Threads from a variety of sources occasionally fall happily together in one’s mind, presenting the opportunity to plait them together into a new, sometimes thrilling picture of what is or what may be.
After an extraordinary summer of intertwining literal threads, discovering old images rising from the long-ago, then encountering new information to join with them, I am busily plaiting them together to discover what this fabrication may bring.
As a budding Elder Generation, the likes of which has yet to be experienced, defined, or described, I would first like to posit the possibility that our experiences with psychedelics make up one of the strong threads in the structure of Who We Are. I acknowledge the possibility that this “We” is actually delimited by my location then and now in the larger San Francisco Bay Area and in the “counter culture” here at the western edge of the world: West Coast California.
The thought that rose up from, say 1969 more or less, was my sense that an evolutionary leap to the capacity of humans to share consciousness could bring about the love of one another and all Life that could wake us up to the Oneness of all things and therefore to the necessity of cooperating with, indeed cherishing, all things, and using our lives, our planet, and our resources for the good of the whole, for the furtherance of Life itself.
When I shared this thought with Lucky (David Goff), he kindly gave me portions of his yet unpublished and quite grand book to read. I will quote from it, after having received his permission, to describe something he knows about the very process of evolution. As you no doubt are aware, Science and Spirit are no longer at opposite ends of a continuum, but are like tendrils, long separated, that are straining toward one another, seemingly yearning to be reunited in our consciousness.
After providing the scientific background of the way holons (defined below) operate, Lucky brings us to the place of describing the human holon and how we seem to be tending toward a merging into a new state best described as “interdependence.” In defining “holon” he cites Arthur Koestler’s work: it is a “whole/part” which both needs individuality and self-definition (vertical movement) and connection (horizontally) to others in order to fit into our environment and thrive. With this combination of tensions, the urge to merge and a desire to be independent, from time to time an individual holon will strike out on its own, rising into a new strata of complexity where it must find its way to maintaining an individual function and to finding a niche in its new environment. Our bodies are made up of holons linked to cooperate with the other parts: e.g., heart, lungs, stomach, bowels, etc.
Drawing from Lucky’s chapter descriptions, he says, “The move toward a psychology of interdependence is … based upon current science, so that it is balanced (reflecting our species social nature), and responds to the very real challenges that confront us as a species. It is a project of consciousness. … [I]t focuses on … the ground of emergence … where social energies reside, energies capable of transforming relationship, communities, and our species’ interactions with Life. By focusing [here] as well as within, the doors to storehouses of human potential are unlocked. The psychology of interdependence affirms relationship, not just as something nice to be part of, but as an essential component in the evolutionary scheme of Life.
So, we see the evolutionary urge of Life working us as well as Life being an essential element of Self.
A couple of weeks ago Lucky and I found ourselves in a gathering of parapsychology elders from around the world, listening to each briefly mention the focus of their current work. Several times mentions of collective consciousness and evolution were made. After 40 years of having no one to share my thoughts of long ago, I suddenly found them reflected from many directions.
The last two threads to this complex tapestry I am weaving are contained, first in a recent experience back in my beloved psychedelic state where, without direct mentions of what we were experiencing, a new ground was established among a few folks who found old grudges being lifted as we grew into a bonded state of higher consciousness. A small but real step toward that collective dream of mine.
Second, I watched an extraordinary movie made by Werner Herzog, released in 2007,Encounters at the End of the World. I highly recommend it for several reasons and for enjoyment on multiple levels. The beauty of the Antarctic life under several feet of solid ice in all its other-worldly landscape is breathtakingly stunning. The conversations with people working there to unravel mysteries of their own nature and mysteries of Nature herself are fascinating. Their discoveries are breathtaking as well. The one that moved me most deeply is the on-camera acknowledgement of the immensity of the discovery one biologist made as he was completing his research project: he took a petri dish of identical single-celled (or possibly simple multi-celled) entities, watching their behavior, when overnight two separate kinds of entities were created within it. Onscreen one watched the cells combining, flocking to a matrix where they were becoming something entirely new! This was Life performing its magic before our eyes; never before witnessed.
So, Life will have its way with us. We will (very quickly) learn to evolve into something that can live in harmony with our environment or we will be discarded as one of Life’s beautiful but failed experiments. Because of the precious consciousness that we have acquired, giving Life the opportunity to see itself and speak to itself, I pray that sufficient numbers of us become capable of that great evolutionary leap into conscious cooperative interdependence that may allow us to continue, on those rare transcendent moments, to experience the Mystery at the Edge of Consciousness.
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