Dear Friends,
I’ve been asked to write something about the global polycrisis. Since I have spent my life taking views orthogonal to the collective consensus, this is another such venture. Basically I will argue that a panpsychic or cosmic consciousness may be a necessary but far from sufficient contributor to a better world.
On my bedside table are five books.
- The Poems of Seamus Heaney
- Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching in Red Pine’s translation
- Joseph Campbell’s On Love
- AH Almaas’s Facets of Unity, the Enneagram of Holy Ideas
- Jeffrey Kripal’s Secret Body
Robert Lowell called Heaney “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” This 1,250-page volume is filled with an astonishing testament to the power of language to remind us of who we truly are. Reading Heaney is one way to live in these times.
Red Pine’sTaoteching is an astonishment of fresh vision from the 6th century BC including selected commentaries from over 2,000 years. Love is at the heart of a considered life. Love is primary. Campbell’s small volume speaks truth of its power and vicissitudes.
AH Almaas’s Facets of Unity is one of the great texts on the enneagram, the mysterious system Gurdjieff first brought west. Oscar Ichazo created the enneagram of personality. Almaas quotes Ichazo at the start of each chapter on each of the nine enneatypes. Here is the Ichazo quote on Point Eight, Holy Truth:
The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now; that this existence is its own definition, and continues whether an individual understands it or not; and that the individual experiences the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening. [p.75]
Here is Campbell:
When people think of marriage as a continuous long love affair, then they are bound for trouble. Because it isn’t. It is in the proper sense an ordeal. And the ordeal is that of individual development. And if there isn’t individual development taking place, well, what is the good of it? [p.11]
Here is Red Pine’s Lao -Tzu:
The great masters of ancient times
focused on the indiscernible
and penetrated the dark
you would never know them
and because you wouldn’t know them
I describe them with reluctance
they were careful as if crossing a river in winter
cautious as if worried about neighbors
reserved like a guest
ephemeral like melting ice
simple like uncarved wood
open like a valley
and murky like puddle
but those who can be like a puddle
become clear when they are still
and those who can be at rest
become alive when they are roused
those who treasure this Way
don’t try to be seen
not trying to be seen
they can hide and stay hidden.
[#15, p.30]
Here is Heaney:
The Rescue
In drifts of sleep I came upon you
Buried to your waist in snow.
You reached your arms out: I came to
Like water in a dream of thaw. p.424
I offer these four authors seemingly at random because they tell you where I am writing from right now and give you a sense that my response to the polycrisis is one steeped in the solace of literature and philosophy, both sacred and profane.
I will now delve more deeply into Kripal whose 13 books I have studied in depth and with whom we are recording a complete set of conversations on his work.The following argument is complex and not for the faint of heart. Here is a link to our recorded conversations so far.
You can find them:
His website JeffreyJKripal.com is a masterpiece of concise synopsis. I regard him as a philosopher and historian of religion of the first order. Some day his importance will be recognized.
Here are seven of Kripal’s 30 gnomons [aphorisms], almost hidden as an appendix to his autobiographical work Secret Body.
2. The Human as Two. Each human being is two, that is, each person is simultaneously a conscious constructed ego and a much larger complexly conscious field that normally manifests only in nonordinary states of consciousness and energy…
3. The Erotic Mystic. There is a profound connection between the mystical and the erotic.
4. The Amoral of Transmoral Mystic. There is no necessary or simple connection between the mystical and the ethical.
17. The Traumatic Secret. The paranormal or altered state of consciousness appears to be “let in” through the temporary suppression or dissolution of the socialized ego, which was opened up or fractured through extreme physical, emotional and/or sexual suffering, that is, through what we would today call trauma…
14. The Paranormal Is a Non-Dual Signal. A paranormal event is one in which a material event corresponds more or less precisely to a subjective event or mental state, thereby collapsing the assumed subject-object dualism of our ordinary cognitive and sensory experience and suggesting some deeper super-reality that is neither simply mental nor material but somehow both.
18. The Realist Impulse of the Cosmic Humanities. Mind is real, a fundamental dimension or nonlocal (and nonhistorical) aspect of the universe…Humanists, and particularly historians of mystical literature, hold the key to the future of knowledge—consciousness as cosmic.
30. The New Sacred. Consciousness as such is the new sacred.
pp.428-30
In other words, if I may offer a gloss on Kripal:
Kripal is among those recovering for our time the ancient view that the cosmos is alive and conscious—a view of most original peoples and of great Eastern and Western thinkers up through the 19th century, when materialist science suppressed it, though it lived on in the counter-culture and was encoded in the humanities.
There are a number of portals to this greatly expanded view of consciousness. They include—primary for our purpose here—intense trauma—which the polycrisis is visiting upon us both individually and collectively. But they also include psychedelics, which are now in widespread use, deep meditation, and the natural born or acquired capacities of some individuals to see the invisible.
The materialist science world view has given us many [double-edged] gifts for manipulating the material world. But it gives us no explanation for paranormal phenomena—intuition, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, NDEs [near death experiences], remote viewing, seeing past and future events, and much more.
The panpsychic view [see the excellent Wikipedia entry] can be summarized as follows:
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism (/pænˈsaɪkɪzəm/) is the view that the mind or consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.[1] It is also described as a theory that “the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe”.[2] It is one of the oldest philosophical theories and has been ascribed, in some form, to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer,William James,[3] Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell.[1] In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise oflogical positivism.[3][4] Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience,psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century, because it addresses the hard problem directly.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with the polycrisis? From an ordinary perspective, nothing. I am part of the global community of polycrisis aficionados that circulates new analyses of the polycrisis to each other literally daily. What are the latest horrors? What are the smartest commentaries? Who helps us find hope in the face of what seem overwhelming odds that we are going down the tubes?
But at another level, these five books and the varied but resonant wisdom they contain have everything to do with the polycrisis. Here’s why.
First, the word polycrisis itself, which we (for our sins) helped popularize, is an intrinsically ugly and jargony word. It won’t last. It’s a transient form.
William Gibson is much better: The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.
The language will be debated for a long time. But words like the holocaust of life or the catastrophe or—the internet meme—TEOTWAWKI—the end of the world as we know it—are much closer than polycrisis to the human truth.
Second, we can’t get out of this. We can’t solve it. No one’s in control. The only thing we have is our capacity to respond. The buzz word for adaptive response right now is resilience. It too will get over used but at least it is a beautiful, meaningful word. And the forms resilience work takes are countless. Who or what are you trying to save? Yourself, your family, your organization and its circle, your community, your country, or the world? Or the poorest of the poor? Or the richest of the rich? Take your pick.
Third, many people intuitively believe that the only way beyond his holocaust of life—for that is what is—is a change in consciousness. There’s something to that. But not what they tend to think. They hope that meditating or psychedelics will save us. This is where Ichazo and Kripal come in. They are both arguing from a place that posits the reality of a living cosmos and a cosmic consciousness. But they don’t posit salvation.
Here’s the twist. Both Ichazo and Kripal believe consciousness is the new sacred. Neither believes consciousness carries a human moral code. Their view, broadly speaking, is a panpsychic view—that consciousness is both cosmic and transmoral. And that means that even if more people achieve a panpsychic consciousness, it would not at all necessarily get us out of the planetary stew we are in.
But while a panpsychic view of Reality won’t extricate us, it may give us a better version of Truth than the purely materialist view, which cannot account for psi or other anomalous phenomena. Materialism denies panpsychism but panpsychism embraces the vital but partial truths of materialism.
Imagine that the Reality is that the cosmos is alive and is filled with a plethora of intelligences of many kinds. Imagine that some view us kindly and wish us well, others would use us, and others regard us as a food crop or in some similar way. Imagine that it were possible some day to align whatever is left of humanity and life on earth with the forces of what we would consider Light in the universe—there may even be a cosmic constellation of such forces. Imagine that we avoid a techno-totalitarian Game of Thrones future—which I personally see as the most likely. We can dream, no?
Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and other best sellers, has just published The Secret of Secrets, an intensely and accurately researched fiction about a man and woman who set out to save the world from American defense and intelligence agency operatives who have been (in reality) researching the human paranormal potentials and seeking to weaponize them. So if you think this is all baloney, read The Secret of Secrets.
So that’s my orthogonal take on the polycrisis. When we began this work in earnest a decade ago people told me I was deluded—that we would never move the needle on the polycrisis. A decade later, the polycrisis has become one of the principal concerns of the elites and the felt reality of millions around the world. In the past few years it has gone into overdrive. What we can do at the personal, community, national, or global levels to bend it in a better direction or learn resilient responses has itself become a major industry.
What I am arguing here, with Kripal, is that the collective trauma of the polycrisis—plus psychedelic infusions and other portals—will “flip” many more people into varied cosmic states of consciousness. Most traumatized people don’t flip—they simply suffer. But some truly do. I’ve seen it many times in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. The flip isn’t binary—it is a continuum. Trauma can flip us short term or long term. There are both transient states and permanent stages of being flipped. Patti Smith in her exquisite memoir quotes Gogol: “Obstacles are our wings.”
The problem is that these mystical or flipped or partially flipped states don’t carry a shared moral code or operating manual to extricate ourselves. But they do point to a super natural reality that returns us to the ancient wisdom of a living and conscious universe designed to support life [the Anthropic Principal].
But the universe doesn’t appear to favor any one form of life—mayhap it just seeds life everywhere it can flourish and lets it fend for itself with all its ecosystem collaborators and competitors. Just as on earth, so in the cosmos. As above, apparently, so below. Many cosmologists believe planetary civilizations typically extinguish themselves at a certain point just as we seem to be trying hard to do here on earth.
I take solace, with Ichazo, with Lao Tzu, with all the great mystics, or at least many of them, in the magnificent and awesome Reality of a living conscious cosmos. I can’t prove it is living and conscious but I read the tea leaves that way as my conscious choice.
Meanwhile, there is this. The only thing we can truly (if barely) control in our lives is our own consciousness—our own response to our everyday circumstances that in turn are shaped by the holocaust of life we call the polycrisis. How do we choose to spend, in Mary Oliver’s phrase, this one wild and precious life?
In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that God’s kingdom is spread out over the earth but no one sees it. Or, if you prefer the secular version, Baruch Spinoza, that renegade 17th century Dutch Jewish lens grinder, simply said God is Nature. Which fits perfectly with the broader views that cosmic consciousness is an aspect of an ever unfolding living cosmos that constitutes the ultimate reality.
We could do worse than Yeats and the Gita for a close:
The Second Coming
by William Butler YeatsTurning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Or consider this from Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita:
Verse 7: “Whenever there is a decline in righteousness and an increase in unrighteousness, O Arjuna, at that time I manifest myself on earth.”
Verse 8: “To protect the good, to destroy the wicked, and to establish righteousness, I come into being from age to age.”
One of the true unknowns about a living conscious cosmos is whether it plays favorites. In Einstein’s words, whether it is friendly (to us) or not. We surmise that the only universe we see is friendly to life writ large—the Anthropic Principle in either its strong or weak variants—though Stephen Hawking and others posit a multiverse—without a shred of evidence—because they cannot bear the thought of some cosmic form of intelligent design. Be that as it may, the question of whether the cosmos plays favorites or not remains—and that might be the key to whether it offers some cosmic moral code.
To wit, does the cosmos prefer enlightened civilizations living in harmony with their planets, consciously cultivating them as gardens, as Rene Dubos hoped we would cultivate the earth? Or are slave civilizations ruled by technoid insect masters equally welcome? We simply don’t know, though some claim they are given insights to hierarchies of intelligences that favor our better angels—just like medieval angelology.
But even if the cosmos is devoid of favorites and just lets all its life forms play their hands, we can revert to old existential tropes. We can just choose—if the cosmos is a moral void—the ancient values of kindness, discernment, and service—those handy step-down from love, wisdom and will. We can ally ourselves with truth, goodness, and beauty even if modernism denies them and the void takes no notice. It’s like Pascal’s wager. He said we should believe in God because if it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, but if it matters, it matters.
So that’s where we are. Whatever the truth, I choose to believe the cosmos favors the forces of love and light that nourish and support life. I choose to distinguish between the fertile darkness of the cosmic womb of all life and the forces of cruelty and annihilation. The cosmos may or may not care. I intuit that it does. I don’t claim that as a moral code. But I believe there are forces out there rooting for us. I find that encouraging. It gives me courage. I believe it serves us to keep our eyes open and our ears and senses primed to see, hear or sense them.
That’s my take. I’m curious. What do you think? Truth emerges from dialogue. Do tell.
Michael
