I confess to feeling some hesitation about this ‘doing’ approach, though. By and large, I believe that real and lasting change arises naturally from within the individual. My attitude could probably be construed as too passive – too little, too late – which I suspect was my reader’s take on it. A big part of me even acknowledges this. Shouldn’t I then suggest that we do something more proactive? Shouldn’t we take more responsibility, as inhabitants of this planet and members of humanity, for changing our presently suicidal course?
I pondered much about it and finally found a way to reconcile my conflicting attitudes: instead of suggesting what we should try to do, I will instead suggest what we could stop doing so to improve our circumstances. Indeed, I believe that much of the damage arises from our own misguided actions. We blindly go about life doing all kinds of things that ultimately harm us. As such, perhaps the best way to stop the downward spiral into madness is not to do yet more things, but to stop doing a few things. In fact, it is a symptom of the imbalances of Western culture – which now pervades the whole world – that all useful thinking must translate into actions. Ours is a culture of do, do, do. However, when someone is pounding his own head with a hammer, the right solution is not to look for a helmet, but to stop the hammering.
So here are my five suggestions – Only five! – of things we could all, individually, stop doing to help improve our collective sanity and wellbeing. None of the entries in the list below requires effort, since they are not proactive but passive. Yet, if most of us would stop doing these five simple things, I am convinced that our psychological and spiritual health would improve substantially, both individually and collectively. As a direct result of that, we might even find our culture and civilization on a path back to meaning.
1. Let us stop compulsively stupefying ourselves. We all feel, in the unacknowledged depths of our psyche, that our ordinary life is becoming increasingly empty and meaningless. Our obfuscated psyche tries to correct our course through an array of signals: unexplained unease, depression, anxieties, intuitive epiphanies and odd drives. We then diligently proceed to ignore and repress all these signals through distractions: idiotic television shows, fanatic rooting for sports teams, alcohol, retail ‘therapy,’ hollow social networking, compulsive money-making and status-chasing, compulsive casual dating and whatnot. This is understandable in that nobody likes to remain exposed to the anguish, frustration and anxiety emerging from the obfuscated psyche while it attempts to force a change. But if those feelings are not allowed self-reflective mental space to be acknowledged, processed and integrated, not only will they harm us even more from within – think of psychoses and even physical illness, as discussed in essay 8.3 – we will not give ourselves any chance to find the meaning of our lives again. Self-reflective psychological distress, whatever else it may be, hints at a corrective direction for our lives.
2. Let us stop believing so readily. Here I don’t mean just belief in the hysterical claims shouted from the fringes of the culture, but also belief in the materialist nonsense that is spoon-fed to us by academia, the educational system in general and the mainstream media. In fact, I often find it hard to decide which of these two beliefs is more detrimental and dangerous. While the hysterical fringes are often pathological, the materialist worldview is demeaning to the human spirit and runs counter to the full expression of psychic life. What alternative do we have then? The words of the poet John Keats offer an avenue:
At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.185
Indeed, if one is rigorous and honest, one must recognize that there is precious little that can really be concluded from consensus fact and reason. In our grasping attempts to ease our insecurities and anxieties, we often conjure up facts and overstretch reason. Materialism is an expression of this compulsive overreaching. You see, your belief is valuable currency, for the way you spend it sets the tone of your life. As any cautious buyer will tell you, there is no need to part with it in a hurry. It’s okay to live in the mystery while you consider how best to invest your currency. It’s just important to keep in mind that being cautious with your beliefs does not mean becoming cynical. Cynicism, in fact, is a disguised but extreme form of belief: the often-baseless commitment to the impossibility of something. It spends as much currency as gullibility. Living in the mystery, on the other hand, entails an attitude of openness without commitment.
3. Let us stop acting so much. Let’s face it: we all act. We act at work, we act at home, we act at the gym, we act at the pub, etc. We act so consistently that we mistake the acting for living an ordinary life. We try to control the image of ourselves that we make available to others, motivated by a need to fit in, to appear strong, to look attractive, etc. In psychological terms, we all wear the mask of the persona. We know, in our heart of hearts, how much suffering, insecurity and anxiety we actually live with. But since everybody else is acting like we do, hiding their inner truths like we do, each one of us ends up concluding that we are alone in our suffering; that we are the weakest, most inappropriate and fear-ridden person on the planet. The acting causes us all unnecessary extra suffering. Show me a person who claims to have no significant anxieties or insecurities and I will show you a liar. The human condition isn’t reassuring and we’re all in the same boat. But because we try to put up this image of strength, we add insult to injury by convincing each other that we are alone in our misery. This only increases our isolation and loneliness. We forget that the only real strength is the courage to present ourselves to the world as we really are, so we can live in authentic community and help each other out.
4. Let us stop eating so much meat. No, I am not suggesting that we should all become vegetarians, just that we could perhaps reduce our meat consumption. And I say this not for the usual reasons, such as better health, less environmental impact, etc. These reasons are all true and good, but my motivation here is different: once you turn animals into products, you make it unavoidable that they are treated – no, processed – as such. Savage economic and human realities then kick in and ensure that these animals live dreadful lives and die in unthinkable agony, as recent documentaries have shown.186 Many more higher animals are killed for food every day than the total number of human beings killed in the whole of World War II, and often under more horrendous circumstances. This unimaginable and excruciating orgy of pain, agony and death is being carried out on our account every day, because we provide the demand for it. And if all psyches, human and otherwise, are one at their deepest, most obfuscated levels– a point I argue in essay 2.1 – try to imagine how much outrage, stress, anxiety, dread, anguish and sheer pain is being pumped every day into our collective, obfuscated mind. Do you really think that you, as an individual, are insulated from this? Can you even conceive of the magnitude of what we are doing to ourselves?
5. Let us stop buying so much unnecessary stuff. Do we really need to upgrade our wardrobe every year? Do we really need a bigger TV or a newer car? Or that new phone? In the throes of culturally-induced fetishism, we look for meaning and divinity in mere stuff. We think – utterly irrationally – that our lives will finally make sense and be fulfilling after we buy the things we fetishize. Yet, inevitably, stuff always disappoints us at the end. How long did your ‘high’ last after your latest dream purchase? Weeks? Days? Maybe only a few hours? Withdrawing our projections from mere things, and modifying our spending habits accordingly, will force a potentially painful but certainly necessary adjustment of the economic system. It will reduce the influence and power base of those who gain most from the current status quo, weakening the control loops that perpetuate it. As a bonus, by buying less we will also be less motivated to continue to increase our income beyond reasonable levels, freeing up time and energy in our lives for mo
re meaningful pursuits (for instance, those discussed in essay 5.7). Make no mistake: a quiet and entirely peaceful change in our spending habits is not only impossible to repress, it will also have a much bigger impact than any street revolution. Consumerism – so frantically reinforced by governments, the mainstream media, and validated by the academically-sanctioned delusion of materialism – is what keeps us in the role of cogs in a sick system that benefits only the pathological amongst us. By peacefully refusing to play the role of entranced consumers, we will irremediably undermine the very foundations of this system and enable positive, necessary change.
That’s it. Five simple things we could stop doing today in order to change the world of tomorrow. How about that?
9. Takeaway message
As you may have noticed, an underlying worldview runs across the various essays in this book as a unifying theme. It is based on two simple but crucial notions: first, that what we call the ‘human psyche’ or ‘personal awareness’ is not a self-contained phenomenon inside our head, but a dissociated psychic complex – or alter – of a broader transpersonal consciousness. All reality unfolds as subjective experiences in this transpersonal ‘mind-at-large.’ Second, the formation of alters gives rise to two different perspectives from which mental processes in mind-at-large can be witnessed: the first-and second-person perspectives.
The first-person perspective occurs when an alter experiences a mental process powered and modulated from within the alter itself. For instance, the flow of my thoughts, which I experience from a first-person perspective, arises and is shaped entirely within me. The second-person perspective happens when the experience of an alter is powered and modulated by another mental process unfolding outside the alter, but still within mind-at-large. For instance, my sense perceptions are powered and modulated by processes unfolding outside me. More specifically, if I look at measurements of another person’s brain activity taken when the person is thinking about something, I gain a second-person perspective of the person’s thoughts. Notice that both first-and second-person perspectives are direct experiences: I have the direct experience of seeing brain activity measurements. It’s just that certain direct experiences in an alter are induced by other direct experiences outside the alter, so they end up corre-sponding to each other information-wise. The brain activity measurements I directly see correspond, information-wise, to the other person’s direct experience of her thoughts. Even the inanimate objects I perceive around me correspond to mental processes directly experienced by mind-at-large. Ultimately, thus, there’s only direct experience.
Naturally, the second-person perspective of an experience is very different than the first-person one. Looking at the brain activity of a frightened person feels totally different than being frightened oneself. This dramatic difference isn’t at all surprising: the first-person perspective is a secondary excitation of consciousness, inside an alter, induced by another, primary excitation of consciousness outside the alter. The primary and secondary excitations, although corresponding to each other in certain ways, need not be even remotely similar experientially. As an analogy, imagine that your particular alter in mind-at-large is like a kettle on a stove. The primary excitation of burning gas outside the kettle induces the secondary excitation of boiling water inside the kettle. There are clear correspondences between the two: for instance, the water will boil faster the stronger the flow of burning gas. But boiling water looks nothing like burning gas. Analogously, the second-person perspective of an experience looks nothing like the first-person perspective. Those who endorse materialism because our sense perceptions feel so different than our inner flow of thoughts and emotions simply fail to see this simple point.
It is the formation of alters that delineates boundaries between different psychic ‘spaces’ within mind-at-large, giving rise to second-person perspectives. After all, without a boundary there would be no ‘outside,’ but only a first-person perspective of every mental process unfolding in mind-at-large. It is dissociation that creates the experiential ‘outside.’ But this ‘outside’ is not outside consciousness itself; it is simply outside the alter. Our culture has come to mistake the witnessing of mental processes outside our personal alters for the witnessing of material phenomena outside consciousness.
This mistake is as inflationary as it is tragic. Postulating a whole universe outside consciousness requires an unprovable ontological category – namely, not-consciousness – that is also entirely unnecessary to make sense of observations. Dissociation, in turn, as a process of and in consciousness, requires only the primary datum of reality, which is consciousness itself. All empirical reality can be understood in terms of the first-and second-person perspectives of experience that arise from dissociation. As discussed in depth in this book, all evidence used to support the inference of a world outside consciousness can be made sense of on the basis of these two perspectives, including: the fact that we feel a clear distinction between our inner lives – our thoughts and emotions – and the outside world we perceive through our sense organs; the fact that our subjective experiences can be affected by intervention in our brain (drugs, trauma, surgery, etc.); the fact that our personal awareness is firmly connected to the moving platform of our physical body; etc.
This understanding is the key to a revolution in our way to relate to reality whose time has come. In fact, it is overdue. Everything that currently motivates us to believe in a world outside consciousness can and will be understood as the effects of mental processes outside our particular alter, which we witness from a second-person perspective. If you truly grok this, you will see through our culture’s delusion; you will wake up from the trance that the world around you conspires to keep you in.
Materialism represents an astonishing failure of the human intellect to see what’s right under its nose. It hides nature’s marvelous simplicity behind a veil of contrivance. Its continuing survival in face of the mounting odds of reason, evidence and direct experience requires constant and deliberate maintenance. Indeed, materialism serves powerful economic and political interests. ‘If our confusion suits the reigning political and economic regime just fine, it is because it stands as proof that the operation to supplant the dream-space of soul and psyche with a fully controllable interface is going according to plan,’ writes Jean-Francois Martel.187 What forces stand to gain from the continuance of materialism? How do these forces manifest themselves in society?
Questions like these evoke the idea of conspiracies. Yet, our ordinary view of conspiracies tends to be rather caricatural: secret, powerful organizations working behind the curtain, whose goals and actions are deliberately orchestrated by hierar-chies of control with an elusive leadership at the top. Secret meetings are allegedly held, secret orders issued and disseminated through myriad covert channels. Everybody in a position of any significance in society is allegedly involved; everybody except us. How likely is all this? You see, this caricatural view of conspiracies helps to protect and preserve what is really going on. If our only choice is to either believe in the caricature or absolve all players of all guilt, it is easy to see how the world is kept entranced.
It has become practically impossible to reclaim the more moderate denotations of the word ‘conspiracy.’ So let me try a different word: stigmergy.188 Stigmergy happens when agents coordinate their actions indirectly, through the local effects of their behavior in the environment. These local effects influence subsequent actions by other agents, whose effects, in turn, influence the behavior of yet other agents, and so on. This way, local actions by different agents reinforce and build upon each other, leading to the spontaneous rise of globally co-ordinated, systematic activity. Ant and termite colonies, for instance, operate according to stigmergy: there’s no hierarchy of control, no elusive leadership, no broadcasting of secret orders. Yet, the resulting behavior is systematic – following a clear global agenda –as if it were centrally co-ordinated by some kind of secret cabal.189
There is vicious, insid
ious stigmergy in our society today. The agenda of this stigmergy is the maintenance of materialism. It manifests itself as a broad network of subtle local actions, biases and values, each serving powerful interests. These local dynamics build up into a system of global reinforcement; a virtual cabal, so to speak. The stigmergy has turned most of us into entranced drones, serving a mad state of affairs that is slowly but inexorably killing our humanity.
We must get past the delusions of our intellectual adolescence. We must escape the invisible cognitive cage where we’re kept by those who stand to gain from the status quo. We must see through the insidious, soul-crushing stigmergy of materialism. We must summon the courage to acknowledge that some of the most celebrated intellectuals and scientists among us have been no more than arrogant children when it comes to their understanding of the nature of reality and of their own humanity. They do not deserve the wide-ranging reverence we, as a culture, seem to feel we owe them. Unexamined prejudice and foolishness are rampant even among the self-proclaimed guardians of reason. A failure to acknowledge and integrate all this at the broadest cultural level will, at best, delay our maturity and, at worst, destroy our species.
Brief Peeks Beyond Page 22
