As I press to get a response from academia concerning the possibility that the world could be a mental construct, I am not finding any great misgivings with or resistance to this concept. But before entering into any substantive discussion of the issue, my correspondents would like some reassurance that it would not be a waste of time.

One apparent consensus is that the long-standing equilibrium between science, religion and mysticism while subject to historical vicissitudes is sufficiently robust and flexible that it does not mandate any significant new concern on our part. There could be, for instance, a considerable additional intellectual shift from materialism to immaterialism without requiring or causing any great disturbance to the social fabric. Whether the shift to immaterialism might be personally beneficial or not, it is not going to have any great impact on the conduct of business as usual, or on the world itself.

I disagree. This negative assessment begs the whole issue. It is based on the materialist presumption that ideas do not matter. If the world is an idea, and largely our own idea at that, then clearly our ideas have mattered and will matter. I cannot predict the threshold or point of no return, beyond which a global mind change will begin to manifest, nor can I predict how it will manifest, but I do predict that we are about to find out. We are the guinea pigs in the cosmic experiment.

The only real problem facing a metaphysical activist like myself is the age-old problem of the chicken and the egg. At this point we have neither one, so how does one jump-start this inversion of our paradigm? There is only one simple answer to this difficult question -- in a word -- opportunism. Persistence and luck become synergy and charisma. That is our only bootstrap to the global transformation. There is of necessity a "quantum barrier" to this transformation through which we will learn to "tunnel."

Opportunism is another word for faith. The traditional religious answer to our predicament is to wait and pray for divine intervention. Ok, it's just that some of us have unusual forms of prayer. Only one question remains. Can we afford to forego this experiment?

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rev. 2/5/98