Fixing the Problems of Our World
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10. The real test in 2006 Lebanon is not Jews and Muslims, is not Hezbollah versus the Israeli military establishment, is not by proxy neocons against mullahs, is not even war and truce, is not (sorry, folks) whether we are headed toward smuggled nuclear bombs and Armageddon or an international peace-keeping force. It is not even finally a debate between the unconscionable Hezbollah use of human shields and the Israeli carpet-bombing of civilians. It is nothing less than a test of what lies at the heart of this species, the human experiment. Are we good or are we bad?
Wars are collective acts of hysteria against the “other,” attempts to change physics by razing forces in opposition to one’s own agendas and desires. In the end, however, they generate karma and establish the direction and fate of everyone and everything on the planet.
Peace now doesn’t mean just—stop fighting and plan the next ambush, or seethe and plot in your corner. It means peace at the core, something that never goes away.
Achieve real peace in your heart as opposed to slogans that ignore the source of all discord. If we elevate rhetoric over action, Lenin is as much of a pacifist as Gandhi.
Those most stridently pro-peace or pro-animal rights often express the same hostility as the war-makers. Those who are pro-God and pro-life are unwitting agents of the one they vilify as Satan. Their God becomes the henchman and lackey of their terror of the darkness in their own hearts, in all our hearts, the shadow that the entire material creation was breathed into being to address.
What is passing for religion in most of the Earth now is its opposite: xenophobia and road rage.
11. We must begin to utilize nonlinear paraphysical energies on their native planes—the mental, the psychic, the psychokinetic, the radionic—in sum, the noosphere. Civilization is already—though few recognize it—a creation of pure mind employing raw molecules to erect a phantasm, to embody an ancient and archetypal dream. It is also, of course, on a secular level an incremental, digital tinker-toy hoisted by lineages of Stone Age masons and potters, imparting their collective blueprints to guilds of chemists, physicists and engineers. But that doesn’t mean that it is not a projection of mind into matter, a predisposition of atoms to the collective brunt of mentation.
The city and civilization of today are the unconscious realization of the Paleolithic shaman’s deepest magic, the blind projection of his most fervent desires, the invocation of his ghosts into concrete forms.
It was a long time coming, but he took a very long breath and quaffed out a profound conjury. As he exorcised the beast, he put a spell on all society to follow. But he did not get the heart of the beast; he did not even fathom it beating inside his ceremony. That is the work left for the shamans of today: to complete his task. A major part has been done; the city has been realized, and we dwell in it.
What we conjure now will be the planet of tomorrow.
Depending on human intention and invocation, anything could still happen—anything.
If we put as much attention into mindedness and breath as we do into machines and metals, then we could transcend technology and—slowly but surely like cell colonies over the next million or so years—become creatures of light and love. We could finish the shamanic work.
In simple terms, the wish of Stone Age man and woman was this: give me a method for turning signs into functions (that would be machines) and utensils with which to tame nature, to protect me from storms and cold and beasts, to feed me too.
They dreamed shamelessly, without (of course) knowing it, of factories of steel and apartments of stone; of marts packed with fruits and fishes and cloaks and blades; of self-propelling carts to penetrate the incalculable forests as well as tractors and shovels to make trails through their brush and mow it down; of vessels to traverse horizonless waters; of wings to ascend to the realm of the hawk. What we have are the unknowable shapes behind sorcerer’s dreams, the templates driving primeval tribes and life and Earth itself.
It was the destiny of Stone Age hunters to have children who would have children who would realize these totems, who would wrench them out of absolute darkness by their lives, generation through generation, until now, at the pinnacle of the age of materialism, we inhabit fully the planet of the wizard and minx.
There is another dream, as obscure in us as the dream of the city was for Pleistocene man and woman. We can no more intuit it concretely than a Stone Age seer and hunter could imagine an apartment building or jet engine, but we know as well as we know anything that there is something, something different from this, at the bottom of our bottomless dreams, that there are objects, realizable forms, ways of living, on the other side of the abyss. In the tragic vividness of what we see before us, we know only that there is an other.
We will have our children, and they will have theirs and, though they will suffer as ancient peoples did, through seemingly fruitless congresses and meditations they will gradually give birth to our obscurities, and it will be as vast and unforeseeable a civilization as this one. It will be made of light and empathy and telekinesis.
But the purifying jihad of the Vandals apparently comes first.
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