“Savages, Cyborgs and Saints: Premonitions of the Space Age”
Six Historical Worldviews and Scenarios of the Future
(Dan Novak, 10.22.06, for the Brandaris Group)
What will the long – or deep – future of humanity look like and feel like?
What will the intensive development of the spectrum of human temperaments, projects and cultures look like in the cosmic era (say, 3006 C. E.)?
Which philosophy best explains the fundamental changes happening in the world right now?
Which scenario of the future will best express what our world will evolve into?
The following six sketches are an incomplete attempt to describe six major alternative ways of being that promise to solidify or threaten to obliterate the human family. They project six qualitatively different interpretations of human nature. These socio-political-philosophical worldviews aren’t necessarily exclusive – but they do represent distinct and contrasting lines of evolution for the human species (or sets of subspecies). The scenarios below can be seen both as perennial possibilities, but also as intensively developed cultures -- versus merely tracing linear, chronological sequences.
They are:
I Regression to Savagery
II Empire
III Techno-Apotheosis
IV Triumph of Democracy / End of History
V Planetary Enlightenment
VI Existence as Drama: the Alternation Cosmology and the Participatory Universe
Scenario I Savagery and control
Human nature: we are heir to a multiplicity of affects -- discordant and idiosyncratic; we are actually a bundle of fundamentally incoherent and/or conflictual impulses; there is a certain tremulousness of our being, a perceived precariousness, a fearfulness and anxiety underneath everything that craves protection (protectedness), safety and security; at the same time we – or more precisely our dominant motive/affect – craves lebensraum, the desire for power, control and ascendance in whatever realm we can manage to secure and batten against the forces of disintegration of existence; we strive to continue in existence
Way of death: fearfulness and anxiety – “the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once”… the threat or actuality of sudden and violent death… the state of being terrorized or tortured… the state of repression and denial…
Classic Philosophers: Thrasymacus in Plato’s Republic: might makes right, the assertion of primal force as the final law; Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan: the savage state of man in nature without governance, the ‘war of all against all;’ de Sade: the purpose of life is the unrestricted and unrestrained assertion of my sovereign liberty, the full and absolute execution of my desires; Nietzsche: the fundamental truth of the ‘will to power’ (control) – each affect wishes to grow and hold sway; Freud’s concept or zone of the ‘id’ – the amoral realm of impulses longing to be born against the denials and repressions of the ‘real’ world, the thin veneer of civilization… Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘hell is other people’…
Contemporary Philosophers: John Gray’s Straw Dogs
Novels and Movies: The Lord of the Flies, The Heart of Darkness, the ring of power in The Ring Trilogy, “Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome” (and innumerable post-nuclear holocaust/apocalyptic films)…
Classic age or historical period: the Medieval “dark ages” of feudalism; the fascism of the Third Reich; the circumstance of atavism, war the only constant; the perpetual possibility of a major period of regression, or the chaotic confusion after a gigantic natural or man-made cataclysm; the historical and cyclic tendency toward entropy and dissolution…
Future scenario: a disintegrating, fragmented and regressive world of increasing fear and violence in which security concerns become paramount – whether in surveillance systems and in the increasingly reliance on the fiefdoms and zones of influence of apparently strong and nationalist/localist leaders… One thinks of the perpetual war scenarios described in Orwell’s 1984. Or scenarios of pervasive environmental degradation as described in James Kunstler‘s The Long Emergency… Or Robert Kaplan’s version of the onus of empire ‘the coming anarchy’… a dark age of barbarians with sophisticated weapons and a climate of intimidation… hi-tech weapons with primitive consciousness
Scenario II Totality of State Control
Human nature: we are pleasure seeking and ingenious/teachable animals with a high coefficient of gullibility or susceptibility to images and image manipulation (as with the rows of captives/captivated in Plato’s allegory of the cave incessantly arguing about the merits of flitting images); we are creatures of great docility, that is, we are eminently teachable, able to be conditioned by the predominant apparatus around us – be it social, religious, political, cultural…
Way of death: continual oblivion secured mainly through pleasure and amnesia, comforting, drug-like or cocoon-like forgetfulness; immediate satiation of all desires, death by chocolate (name your ‘poison’ or your controlling ‘soma’)…
Classic Philosophers: Plato’s Republic (?) and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in both calling for absolute control of all segments of society under the aegis of the ruling class or the absolute sovereignty of the monarchy… Not too many defenders of absolute monarchy, total state control, or the notion of the validity of Empire (maybe some Christian apologists of the Middle Ages, or maybe Rudyard Kipling’s poetry of the British Raj? Lenin/Stalin’s Communist blueprints? Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf? Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book?)… In the 1960s Herbert Marcuse pointed out the parallel systems of control exhibited by USSR propaganda and US advertising… Also formulations like the Situationalist manifesto of Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle and the massive critique of totalist political regimes in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and by untiring jeremiads and historical analyses of state/cultural disciplinary regimes given by Foucault… In recent times, the classic formulation and critique of the wedding of political and commercial hegemony by Marxians Hardt and Negri in their book, Empire… Perhaps the most mischievous critique of this libidinal and illusional nexus that governs our time is in the work of Jean Baudrillard, e.g. his Simulations…
Recent Philosopher: Canadian Kalle Lasn, in his jeremiad, Culture Jam
Novels and Films: Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, a thousand sci-fi dystopias, Fahrenheit 451, The Truman Show, The Matrix…
Classic Age or Historical Period: Historical empires of all sorts – from the Egyptian and Babylonian, to the Persian and Roman, the great European and ‘new world’ empires of the Spanish, French and British; utopian blueprints; fascisms… totalitarian fascist and communist regimes (and also the USA, despite its avowed democratic ideology, becoming the dupe of oligarchic/commercial/military interests and momentum?…) – revolutionary and charismatic societies originally celebrating freedom and liberation and by successive turns becoming militarily powerful and developing forms – intentional or unintentional – of domestic control… the way states become big and powerful and reflexively aggressive… the very tendency toward empire, toward tight unification and uniformity, toward an all embracing totality…
Future Scenario: a global monoculture, a world-wide mall, a seamless integration of corporate control over financial and commercial markets, not an intentional “empire” but guaranteed by military protection and progressively anticipatory surveillance/tracking (see “Minority Report” and GIS monitoring of your back yard)… and control of the abdicated electorate by ubiquitous entertainment empires and omni-screen virtual immersions… an immense diversity of styles amounting to a comfort-driven uniformity… an enormous circus tent or set of theme parks whose unrelenting montage of images and roars of applause mask and drown out anything that resembles pain… only pleasure and conformance are permitted…
Scenario III Accelerating Technological Convergence or Divergence
Lines of human-technology converge and combine to create an unprecedented transformation into either a new trans-human species (beyond the biological or the ‘machine’), the famed “Singularity” event, and/or eventuates in a variety of posthuman species with distinctly different futurals and destinies…
Human nature: We are what we make… Tools R Us – “homo faber” -- tools as instruments and as consequent environments are not extraneous but essential to human nature – our amplifications are us, as Marshall McLuhan continually reminded us… We have always been “amphibians” in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, inhabitants simultaneously of/in multiple worlds, or “cyborgs” in Donna Haraway’s famous locution: we have always been and are intrinsically hybrids, creatures whose cerebellums, thumbs and range of virtual extensions have provided the media of our radial/centrifugal energy… civilization has always been the glyph, the book and the screen, the spear and the probe… Every instrument, from telescope to microscope, from horse to car to rocket, has extended our consciousness and altered our space and time sense ratio, our understanding of where we are and where we were… our sensitivity and tactility is always being extended with inherent portals and perceptivities (Whitehead’s ‘prehensions’)… Our consequent ‘world’ is ever being enlarged… We are infinitely malleable, perfectible and transformable sentient beings in constant evolution and generating new domains of interactivity… technology is not synonymous with machines or the machine age but is more in the nature of evolving design, as in software… technology (our nature) may be hard in the beginning but soft in the end…
Type of Death: the rejection of death as a biological inevitability; the prospect of an indefinite prolongation of biological life; new, “improved” genetic/bio designs; downloading consciousness into other “translations” of ourselves (cloning and/or molecular patterning/transmissions, e.g. a la Star Trek ‘beamings’); “death” as techno-metamorphosis: transmogrification into the symbiotic-alien, consciousness amalgamation into strange and novel perceptions in new bionic and/or virtual media… the letting go of the familiar human… radically different posthuman cultures, real and virtual planetary dwellings and cosmic peregrinations… the never-ending project of the persistence and metamorphosis of life…
Classic Philosophers: Prometheus, the mythical titan and bringer of fire as the iconic hero of the technological quest for extension and control, of the quest for godlike freedom… Archimedes, the archetype of the mathematician-physicist-scientist-inventor, Democritus and Lucretius, the early Greek and Roman atomists who taught that all was essentially material, that the gods were figments of our imagination and that humans should not give in the emotional slavery of fear by being dupes of our own imagination… Bacon’s Novum Organum; Diderot, Voltaire and the French Encyclopedists, who piloted the Euro-Enlightenment project of the dissemination of knowledge and practical industry to improve the lot of mankind beyond enslaving monarchies, hereditary aristocracies and religious clerics; LaMettrie, author of Man, the Machine, August Comte, author of positivism and the religion of mankind; Marinetti, A Futurist Manifesto, Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner who proposed the project of a thoroughgoing scientific ‘behavioral science’… Utopian philosophers who promoted the idea of the perfectibility of mankind… Techno-utopians like Buckminster Fuller (Nine Chains to the Moon, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, etc.) who felt such perfectibility was necessary to survival as well as materially achievable… Marvin Minsky and a host of cyber/computer engineers and theorists… Donna Haraway, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; Paul Virilio, Open Sky and The Art of the Motor; Technophiles of more recent sorts like the X-Tropians and the Trans-Humanists celebrated in the journal, Mondo 2000…
Recent Advocates: Alan Harrington, The Immortalist; Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions; Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot; Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century; Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, The Singularity Is Near; Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years; Robert Zimmerman, Leaving Earth; Michael Zey, The Future Factor…
Novels and Film: Science fiction generally (starting with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, through Clarke and Asimov to Larry Niven and Doris Lessing)… utopian fiction (like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward)… novel and later film based on Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven… novel and film from Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, William Gibson’s cyber-classic Necromancer and the ‘cyberpunk fiction’ of others like Bruce Sterling; the sci-fi series by Iain Banks, The Culture…
Classical Age or Historical Period: …………………………every age?…………….
a continual historical identifying preoccupation with our products and projections, homunculi and all manner of inventions, from puppets to steam engines and cars to robots……. Marx: societies always configure around their predominant material projections which in turn become their infrastructures………… technologically defined or configured societies -- the French utopian Fourier’s socialist experiment? the ‘new man’ project Soviet Russia? a variety of Sixties’communes? the New Alchemy Institute? the international space station? online cyber-communities?
Future Scenario: Our evolution is continuing at an increasingly accelerated pace and, as we approach a collective quantum jump, we also find ourselves in possession of an array of interacting instruments and knowledge of micro-processes that give our species to keys of material creation itself… Humans will make themselves/ourselves into either subservience to the technological apotheosis of a more capable complex emergent entity (with something much more capable than one of our first babies, computer chess champ, Deep Blue) or again speciation into a surprising variety of divaricating subcultures/worlds that mirror the spectrum of human temperaments and interests…
We are living in a postmodern era defined by a matrix of intersecting technological developments, all of which in tandem threaten to empower or threaten our integrity as a species: medical/cryonic (indefinite extensions or prolongations of human lifespans), genetic design (control, design and even creation of entire life patternings and posthuman forms), nano-technology (control of matter itself!), cyber- AI, AL, robotics, virtual domains and interactivity spheres, space faring and eventual species diasphora… At the very least such developments may require major adjustments in human society… At the most, they present radical options for not only centrifugal cultures but different human evolutionary lines and futures… Humanity will take control of not only its own evolution, but of the very processes of creation itself…
It is important to emphasize that this array of techno-enabled futures is not (and never has been) mere speculation. The “future” in its archetypical reality is always active and under construction and today’s phase – the 20th and 21st centuries – is proceeding in the form of major iconic projects:
1) the physical plumbing and control of the processes of matter (“programming the universe” as information, atoms as bits, nanotechnology developments…)
2) genetic decipherment and design ( the ‘DNA Project’); more than medical or cosmetic redesigns of the human; aging patterns overcome and strategic prolongations of bio-existence; cryonic preservation/resuscitation tactically achieved…
3) experimentation and development of ‘artificial’ life patterns (the computerized, silicon based “game of life”) and ‘artificial intelligence’ combined with robotics (Kurzweil’s “spiritual machines”) that will qualitatively transcend human intelligence and action capabilities, perhaps moral capabilities as well -- since humans seem to be such poor stewards of life, what with war as a prime characteristic feature of human history… Brautigan’s telling poetic phrase, “and all watched over by machines of loving grace”…
4) the elaboration of virtual reality venues and cyber-domains of experience, moving from game-like settings and programs to holographic projections in/onto virtual ‘planets’ – though the scenes will ever be more complex and shifting, it will be discovered that the scripts of our lives have always been informed by the projections of the imagination… the dimensions of vividness and ‘depth’ will always be pursued…
5) the technologies that will permit space-flight, space-faring and space-colonization will finally be achieved as well as being commercially and scientifically exploited… space travel will entail unique encapsulations, dwelling colonies and/or different forms entirely for the human (humus=soil, earth)…new forms of “traveling,” e.g. perhaps quantum tunneling that will enable faster than light travel and will create abrupt and startling ‘appearances’ here and in sundry realms… communing with hosts of interstellar species as human mutants emerge and migrate in the ever-enlarging cosmos… perhaps the achievement of celestial or angelic status or frequency of being…
Scenario IV “The End of History” -- The Triumph of Western Rationality, Liberal Democracy and Material Progress
Human nature: We humans are creatures defined by our rationality and the overcoming of our superstitious tendencies. We thrive on free inquiry, free trade and the pursuit of happiness. The defining event of human history was the birth of Western science, the empirical scientific method and the technologies and social arrangements associated with that – our infatuation with material betterment and social progress, defined as the progress of freedom. What we are essentially is really described by the confirmed results of the latest science. If we are quarks and reflexes, so be it. If we are cognitive concatenations of neural nets and brain activity, so be it. If we are animals evolving over aeons, so be it. A likely story of human genesis is presented by astronomer Carl Sagan in his The Dragons of Eden and his Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The unbelievably large physical ‘cosmos’ is our home. There are no ‘supernatural’ forces, beings or gods – other than in our superstitious minds. Whatever our ‘raw material,’ the ethos and practice of science and untrammeled commerce really defines and completes us as human beings.
Way of death/dying: death by tedium and despair?… the same/old, same/old repetition, an unending series of limited/linear commercial fulfillments, “bad faith” in the sense that there be no broader horizon than our familiar roster of wants, needs, desires and concerns… the Kierkegaardian despair of the finite being resigned to the finite, despite hunger after the infinite… why would the question or desire of an ‘afterlife’ even arise if it were not for the condition of scarcity and want?…
Classic Philosophers: greats of early modern science and the philosophers of the European Enlightenment… Adam Smith and John Locke… Hegel as the great philosopher of the historical process… August Comte and his “positive philosophy” of the progress of science and the solidarity/welfare of mankind… socially conscious scientist evangelizers and popularizers like H. G. Wells and Carl Sagan, Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins… philosophers of science like Karl Popper… the great classical and recent economist-apologists for market capitalism, like Frederick Hayek
Recent advocates: Francis Fukuyama in his now classic, The End of History; Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies and her The Substance of Style, and Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
Novels and Films: ……… utopian depictions of a cornucopian future?
The Historical Age: The early modern era of the West has given us physical science, market capitalism as a form of commercial activity, and technology and science-based medicine. It has also given birth to the notion of freedom and the modern form of the liberal democratic state wherein all can pursue their dreams and livelihoods. Despite the major and threatening totalitarian aberrations of the last century, the triumph of modern liberal democracy seems assured – the victory of rationality over extreme irrationalities and totalitarianisms based on fear and political repression. Democracies don’t fight each other; they trade with each other! The world, despite wars and temporary setbacks is slowly but surely evolving toward the final rational plateau of peaceful commerce, individual freedom (with reasonable, consented to restrictions) and continued technological progress, aiming toward medical and eudaemonic well-being. The great cataclysms of human history will eventually terminate in a peaceful planet suffused with material contentment. If history is defined as wrenching struggles and transitions, then we will all collectively enter a period that can rightfully be called, “the end of history.”
Future Scenario: While we are experiencing turbulence now (Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea), the values and direction of Western liberal democracy (along with scientific empiricism and free market capitalism) represent the true progress of mankind. The Fukuyama thesis of the victory in the long run of the institutions of liberal democracy means that we should indeed fight to protect those values and will eventually win and usher in “the end of history.” In the end, no more need for warfare and no great crises or transitions or revolutions – only steady scientific/technology progress… the reaching of a kind of steady state and relatively satisfying plateau for mankind…
That flowering and leveling off of species material welfare will almost certainly occur, despite a bittersweet tinge – we can have it all if the all is limited and that’s all we want. A humane, global, corporate capitalism goes along with the pursuit of rationality and the liberal democratic state.
Scenario V Evolution of Consciousness and Planetary Enlightenment
Human nature: We humans are more than merely rational creatures, we are an evolving cosmic consciousness, on a continuum with the embryonic consciousness in plants and animals, even with atoms and stars! We are sentience and interconnectedness and deep ecology expresses this fact. We are starstuff becoming conscious, and evolution generally becoming conscious of itself… We represent the apex of this planet’s evolution about to experience a saltation, major jump in our collective consciousness that will enable us to become more genuine stewards and caretakers of all the beings entrusted to us and with which we fraternize…
Way of death/dying: individual/collective transformation into a higher consciousness and/or larger, more expansive identity… the dilation of our contracted being or ego-defined condition to contain the whole swath of existence… a rainbow of powers and talents emerging from pain and crisis, death and suffering… the bursting of the ego-shell or chrysalis into a butterfly-like or nectar-producing being… a psychedelic merging into a holistic and compassionate connectedness, unseparated by familiar walls and filters…
Classic Philosophers: The ‘mystery’ and esoteric traditions generally (knowledge of other worlds and realities only given to ‘spiritually’ trained and prepared adepts… Paracelsus, Bruno and Renaissance advocates of “infinite worlds”… Renaissance and early modern utopian visionaries… the English Romantic Poets… Novalis and Goethe… Hegel as the philosopher of organic process and the career of the absolute mind/spirit/consciousness as manifested in history… American Transcendentalism; the late 19th and early 20th century Theosophical Movement… Henri Bergson in his Creative Evolution, William James, and Whitehead in his Process and Reality and the process philosophers generally… Political activist turned yogi, Sri Aurobindo Ghose’s rediscovery of the Indian/Vedic tradition in his The Life Divine and his doctrine and yoga of spiritual-cosmic evolution… George Gurdjieff’s All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson…
Recent advocates: the great Jesuit paleontologist, theologian, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man and The Future of Man, The Hymn of the Universe; Douglas Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth; Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth; Satprem, The Adventure of Consciousness; the counter cultural and new age visionaries of the 1960s-70s… the movement and thinkers of “deep ecology”… Ken Goffman, Countercultures Through the Ages; Ray and Anderson, The Cultural Creatives; Duane Elgin, The Promise Ahead; Ken Wilber, The Atman Project; Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body; Joanna Macy, The World As Self, The World As Lover, David Korten, The Great Turning
Novels and Films: Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker; Aldous Huxley’s Island; A. C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia; David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus; Taoist inspired sci-fi novels of Ursula LeGuin…
Classic Age or Historical Period: rudimentary and dispersed awakenings in the “axial period” of human history (Karl Jaspers), corresponding to the birth of the great religions from about 500 B.C. to roughly 500 A.D…. esoteric spiritual societies and utopian commune movements of all sorts from ancient secret initiation brotherhoods and sisterhoods to early Christian ecstatic communities to utopian experiments of all sorts; dissident religious groups and communities; the social-political consciousness movements of the 1960s-70s from Civil Rights to Feminism to the Anti-War Protests and Peace Movement to the Psychedelic movement to the influx of the Asian wisdom and meditation traditions…
Future Scenario: We are living in the midst of a great planetary enlightenment, the flowering of consciousness in which technology will reach its maturity in providing flexible and sensitive tactility, and an almost endless supply of energy and abundance, ending aeons of scarcity and contest over limited resources… Collective moral consciousness and individual awareness will match the new seamless and luminous terrestrial-infrastructural “body” of humankind and there will be a golden age of art as humans are liberated by technology to new realms of ludic enjoyment and activity… There may be a great planetary crisis that may precipitate and be the midwife of this collective quantum leap… There will be new “octaves” or cosmic frequencies accessed by human evolution (Gurdjieff) and encounters with higher order celestial beings and/or angelic species… a hope-filled sense that we are close to a major planetary convergence, alignment and leap wherein the local and global in proper resonance and relationship…
Scenario VI Saints, Sages, and Existentialists
The participatory universe, the dramatic world, and the alternation cosmology
Human nature: We humans have the entire gamut of impulses, tendencies and ways of being from the most noble to the most savage… we contain the entire spectrum of latencies or possible ranges of behavior – that gets cultivated according to our karma and choice… we have the seed of enlightened buddhahood within us as well as the most heinous dictator and murderer… Our “nature” contains every realm or level of being… we are actually the most obtuse matter, the most amazing actual and potential energies and processes, the actuality of sage-like understanding and the possibility of universal love… As the great teachers and sages have told us, and as the great saints have exemplified, what we are is always in the balance: we are always falling asleep and into habits which easily grow vile, we are always struggling with ourselves (the great truth of the Manichean war of good and evil in our souls), we are always expressing enlightened wisdom and behavior – whether we know it or not… and we are always subject to “temptation” (and its resurrected cousin, blessing) while alive… the world’s perpetual chaos, disorder and imbalance is the continual possibility of grace… “the world” is the mandala or translation/choice of our consciousness, we create our worlds – exactly… the world always poses the “koan” or the impossible to answer need for reconciling action… awareness of drama and action in accord with our deepest nature makes us fully human…
Way of death/dying: St. Paul: ‘I die daily’… We are always the subject of incomplete deaths…. Realization is complete dying to the known and venerated (and hence complete birth or resurrection or final coming to)... the notion that we have never left home (‘been born’), that moment to moment we are in our true home, that we are not wandering “in time” as orphans, that dying to the ego and its agenda is supremely necessary (or supremely unnecessary!), that the ego (and 'other'!) is not so much to be transcended as to be seen as an artful mirage, having fewer habiliments than the proverbial emperor -- the real royalty or aristocrat being the divine heart at the center of our soul! (according to Meister Eckhart), that most deaths are postponements and perpetuations of suffering we insist on and (as say Krishnamurti and the Buddha)… we can only die right now -- or, in Sri Nisagardatta's arch phrase, "you" have never been born, so how you gonna die?! -- or, the one who is born is the one who must undergo dying...
Classic Philosophers: the great religious sages and teachers: Moses, Kung Fu Tzu, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Siddhartha the Buddha, Jesus, St. Paul, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, George Fox, Hui Neng, Huang Po, Bankei, Shankara, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Pascal, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard, Krishnamurti, Thomas Merton, Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi, St. Teresa of Avila, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, etc.… Aldous Huxley’s great compendium, The Perennial Philosophy…
Recent Advocates: Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth and his On Having No Head; Joseph Goldstein’s The Experience of Insight; Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness; James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games; Robert Thurman, Infinite Life
Novels and Films: Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in his The Republic; Dante’s Divine Comedy; Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy; Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and Magister Ludi (The Bead Game) ………all the great works of fiction! -- as explicating and unfolding the virtually infinite variations of the law of karma (given circumstance, intentional and unintentional consciousness and the net of consequences of action, suffering and transcendence...) – including and especially science fiction; all great films likewise… Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”…
Classic Age or Historical Period: the peaceful reign of the Buddhist king, Ashoka?… every age; none of them… the world will always be the world, enlightenment will always be enlightenment; “matter” and “spirit” will always be perpetual possibilities on the same spectrum; samsara and nirvana are strangely convertible… reality is always aboriginally sacred, yet has to be made sacred… there is a path, and there is no path or raft or ladder to the Highest…
Future Scenario: We are living in the world we have always lived in -- one of perennial danger and possibility that is both extensive and intensive… The nature of the world is always its being out of balance, and balance is only a transient achievement although an important one… The world always is off-center, full of tension and oppositions, always hangs in the balance awaiting determinative decision. Existential choice is the nature of this world – we always create it with our actions and their consequences. The world is unavoidably participatory and can be cultivated in innumerable ways, depending on one’s bent… Ecstasy, whether of a sexual, power, understanding or compassionate sort can always be had by cultivating the appropriate regimen and path of life. The world is filled with Sapphos, Margaret Thatchers and Mother Teresas… Polarities define the world, ironies and surds as well. Be careful about what you do because, one, you’ll achieve it, and two, your most prized work may be translated into its opposite… The world is pure discontinuity filled with a palette of beguiling patterns and absorbing incarnations…
Full realization is as available and open as it is difficult and challenging…
