The remaining time allotted for us to continue participating in the experiential realm that we regard as our particular, isolated world is disappearing rapidly. We are being pushed and pulled into a greatly expanded experiential order, which would include the experiential realms of other intelligences. Even considering the shock of the cultural encounters of several centuries ago, we have not participated in anything comparable to this since the prehistoric era.
What has been our 'normal' experience for the duration of our recorded history is, from this larger perspective, exceptional. Through our various spiritual traditions we have attempted to explain our situation to ourselves, with obviously limited success.
What we can see in our history is primarily the story of our fascination and then our increasingly skillful engagement with the 'physical' world, culminating in a global technostructure supported by the belief system of scientific modernism. All of this has been directed to the extreme cultivation of our individualistic, microcosmic consciousnesses. Now for the harvest?
Not quite. Despite our own 'physical' mortality and the occasional cosmic drama, there is a necessary underlying continuity to all aspects of experience. We are about to participate in one of those dramas in which the prospective discontinuities will be seen in retrospect to have been relatively superficial. This is not to discount the actual trauma and suffering that can attend such events. The minimizing of those effects will be our best motivation and guide toward making the best possible cosmic transition.
But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. Back in the present of 1996 we can barely distinguish the clouds forming on the horizon. It is one of the smallest clouds which ought to be getting our attention now. As a precedent, a few decades ago the philosophical community quietly acknowledged that analysis could never provide a complete explanation of the world. By present trends, in the next few years there will be a more difficult to ignored acknowledgment by the scientific community that a similar attempt at the complete analysis of the mind is logically doomed to failure. Relative to all the other global developments that should concern us, this might rank as one of the most obscure, and so it would remain were it not for the fact that our scientific modernism happens to be a conceptual house of cards, or a set of dominoes.
Let us examine the critical dominoes. The unanalyzable nature of consciousness will be seen to entail its non-physicality. Its non-physicality means that our ability to experience a 'physical' world could not be an accidental or even an evolved attribute of such a reality. At this point we might be tempted to recapitulate the Cartesian cosmology. According to Descartes there were two created orders, spiritual and physical, inhabited by us creatures. The creator is kept rather busy maintaining the harmony of these two spheres of existence.
In the nearly four hundred years that have intervened, the intricate conceptual unity of the experiential realm has become better appreciated, significantly through the efforts of science. It is now impossible for us to return to Descartes' simplistic and ironically anti-rational view of the world.
Our alternative is to postulate the existence of just one 'substance:' experience. The apparent naturalistic order of our world is a tribute to the one inherent attribute of experience, its impressive and unlimited potential for self-organization and expression. In our normal, waking state we do not consciously participate in these potentialities that constitute the cosmic spirit.
It is in the natural order of things that this spirit should be both self-concealing and self-revealing. Its self-concealment has characterized our recorded history. Its revelation signals the logical end of that history. A fear of God is a perfectly natural reaction to millennia of superficial absence. That our temporary spiritual blindness should be spontaneously overcome largely through our own conceptual and creative power, is as it should be. If I can contribute to this process of revelation, then so can we all.
Dan T. Smith, Baltimore, MD