants. It’s an issue separate from the issue of addiction and dependency. These things are not stimulants or depressants, and they do not cause addiction or dependency. What they cause is what I’m advocating: a fundamental reevaluation of cultural values. Because culture as we’re practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain.
We do not feel what we are doing. Remember? I spoke about the primacy of the felt moment of experience. If we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But between us and the consequences of our action there are endless veils of political rhetoric, stultification, denial, sedation, intoxication, ideological delusion.
We are not making the waves in this ocean, we are corks riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged by perhaps chance alone to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe; a moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming evolutionary inflationary expansion.
We are caught up in a process of unfolding complexification that has now lodged in our species. We are its source at this point. At one point its source was the geology of the planet. At a later point, closer to us in time, its source was all biological diversity. But as the novelty has increased, the domain of its expression has narrowed. And it is now confined largely to the human species.
McLuhan said once: “We move into the future like a person driving, who uses only the rear-view mirror.” That’s how we understand the future: by driving in the rear-view mirror. All of our models of what lies ahead are based on inverted models of the past. And the one thing you can be certain of is: that won’t do it. Because we can see: a person standing in 1900, using that method, would’ve been wrong about the late 1990s. A person standing in 1600, using that method, would’ve been wrong about the late 1900s. And so forth and so on. You cannot extrapolate from the past into the future.
Salvation is always available. It’s in the moment. It’s an act of understanding. It doesn’t come down through a lineage. It doesn’t come through a substance, an empowerment, a work. It comes through understanding. Salvation is an act of rational apprehension of some sort.
We are building the nervous system of the human over-soul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies—societies; human groups run by rules—into telepathic collectivities of some sort. I mean, the chaos of the Internet is chaos only to the constipated order-freaks of the Hobbesian sociological machine.
We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness. This is all very scary. None of us know what it means. But the forces that have been called into being are now beyond the control of any institution, or any strategic planning committee, or any banking committee. These things have a life of their own.
The perfect metaphor for understanding this situation is a birth. If you had never seen a birth, and you were rushing about your daily business and suddenly came around a corner and this was happening—as, for example, could happen to you in India or in Africa somewhere, and you confronted human birth—if you had not been prepared for that moment, you would have a real emotional thing on your hands. It looks like a medical emergency: blood is being shed, organs are beings stretched, there is pleading and groaning and moaning. You have to have your chops very together to look at this situation and say: “How wonderful! New life coming into the world as it has always come into the world!”