Supramental consciousness

Spirit of Storm, Hurricane of the World

by longsword on Thu 24 Nov 2005 12:03 PM CST Permanent Link Cosmos

The First World War occurred because a dying age did not know how to end itself in time. Not knowing how to end itself in time, it took the only option open to it -- fire, violence, conflagration, and twilight of the gods. A French general at the time, upon hearing that war had broken out, intuited its meaning and called it "suicide of Europe". He was almost right. It was really the suicide of the Modern Age.

The Second World War was only a continuation of this process of Modernity's self-annihilation. All the "sterling" values of the Victorian Age, the Modern Age, were swept away in an orgy of nihilism. All its contradictions collided, not to produce a new "synthesis", but like the meeting of matter and anti-matter, annihilating each other. It was, in some respects, a mediocre age in any case. Warning signs had not been lacking.

• Samuel Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens had mapped its hypocrisies and its disintegration and decadence well before the war.
• Nietzsche, however, presciently forecast what had to come as its fate -- the result of a culture unable to sustain itself or its contradictions.
• And Yeats wrote his great poem "The Second Coming" at the conclusion of the Great War in recognition of this fact: that the era of the First Coming, the Christian Era, Christendom, was finished. The Great War was only "two thousand years vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle".

Only the lifeless corpses and the dead forms of its passing remain in the guise of our contemporary institutions, like zombies who also do not know how to die at the right time. It is called "whipping dead horses". Only now, in hindsight, can we recognise the meaning of the early years of the last century. The sins of the Fathers are visited down to the third and fourth generations. We, who are of the third and fourth generations, are at the tail end of this process of Modernity's exhaustion and self-annihilation.

Even as this Spirit of Storm and this Hurricane of the World rages through the age at this "End of History", other forces have been slowly gathering strength, completely overlooked by Fukuyama, amongst others. The period immediately preceding and following the First World War are distinguished also by the gradual emergence of a new consciousness. It marks, for example, the ascendency of Nietzsche's life philosophy with its antipathy to "modern ideas" and its contempt for the bigotry of the single "point of view", which comes also to expression in the art of Pablo Picasso with his "cubist" deconstruction of perspectival consciousness.

With the emergence of quantum theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Einsteinian relativity theory, it also marks the end of the hegemony of "classical physics", of Newtonian "single vision", and of the Cartesian "cogito". Carl Jung stunned his classically trained peers with his notion (regretable in some ways) of a "collective unconscious". Today, in every field of scientific endeavour, paradox and indeterminacy is the rule of the realm. The very phrase "classical" is a judgement on the Newton-Cartesian paradigm's growing impertinence for our self-understanding or for organising our consciousness of reality.

In every field of young endeavour we see the collapse of what Blake called the "single vision". Yet the habits and defects of thought and an institutionalised false consciousness persist as dead formula and empty dogma and ritual -- even as neoliberalism, neosocialism, neoconservatism and, yes, environmental neo-primitivism. John Zerzan's neo-paganism is as much the child of a dying age as Adam Smith, Rene Descartes, or Karl Marx. I also count it as profoundly significant that recently, in Britian, William Blake's unflattering caricature of Sir Isaac Newton was selected as the model for a sculpture of the great man that now stands outside a new Museum of Science and Technology. The new scientist, apparently, has a sense of humour and a touch for the ironic.

What unites these new forces is a holistic vision of reality, still in formation, as a transcendence of the limitations of perspectivism, the single vision, and the purely analytical mode of consciousness. Likewise all fundamentalisms (economism, "globalisation", scientism, religionism, modernism) which are also dead formula and hollow dogma, and which confuse totality for wholism. This is not to say anything new. Many have already realised this. Jean Gebser called the new global consciousness "aperspectival consciousness" or "integral consciousness" (also, Haridas Chaudhuri). Aurobindo called it "Supramental" consciousness. Nietzsche knew it as the mode of consciousness realisation of the overman. Others have called it "holistic consciousness" (Willis Harmon), "global consciousness", "ecological mind", "ecodynamic consciousness" (Rosenstock-Huessy), transhumanism, and so on. It goes by many names. In broad theme, holistic consciousness is ecological (which is something more than simply "environmentalism").

I will never tire of warning against this absolutely worst form of confusion, that of taking "total" and "whole" as being synonymous, since the first is a justification for all fundamentalisms and totalitarianisms. One should not confuse what are the remnants of a dead and dying age with what is vital and is a real principle of renewal and transformation. The dominant trend today is still fatalistic and nihilist, and it often misleads the unvigilant into evolutionary dead ends. Suspicion and mistrust of anything that claims itself "new" and "revolutionary", such as the "neo" ideologues and "new age" and all old growth that smothers out new growth, is still warranted.

I advocate only mindfulness. The delusions, the hypocrisies, the propagandas, and the mendacities of our time is sometimes beyond belief, amounting to no more than shadows without substance and the weight of a dead hand. We need no more evidence that the old mode of consciousness has become a force for death, decay, annihilation and self-annihilation in the world than to know that more people died from war in the last century than in all previous wars of history combined, that we are now precipitating the sixth extinction event, that our environment is dying. With our own eyes and ears we see this. And seeing this, it is hard for us not to conclude that this catastrophe is linked to a mode of consciousness that has become deficient and false in its expression, that no longer even understands the difference between what is living and what dead, or what is good and what evil.

Yet, it is this same spirit that the great physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised when he witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and recalling the words of the Hindu god Vishnu, recited to himself "Now, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds". Keywords: Transmodern, Transhumanism, Spirit, Reality, Nihilism, Nietzsche, Modernity, Ideology, Fukuyama, Consciousness, Blake, Aurobindo posted by hope2endure at 11:18 AM