Monitoring the Collective

Beware the Military/Industrial/Fundamentalist Religion Complex. If you put your faith in patriarchal systems, your spirit may sink like a rock in polluted waters. Obviously, if you are using an oracle like this, you probably don’t have much faith in such systems anyway. But the danger they can generate still surrounds us. As Yeats wrote in his poem “The Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” If you are not part of the patriarchal complex then you need to have some passionate intensity to offset its machinations. Stay informed and find the area where you can most effectively oppose oppressive power systems. Sometimes the best opposition is indirect. The I Ching counsels that you only sharpen the fangs of evil when you resist it, and that the best rebellion from darkness is to make energetic progress toward the good. While I think that’s often the best strategy, as a dynamic paradoxicalist (see Dynamic Paradoxicalism — the Anti-Ism Ism) I am against absolutist positions, and think some virulent cases of evil — the Nazis come to mind — do require direct opposition. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” said [...]

Pay attention to world events. On the morning of September 11th I awoke from a disturbing dream. I was on a ship that was on fire. The Captain was dying of a heart attack and some young people, former students I had taught in New York, were asking me for help. Since I taught in New York for 14 years, the odds are that some of my former students died on 9/11. When I woke up, still having heard nothing of the tragedy, but disturbed by the dream, I picked a card from the Zap Oracle and got this one, which was already captioned, “Pay Attention to World Events.” It is one thing to consciously abstain from fear-based news media; it is quite another to be ignorant of the world out of laziness and neglect. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” If you are not paying attention to world events, you are not being vigilant. Another rationalization people commonly use to excuse their inattention to current events: “The media is all corporate-controlled propaganda.” There are plenty of non corporate-controlled news sources out there, some of them excellent. But in my experience, those who scorn the [...]

This collage, Storming the Empire, made in 1986, seems uncannily prophetic of 9/11. The destructive energy of the collective is not merely active when something dramatic and newsworthy is happening. It is there all the time as a major theme in the zeitgeist, refractted as a moment of road rage here, a destructive impulse there, as a force we can find in ourselves and in others close to us, as well as in the dark machinations of governments, religious ideologies and other dark forces that coalesce to manipulate civilization. But these forces have their purpose in the great design, just as the word “apocalypse” originally meant a revelation to humanity by a divine agency.

The world is in a constant state of change. The change could be geologic, environmental, political, economic, or evolutionary. Perhaps the change could be to your world in particular, your outer circumstances, or the configuration of elements within you. While nothing visible is changing dramatically in the outer world it is possible to have recognitions, intuitions or visions powerful enough that you can feel the shift of your inner tectonic plates.

The individualized mutant will tend to view collective energy and what Jung called “mass man” with disdain and irritation. I have certainly been guilty of this. It is so easy to be annoyed or even horrified by the bustling, buzzing, acting-out energy of mass humanity. Mass man is composed of people who don’t really know themselves, or their moment in history, and yet seem to be completely defined by the present era. They are person-shaped creatures who seem to be living stereotypes. They aggregate together and produce much sound and fury signifying nothing. And yet they are as much a part of nature as stars, trees or viruses. They are part of the cosmic design and must be accepted as such. Like many natural forces, they can be extremely dangerous. Easily manipulated, mass man has been used to create many of the bloody tsunamis of history. More often mass man is merely mundane and a somewhat appalling spectacle to those of individualized consciousness. The mutant must, of course, be alert to the many dangers and hazards created by mass man. You don’t want to get trampled by a mob, and so it is best to keep your distance. When traveling [...]

Get out there and see what is happening in the world. Sometimes the conscious mutant will tend to withdraw from the blooming, buzzing madness of collective energy. It is also easy to fall into an attitude of sarcastic disdain towards the often grotesque and toxic goings on. But we need to know what is happening in our world. What is the state of the present zeitgeist? What is happening locally and globally? Some people feel justified in not knowing about current events. They assert, with some legitimacy, that the news is so often negative and ruled by the “if it bleeds it leads” principle of infotainment. While this is true of many news sources, it does not excuse the obligation of every capable citizen to be as informed as possible about what is happening. While the internet is currently bankrupting newspapers and defunding rigorous journalism, it also makes available many new, non-mainstream sources of information. Even better than seeking out news sources is for you to be your own journalist and visiting anthropologist. The view from the street is irreplaceable if you really want to know what is going on. Some hardcore right-wingers are sure that the U.S. is better [...]

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” said Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce’s literary alter ego). Although we are presently incarnated within the Babylon Matrix, the approximately six-thousand-year period characterized by patriarchal, dominator societies (See social historian Riane Eisler’s seminal work: The Chalice and the Blade ), we may also be on the cusp of a new aeon when the age of nightmare empires metamorphoses into something new (see: The Mutant versus the Machine…).