Dupes of Non-Physical

The recognition of this civilizational unconscious, this hidden cultural reality, is the end of a process that began intellectually in the early 20th century. Freud began with the instinctive unconscious. Jung followed him and reflected the instinctive life into consciousness as it was created in the collective unconscious and reflected in patterns of imagery that would occur in science or poetry or dreams or the rest of it. It wasn't instinct. It was instinct reflected in imagery creating consciousness. The third wave came in Paris with people like Levi Strauss and Foucault who studied the intellectual unconscious. Foucault looked at the epoch from the 17th century to now, and said there is a hidden framework that unites economics, linguistic theory, art and philosophy, yet no one in the 17th century was really aware of these hidden correspondences. So Foucault, in a sense, discovered the intellectual unconscious. Levi Strauss went off to the Amazon, and showed how if you look at all of the mythologies of South America, there are these hidden patterns and hidden structures that the people telling the stories don't see. It's only the ethnographer writing the mythologie who can show you the intellectual unconscious.
Now in the later 60's, following the work of the French thinkers, Gregory Bateson using cybernetics showed that there is actually a civilizational unconscious, that mind is not separate from nature, that mind is in nature, and that in many ways the ecology is the unconscious of the societal system. So what we have in pollution, for example, is a real expression of the being of humanity in this moment of time. What we have in our conscious structures - our institutions - are the Disneyland movie sets. IB-WT-28&29


When one moves from the academies of philosophy into mind jazz, one can never tell who is going to play in a way that makes a jam session possible. Some people's books are great, but the people themselves are so autistic that they cannot listen to anyone else to shift their own tunes in response or in exploration of new implications of their old patterns of thinking. They have been so isolated in life by their own gifts, and never having found colleagues, they become shaped by adversity into cosmic soloists; but because their gifts are respected, they are not tagged as insane and are accepted as gurus. Both Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan suffered from this kind of cosmic autism and ended up, through multiple recitals of their ideas, becoming holographic tape recordings of themselves. Messiahs to the electronic media, they became its sacrificial victims and showed how the United States dulls bright minds with spotlights. People like Ralph Abraham, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela seemed much more open to a kind of intellectual chamber music in which we all learned and changed from playing with one another.
So as the New Age movement began to define the new as paleolithic shamanism, neolithic feminism, pharoahonic architecture, and medieval Islamic geometry, I moved away to stand next to the instrumentalists who were playing new tunes, or new and interesting variations of old ones. It didn't happen all at once, and for a while I was stuck between two stations and was picking up a lot of noise. I was no longer tuned to the MIT of the 1960s, and I was no longer tuned to the holymen and gurus of the 1970s, but I had not yet met the scientists with whom I would work in the 1980s. IS-WT-xv&xvi


We are, again, at one of those exciting times when the creative imagination of an entire civilization is undergoing a transformation of its basic mentality in the shift from one geometry to another. It appears to me that there have been three of these mentalities in Western civilization and that we have now entered the fourth. The first mentality was the arithmetic, the line of counting goods in space and generations in time. This is the mentality of Hesiod's Theogony and of Genesis. The second mentality is the geometric and it expresses the intellectual revolution wrought by Pythagoras and Plato. For these ancients, motion was imperfect and sinful, and only the unmoving geometry of the perfect spheres in the ideal realm was a true expression of the Good. The third mentality was the dynamic mentality of modernism, the mentality of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, in which motion and falling bodies became the focus of attention. Now we are moving out of this modernist science with its narratives of linear equations into a postmodernist science of which Chaos Dynamics is one important visual expression. From my external point of view in the humanities, the behavior of these aperiodic phenomena is neither chaotic nor dynamic, and I argued with Ralph Abraham in Los Angeles that these patterns would have been more appropriately called "processual morphologies", and this is the term that I used in Pacific Shift. Because I had cut my philosophical teeth in high school on the process cosmology of A. N. Whitehead, I felt that these patterns were only chaotic to a mind restricted to the linear reductionism of scientific materialism, but Chaos Dynamics is the term the scientists have chosen, so the decision has been made and this infant science has been named. Like the Foucault pendulum following its basin and attractor, we do seem to swing from extremes - from technological materialism to New Age psychism, or from a modernist obsession with systems of control to a postmodernist fascination with chaos. IS-WT-xviii&xix


In Culture the ego was diffuse; in Society the ego became articulated and defined in the mystery school of death; in Civilization the ego became discrete, a literately defined center with a sharply defined periphery; in Industrialization the ego became a turbulent flow, a chaotic attractor with the power of a Cosimo di Medici, a Descartes, a Beethoven, and a Napoleon to break through boundaries and definitions to amass the glory, and power, and wealth that it felt was its proper destiny; now in Planetization the ego is no longer diffuse, certainly no longer articulate, unable any longer to be discrete in the privacy of its civilized study, and no longer able to expect the biosphere to sustain the amassing of its glory and wealth. The diachronic flow of the ego has come to its end, and now the synchronic dimensions of the spiritual Daimon is beginning to infold itself into temporal consciousness. Multidimensionality begins to be experienced as the personal field of consciousness, the interrelatedness of all sentient beings in "the innumerable universes that are suspended from the tip of Buddha's hair". Lacking the appropriate and futuristic image to "imagine" this, so very much like a cultural historian, I fall back upon the past and envision the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life from the Judaic Kabbalah, but I see this flat rendering on a two-dimensional page transformed into a multidimensional crystal in which the lattice is a recursive one in which the "ego" is the foundation, but all the other nodes are also part of the architecture of an individual, but enlightened consciousness.
Between the angelic heights of the macrocosm of the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the bacterial earth lies the middle way of the Mind, and it is in this imaginary landscape of the middle way, whether we call it the Madhyamika of Buddhism or the Christ of Steiner or the Da at of the Kabbalah, that we humans take our life and come to know our world as the dark horizon that illuminates our hidden center. IS-WT-168&169


The rise of paranoia, from right-wing fulminations against the world conspiracy of the Trilateral Commission to Lyndon LaRouche's hatred of the British Secret Service, is an important signal that the literate, rational citizen of the post-Enlightenment era is being replaced by the subject in a shift from identity through logical definition to identity through participation and performance. In one form of consciousness, identity is seen through similar logical predicates; but in paranoia, identity is seen metaphorically as the participation mystique of common subjects. Looking at the erosion of good pietist values from electronic evangelical broadcasting, and looking at rock festivals, we can see that democracy is in for some hard times. PS-WT-134&135


History is rarely a happy place, so there is always the danger that the end of the Cold War could bring a racial convergence in which a new European civilization proposed to the Russians by Gore Vidal, one that stretches westward from Vladivostok to Vancouver, will try to stand off "the yellow peril" of a rich Japan and a prodigious China. If the cultural bifurcation of the world continues along these lines, then zones of cultural entropy in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, will so terrify entities such as Israel and South Africa that they will never surrender to forces of liberal tolerance but will become entrenched, technological fortresses in which the Great White Race makes its last stand.
But persuaded by my years of living in Toronto and partaking of the insights of the Torontonian school of Innis and McLuhan, I do not think that the formations of nineteenth-century empires can now reassert themselves, for they were built on print, bureaucracies, and the center-periphery dynamics of railways and shipping lines. In a global ecology of mind that is polycentric and electronic, I think that the nativistic movements of premodernist Islam and modernist Europe are both bound to fail, just as the Ghost Dance and Louis Riel's rising of the Metis failed in North America. Precisely in order to avoid a world organized along lines of racial hatred, my allegiances are to such universal forms of human association as are expressed in Varela's Western science and Eastern Buddhism. IS-WT-164


The world of electronics is Top and Pop culture; it is an energizing of opposites: the elitist science of Stanford, Cal Tech, and the Silicon Valley, and the media and musical reproductions of Hollywood. GK-WT-195


What is making the process move more rapidly is not just global television, but global mysticism. Individuals less centered in their egos are discovering the patterns of convergence and synchronicity in their lives and the life of the new culture. It almost seems as if the consciousness of a racial, planetary Being were surrounding civilization, compressing it, and turning it into a miniaturized artifact of the past. The artist caught inside civilization feels the pressure and is demoralized because he is holding on tight to his civilizational identity; witness the mythologizing of the ego in the work of Norman Mailer. It is the work of the artist to reinterpret the world, but since the civilized artist cannot understand this new world, he has chosen to perish with the old.
With the death of the art of civilization, the art of planetization is born. Once the romantic artist, like Yeats, made the emerging nation, like Ireland, conscious of its national identity; now the planetary artists are trying to make the races conscious of their emerging planetary identity. The old artist sculpted with stone, painted on canvas, or told stories about a day in the life, but whether it is conceptual art, nonfiction, or the music of Stockhausen, the new medium is information itself. The place where information is densest is the university; and that is why many of the new artists have come out of that setting, not as artists in residence or professors of creative writing, for those are civilized roles, but as jugglers of information. Where the expert is enthroned, there the fool is forced to say "uncle", but masks his subversion by crying "nuncle".
To understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air. EW-WT-77&78


We slay with technology and save the victim with art. IS-WT-146