Month: February 2020

The End Of The World

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Today America crossed a threshold. All of its inherent darkness was laid bare for everyone to see. It happened at a ‘Prayer Breakfast’ in Washington, followed by a celebration of decadence, where all participants were branded with the badges of absolute complicity.

What was on view was a world that is ending. The grinning Christians at the prayer breakfast may have been rejoicing at the apocalypse. They listened rapturously to the obscenities spewing from the mouth of their master and their mirror. Frightened rich white people, arrogant in their confidence that the church that they have constructed out of hatred, racism and xenophobia will be consecrated by some imaginary God and somehow last until the Rapture.

While the real Christians in the crowd were castigated and attacked, the true believers and the cultists bonded together like an indistinguishable mob of fallen angels in some engraving by Gustavo Dore in an edition of ‘Paradise Lost.’ The stench of hypocrisy and decay was overwhelming.

I grew up as a Christian. I sang in the choir and performed in the Christmas plays. As a Boy Scout I studied under my pastor to receive the ‘God And Country’ honor. I was baptized and born again. Nowadays, when I drive through the suburbs of Albuquerque and Denver with their mega churches and institutes of sanctified oppression I feel the kind of revulsion that only fades when I’ve left them behind.

There are actual Christians in this world, but the American version has become seriously afflicted by a disease that, if not repudiated and exorcised, turns it’s most public representatives into creatures of darkness. The words that now rise to my mind when I hear the word ‘Christian’ are not words reflecting peace, forgiveness or truth, but words of violence, distrust and hypocrisy. Many Christians have turned their faith and love into obsessive dedication to dogma and political ideology, making them willing servants to the masters of war and power and wealth. At their prayer breakfasts they now listen to sermons given by the worst of us.

I imagine American Evangelists will get the Apocalypse they deserve. When their true Gods are bigotry, misogyny, racism and hatred, it’s inevitable that the consequences of these impulses eventually come to collect a price. The road toward Armageddon won’t be pretty for any of us, but in the end those with true courage and true Christian love will turn and walk away, and the congregation of fear will fade back into the dark corners where they came from. Their world, as powerful as it is on it’s face, will finally come to an end, as the rest of humanity turns away, the desecration of our institutions is repaired, and those who inherit the earth turn again toward the truth and the soul of survival.

In this outcome, I have faith.

“Reality designing is a team sport.”*

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In 1992 while driving a rented Mustang down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco toward Big Sur I heard Rush Limbaugh for the first time. He was broadcasting on California Talk Radio and was only at the beginning of his trajectory through hate mongering and drug addiction, toward becoming the only human turd in history to receive the ‘Medal Of Honor’ from a president who had decided to use the occasion to take a shit in the ‘People’s House,’ so that another Californian could tear up the honoring speech like the toilet paper that it was.

Back then I couldn’t know that Rush would create so successfully the template for the worst of us to follow, parading insults, sarcasm and conspiracy before the ears of the gullible, mostly waiting in cars backed up on freeways on the way to and from their work and aching for some form of entertainment. Rush was entertaining.

We were only a couple of years past Reagan in the first years of the Clinton administration and the widespread diseases of cynicism and despair had not yet entirely taken the place of America’s trust in the future. We were six years into the revolution in personal computing, and this was beginning to alter the cultural landscape in ways that the psychedelic revolution had not even anticipated. It would propel people like me into worlds I could have only dreamed were possible. In the middle of all of this expansion of possibilities it seemed that people like Rush were here to make sure that paranoia would prevail. Tooling along the edges of the Pacific, I listened to that voice largely because I’d never heard anything quite so outrageously ridiculous. It was fascinating and almost addictive in it’s sheer over-the-top novelty.

I’d been invited to attend a week long workshop at Esalen by a trio of authors that I’d worked with as the editor on a book just published based on their continuing conversations about the possibilities ahead four culture, the human brain and the psychedelic revolution.** It was an extraordinary week, as I stayed in the house of Michael Murphy (Golf In The Kingdom, The Future of the Body), explored the gardens, the beach and the cliff side hot tubs, and met with my three authors on a lawn above the Pacific to discuss future projects.

An alarming distortion effect was emerging, driven by fear and loathing boiling up in our reaction to blindingly rapid cultural changes brought about by technological and psychic revolutions, by victories in the civil rights movement and by the radical devastation of America’s self image after Vietnam and Watergate. All of this was still in the background for those of us exploring the leading edges of possibility. We had no more idea than anyone else where all of this was headed, but were compelled to keep pushing the boundaries until they either broke or proved true. At the same time we were ignorant of the shadows encouraged by the obsessions and arrogance birthed by our quest for knowledge and power. Although we couldn’t conceive that the forward movement of consciousness toward utterly novel forms could ever be stopped, we ignored the probabilities of a counter wave that was born out of the collective sense of fear in those we thought we’d left behind.

And now we are in the thick of it. All of our civilization’s compressed apprehensions have spread like viral monsters of demonic energy that rage across the cultural landscape. We are like a nation of refugees, huddled beneath a constant bombardment of negativity, the effect of which is a sense of numb despair that turns many of us into zombies, willing to flock toward any promise given by anyone proclaiming that they know the path forward, even when they lead us away from the truth. Ironically, every act of resistance and every wall or barrier thrown up to stop the flood of change only serves to accelerate the inevitable breakup of aging structures of prejudice and pride that stand in the path of human evolution.

The universe is much bigger than the American Dream.

*Timothy Leary, Chaos and Cyber Culture, Ronin Publishing, 1994

**The book is Trialogues At The Edge Of The West, by Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake, Bear & Company, 1992.

Stretching

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I’ve in the last week picked up a copy of a book composed by Timothy Leary and associates back in 1994, two years before Leary’s death in 1996, and around the time when I was imbedded in the post-psychedelic New Age culture of art and speculation that nested in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’d actually passed by Doctor Tim in person as he toured as guest speaker and celebrity for some sort of exploratory consciousness fair that took place at the city’s main Convention Center.

I am certainly no stranger to Leary’s thought and his writings. From the time when he was advocating from an eminent platform at Harvard for boundary breaking explorations of consciousness via LSD and Psylocibn, to the time when I spent days trying to process my own headlong perceptual journeys out to the boundaries of consciousness and beyond. I travelled along parallel paths while Leary made his way through prison and exile and paranoia and the trials that came along with pop stardom and self deification.

When I walked into my dormitory room at Case Western Reserve one night, getting off on some form of chemically induced revery I heard Leary’s voice come over the radio, telling me to, “Sit down Ralph.” He then took me on a guided verbal tour of my brain, the universe and the whole history of human DNA. It turns out that the ‘Ralph’ in the recording, played that night over the student station was of Leary at Harvard conducting an LSD session with one of his grad students, Ralph Metzner. I didn’t learn this until years later, and in the meanwhile carried it around with me like the inner knowledge of some secret synchronistic initiation, a mystery for which I sought no further solution.

The book I’m reading is one I wasn’t particularly familiar with, lent to me by a friend. It’s called “Chaos & Cyber Culture.” By 1994 Leary as visionary prophet had been largely discredited by both popular and serious academic culture. He had spent time in prison, in Europe and in North Africa, in flight from the American police, hobnobbing with revolutionary elites and movie stars and science fiction writers, hounded by governments and ideologues of the Left and the Right. The 60’s dream of storming the barricades of capitalist/consumer culture had long ago faded or been absorbed and replaced by the high octane quest for new meaning and new wealth accelerated by revolutions in technology and communication.

Society was itself going through the initial stages of the sort of destabilization one encounters on an acid trip. Timothy Leary, along with many former prophets and outlaws and explorers were now mere flotsam in massively circulating currents of change. He was gone before the currents would peak and then break into fading fragments after September of 2001.

The book is a collection of words and images splattered across pages designed in the mode of a psychedelic version of The Whole Earth Catalog. There are dozens of typefaces in all sizes floating in the form of giant quotes and poster graphics and images from the past and the future. There are interviews and conversations with the likes of William Gibson and William Burroughs and David Byrne and all sorts of artifacts assembled around a political documentary and summary of sorts of Leary’s broad visions of past, present and possible future.

Other than in worlds of extreme science fiction I haven’t read anything like this in years. Drawing on history, art, mysticism, biology, psychology, computer science and literature, framed with over-the-top optimism regarding the future of civilization and human consciousness, Leary’s vision has no boundaries, and in reading I grow increasingly aware of how much my vision and that of my culture has narrowed over these past four decades. As a nation and as a world we’ve become increasingly ruled by fear and apprehension, which by nature is a narrowing of consciousness to the primitive state of flight or fight that responds robotically to a wider and wider range of stimuli.

We sit in our cocoons of political power and economic anxiety and anticipate the worst. We are a shell-shocked population with eyes and ears open to more and more information but with less ability to integrate it into something that makes sense. We live in a world of chaos, awaiting signs of the next real ‘strange attractor’ that we hope can assemble all of this mess into meaning. We’ve entered a historic and geological period where the shocks come in accelerating waves of war, recession, natural disasters and forced migrations, and our response is to reach out to the person who promises to protect us and shield us and make it all right. Increasingly we realize that the future can’t be controlled by any power wielded by the few for the supposed welfare of the many. Individually we awake once again to the knowledge that the portraits we perceive of the world around us are painted mostly by ourselves.

At first this makes us all feel incredibly alone, until we make an effort to explore and find new ways to make contact with one another, not as crowds or constituents or mobs or armies, but as fully responsible human beings. Our challenge always, is to create entirely new realities for ourselves, through our storytelling and our imagining, that are fluid and adaptable enough to deal with the constant change that our world throws at us. We have the tools to do it, and our task is to awake to our possibilities and to summon the courage to face and dismiss those who would build walls out of our fear.

To the Super Bowl

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So, this evening (Monday, Feb. 3rd) the REAL Super Bowl begins. Now that all of the Impeachment drama is coming to a close and the football drama is over for a year and we’ve watched the most expensive commercials ever made, perhaps we can get down to business of moving forward.

For the year’s total anticlimax there’s the State of The Union embarrassment taking place tomorrow, in which the Donald will…who knows what the Donald will do or say? The best approach in dealing with our Asshole in Chief is to ignore him as much as possible and go forward with our lives, using our thoughts and imaginations to conjure more palatable futures.

Rush Limbaugh is dying of lung cancer. That’ll take some of the wind out of the sails blowing toward oblivion. While Senators bloviated, the biggest news this week is that the Thwaite Glacier is getting ready to drop and could quickly raise the ocean levels by up to 3 feet. The impending drop of what scientists have dubbed the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ will only be the first of many. There goes one civilization, to be replaced by necessity with another.

I’ve spent the past three years stewing in the juices of my own anger and it has gotten me nowhere. The daily disaster has driven me to forget that the best way to observe the ongoing bombardment and spectacle of news and information is to step as far back from the sheer noise and confusion as possible. The news of the ‘moment’ is mostly made to sell personality and product rather than offering much in the way of useful information. What happens in the moment isn’t as important as our collective mediated response to it. The Reality we perceive in this digital world is of necessity always second hand.

We are each in the business of assembling a world that corresponds to our own predilections. For myself I’ve chosen to accept information primarily through online digital conversations, rather than merely accepting what is ‘broadcast.’ Avoiding antiquated mediums like television and radio or newspaper, I seriously engage with information only after it’s been processed through trusted networks of intelligence and discrimination, carefully evaluating the materials with which to assemble my own picture of the world. I’m a subscriber to reality, mostly through print and podcasts, and an occasional glance at headlines from selected inputs on Apple News or Flipboard or the front pages of newspapers.

When I encounter, as in the laundromat, televised news formats in real time I’m conscious that what I’m receiving is an agenda that has more to do with commerce than truth. This stuff, including all forms of mass public broadcast, from out and out propaganda to public radio, is safe to consume only to the degree that one is aware that every broadcaster has their own agenda. Whatever presents itself as absolute truth is only ideology.

Everyone I know who merely consumes ‘The News’ on television or radio appears to be driven crazy by it.

As a consuming culture many Americans are being consumed by cynicism, doubt and despair. The world we’ve constructed in our minds is one in continual emergency, to which we must react without being given a trusted set of tools to react with. Too many of us are swimming and drowning in a pool of helplessness where new alarms are shouting every day, “Danger! Danger!” After years of daily bombardment we are shell shocked and numb, unable to pierce the fog that obscures the future. Christians and New Agers await the Apocalypse, white supremacists look forward to their ‘boogaloo,’ conspiracy fetishists obsess over every revelation while screwing themselves into increasingly paranoid fantasies, and the rest of us deal with a growing sense of apprehension and dread.

Meanwhile, the world trundles on within webs of mind boggling complexity and we are swept along in rushing rivers of karma and consequence. So easy to imagine that we are either victims, or else we are fighting a constant war for particular outcomes. So easy for me to spew words into the void like weapons, effecting only to increase the chaos instead of offering clarity or hope.

Well, it’s a new year and I’ve been mostly silent lately, after what has felt to me like constant struggle against overwhelming odds. It’s true that there is struggle. The need for change is obvious. The change that’s needed however, can only come about through a change of channels. I’ve been paying too much attention to the idiots waving the flags, and too little time spent in a world where human beings are meant to live, one that’s woven through our minds and our imaginations, where we tell each other stories and look at dire situations as problems to be solved. This is the only kind of world where we have a chance to live beyond our fears. It’s the only world where we can construct the necessary bonds that will hold this ship together.

Let’s try something different for a change.