Thor Among the Giants. XIII: A Good Old Story

What then, might be a good story for a nascent noosphere? Call it a religion of the future. Today’s belief systems come out of the customs of particular tribes and islands, each trying to tell the same essential story of love’s triumph, whether it’s Christ’s resurrection, Rama’s re-emergence as king, or Buddha’s arrival in nirvana. The religion of the future will forgo the squabbles of creeds and dogmas and get straight to the business of love-spreading, because religion needs to be less about “I’m the only one who’s right,” and much more like going to the bakery. In the bakery you would never scorn the warm, freshly baked olive bread because you are a pastries person, committed only to eclairs and cannolis; or even worse, because you are a member of the chocolate sect, you would not tragically deny yourself (and your friends) the wonders of flan or apple squares.  As Sonam said, we all have to live together, so why should the practice of love be about proving each other wrong, when we could all be dancing together in the garden of delight? Teilhard de Chardin sees the formation of this kind of new kind of religion as not just us being nicer to each other, but as a crucial leap in evolution:

 “And now, like a germ of life in the dimensions of the planet, the thinking layer is developing and intertwining its fibres over the whole expanse, not to blend and to neutralize them, but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

 I positively see no other coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of facts, except by interpreting the “superarrangement” that all thinking elements of the earth find themselves subject to today, individually and collectively, in the sense of a gigantic psychological operations – as a kind of megasynthesis…”

                                                                        The Human Phenomenon

 An average human is a synthesis of around 32 trillion cells, all cooperating in some massive way so that, in this particular case, Brian Murphy can amble down the street in the morning and wonder if he should have a scone with his latte or stick to the diet. The megasynthesis that de Chardin proposes is that a planetful of Murphy-like beings will coalesce into a new organism, not of matter, but of consciousness, and having evolved so mightily, may be less preoccupied with lattes than some of its potential constituents are today. Just as my cells, if they know what is good for them, do not go shooting off in their own selfish direction, de Chardin says that the global synthesis is only going to happen if our old, isolationist ways are overwhelmed by billions of friendly and cooperative selves. De Chardin would agree that creating such a megasynthesis is super-challenging, but the pressure of evolution towards greater and greater complexity is always behind us, pushing towards some next stage; not only that, we have done this before, remember, when we moved from being single-cell creatures chasing each other in ponds, into the modern day latte drinker, staring into his cup:

 “But if this is truly what is happening, what more do we need to recognize the vital error hidden in every doctrine of isolation?

 False and contrary to nature is the ego-centric ideal of a future reserved for those who have known egotistically how to reach the extreme of “everyone for himself.” No element can move or grow unless with and by means of all the others as well as itself.

 …The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead for some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth...”

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 All together now! They say it takes a village, but it will take a whole planet for us to open our lungs to the first gulps of a noospheric atmosphere. Enticing as it sounds, or scary as it sounds, life in the noosphere promises to be much more genuine and nakedly real than it is today. Karl Rahner, a twentieth century mystic, said that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all,” and if you drop the Christian part and extrapolate what he says to all of us, then we will each have the task, the joy, of bringing our own inner mystic to life – just as we do every night, when we improvise extended dreams and dramas onto the blank screen of our sleeping brains. And the other time we reliably go there is when we take a psychedelic, encountering voices and impressions that come from the beyond or from the within, or from some weird and fuzzy fusion of the two. This mystic element could put us on an education program for entering – and staying in – the next phase of consciousness. You might think of each psychedelic journey as a sneak preview of our collective homecoming, one that could become a non-sneak, completely deserved preview, if we do our meditation and regularly perform our yoga practices.    

 In the past, contemplatives and mystics went off to the desert, or the monastery, or some other hard to reach place, to practice pretty much in isolation, but today’s – and probably tomorrow’s – chemically-based mystics won’t generally have the ‘luxury’ of such self-denial – we will be at work or at school shortly after, back in the mix of life. Thomas Merton believed that contemplatives, whether they are alone in their cell or in the mix of life, already put a secret positive pressure on the world, which is an appealing idea, and when we have mass mysticism, maybe that pressure will be all the more tangible, as we try to move up a vibrational notch together. The “self-healing” that we do today to improve our personal mental health is the starting block to an “us-healing,” where we might work with others in mind, as much as ourselves. Right wing people probably called it right when they said medical marijuana was the thin end of the (weed) wedge, while psychedelics might be the thin end of a more communal, noospheric wedge.

 Do you ever remember – I certainly do – being told as a kid that the meanness or rough treatment that an adult was dishing out to you was for your own good because it would prepare you for the far rougher grown-up world ahead? I always wanted to tell my elders, but was usually smart enough not to, “The world is only such a rough place because there’s too many idiots like you in it.” Ladakh is a rough place too, as far as the conveniences and amenities of life are concerned, but in the ways people treat one another it seems to be a blissful little peek into a communal and trustworthy human condition.  For the rest of us though, there is this stinky cosmic sludge that has accumulated in our karmic basement over thousands of years: the violence, despair and small-mindedness that has been generating all these Pebble-produced Hells we have been mistakenly residing in. And as each individual does their own psychedelic exorcisms, they are shoveling away a little bit of that collective shit. Maybe that is part of the reason why, after an exhausting trip where you seem to have purged away three person’s worth of trauma, a few days later more sludge seems to have slurped in, ripe for the processing. It could be that each personal basement has secret passages leading to a collective warehouse, meaning, among other things, that when I get well for me, I am getting well for everybody. On the psychological level we are enmeshed in a sort of codependent relationship with the world, such as when our good mood is spoiled by other people’s bad driving, or when we wait for the rest of the world to politely do the right thing before we can be at peace. Un-enmeshing ourselves, getting less attached in Buddhists language is, I believe, the very evolution that de Chardin is talking about. Thomas Merton describes this in the language of his particular tribe and quite large island:

 “I will have more joy in heaven and in the contemplation of God, if you are also there to share it with me; and the more of us there will be to share it the greater will be the joy of all. For contemplation is not ultimately perfect unless it is shared. We do not finally taste the full exultation of God’s glory until we share His infinite gift of it by overflowing and transmitting glory all over heaven, and seeing God in all the others who are there. And knowing that He is the Life of all of us and that we are all One in Him.”

                                                                        New Seeds of Contemplation

 For many of us today, who have no religion or found their religion to be an empty stocking on Christmas morning, it was psychedelics that opened us up to the kind of joy that Merton describes, or at least gave us a tantalizing whiff of it. One thing that psychedelics have is a capacity to burrow so deeply into our psyche that we reach down to, or sometimes below, the place where the original story of smallness and shame was imbibed and accepted. Part of a mushroom’s magic, after all, is the glimpse it gives us of world upon world beyond our own, and how our inner landscapes are much more conditional and malleable than we ever considered. Wishing doesn’t make things so, but the act of sending our wishes into the remoter corners of our being appears to give our good thoughts more of a hearing than we usually assume. Human selfishness and folly are just one lifestyle, a story we habitually choose to stick into the foreground of existence, forgetting that more interesting narratives are available in the library of being. 

 Our current story of globalization, endless growth and, in de Chardin’s words, “everyone for himself,” remains compelling to the self that functions on the twin poles of acquisition and safety; but the whole equation changes once the shotgun of an ecological endgame is held firmly to our heads. True, the billionaires are already building their bunkers and fortresses in case we enter a Mad Max world, but let’s hope this is their Plan B, and Plan A is still about saving the planet in some kind of a recognizable form. In fact, the increasing extremity of our situation may be the booster rocket we need to propel us out of our comfort zone of conflict and mistrust and into the unfamiliar territory of super-cooperation. It’s Utopia or bust for us – either a difficult birth into a startling future, or the train wreck we call end-stage capitalism. If we don’t do this quantum leap of faith into the noosphere, if we succumb to our own dumb story of human smallness – well, evolution can be patient and wait until the octopi, or some other sufficiently sentient being, comes along to give it their try.

 The unchangeable truth is that the ecstatic experience gives better value for effort than sipping white wine on your McMansion porch or getting drunk on power: it’s more fun. Having more fun, we become more like the Ladakhis, and in doing that we forgo our selfish pleasures for a more fully expressive life. A lot more fun or vicious self-destruction – which will it be Humanity? Humanity ponders hard, scratches its head and finally says, “Oh, I think I’ll take the fun please.” Phew! At least we hope that’s how it goes. But what would the daily life of this fun future look like? Perhaps on the outside, oddly enough, it might not be so different. A bit more tree-hugging perhaps, more spontaneous clouds-gazing in public places, but as for daily life, it may be that we do many of the same things, but be very different as we are doing them. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”

 Activities like dancing, singing, healing and discovering will be at the centre of our social life rather than being shunted off into a category called “the arts” where professionals perform them for us; we would be playing music together instead of having one person in front of their adoring fans; growing our own vegetables and putting on dramatic productions instead of sitting at home with Netflix and a bag of Doritos; creating our own ceremonies with the people we love, more than going to church and listening to the sermon. We would be like the Ladakhis, making meaning in our feasts, parties, and conversations; the noosphere would coalesce into focus by us having a damn good time, and our lifestyle would accommodate to ecstasy instead of luxury.

 The Stoic philosopher Seneca said this about the somewhat Pebbly lifestyle his Roman colleagues were living:

 “It is not that we have such a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is – the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.”

                                                                        On the Shortness of Life

 For Seneca this waste takes place when we spent our time on our business cares, societal aspirations and our carefully curated social masks. Reserve some time for yourself he says, but then he points out that even time alone may be frittered away in “busy idleness” instead of genuine leisure, which, he suggests, would be largely composed of quiet contemplations and philosophical discussions with your learned friends. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn describes the direct experience of this state of presence better than Seneca, when he says in a YouTube talk:

 “Your inbreath is not a fight, an act of fighting. Your inbreath is an expression of arrival, I have arrived. I don’t need to run. And if your inbreath is like that it has the power of healing. It is possible to live every moment of our daily life in such a way that every moment becomes a moment of healing.”

                                                                                                Stop Running

 Now that’s noosphere talk for you! Thich Nhat Hahn proposes inhabiting the world in a way that is totally different to the norm. In walking in a garden or down the street, he is “arriving” into a noospheric state of being, arriving in every moment. Seneca puts it to us that without this level of being we are not living up to ourselves, that “the part of life we really live is small,” where we “lose the day in expectation of the night and the night in fear of the dawn.” He compares our present selves with a more noospheric (okay, Stoic) way of being that is there to be achieved:

 “Decrepit old men beg in their prayers for the addition of a few more years; they pretend that they are younger than they are; they comfort themselves with a falsehood, and are as pleased to deceive themselves as if they deceived Fate at the same time. But when at last some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, in what terror do they die, feeling that they are being dragged out of life, and not merely leaving it…But for those whose life is passed remote from all business, why should it not be ample? None of it is assigned to another, none of it is scattered in this direction or that, none of it is committed to Fortune, none of it perishes from neglect, none is subtracted by wasteful giving, none of it is unused; the whole of it, so to speak, yields income. And so, however small the amount of it, it is abundantly sufficient, and therefore, whenever his last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step.”

 In Seneca’s world this sage-like person has developed the wisdom, fortitude and presence of a Buddha nature, a noospheric self. Once we have figured out that decorating ourselves with expensive shoes, bags, other accessories, fancy houses and so on, is slightly childish and certainly beside the point, we can get on with the business of being, which in itself is a kind of worship. William Blake, in his accustomed theatrical fashion, puts it all very apocalyptically:

 “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”

                                                                        The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The cherub with the flaming sword guards the tree of life in the garden of Eden, so when he leaves his post humans can re-enter Eden, and restore ourselves to the state of innocence and completeness, not by becoming child-like again, but by cutting away the accretions of conventional life and habitual thinking. Blake compares this to the printer’s task of cutting into metallic blocks with acid and leaving the visual image of the artist (i.e. himself) apparent. On the human level this is done, as Thich Nhat Hahn said, by becoming present to ourselves. To Blake, this state of presence comes through deeply noticing our perceptions, so that the world we now see as “finite and corrupt” will appear in a more coherent form as “infinite and holy.”

 This is uncannily close to the tripper’s experience of seeing the vibrant life in everyday things, and of experiencing the world as “all connected,” “all one,” “alive,” and so on. When we trip we have the chance to peer into an infinity Blake celebrated long ago. This happens through “an improvement of sensual enjoyment,” which, no, doesn’t just mean having better sex, but to “arrive” in front of our sensory perceptions and enjoy them, and through this realize that infinity has always been hiding in plain sight. It is we who were too distracted to see it. If the noosphere of the future is a new religion, then the only false ideologies are the ones that prevents us from arriving to the fullness of our being. The lines that follow in Blake’s work are among his most famous, but they don’t make much sense if you haven’t read the ones that come before:

 “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

 Nothing really stands in the way of us doing this spiritual clean-up job, and the most interesting thing about our personal healing is that it is one iteration of a collective move to chip away at the rubble round human perception, where we can get ourselves out of this collective cavern. Eventually though, once free, we would feel sorry for people back in those crazy old days when money-making and one-upmanship were regarded as virile sports of the realist, and no one thought twice about masking their true self while out in public. Noosphere us would see that in our silly Pebblyness, we had been magicking a Hell out of nothing tangible at all, and that these virile sports were not sports at all, but simply a loss of nerve in the face of a naked encounter with the divine. The fascination with winning and losing is all that is left for the desperate soul after it has starved itself of the wellsprings of Imagination. Abuse, trauma, emotional violence, are the extreme end of the scale of what we are doing to ourselves all the time, when we close ourselves into our Pebbly Cavern. Noospheric us will notice that like the Ladakhis, joy is our birthright, confidence our human given, and that a plain old garden and the Garden of Delights are one and the same. And, as in the Arabian Nights, there is always another story to tell.