By Daniel Mirante
The concept of man as robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioral engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising propaganda; the expanding economy of the affluent society could not subsist without such manipulation…. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots, buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product. L. Von Bertalanffy
Culture is Nature
Culture is Nature. It comes through us and is as natural as blades of grass in a field. Seen from this perspective, as from aeroplane, the city is as beautiful and natural a vision as the facets of a jeweled ammonite.
The uncountable interactions on every street, every moment, make the city a natural system of staggering complexity. City networks grow like organisms, emergent crystalline growths, stocks and shares, fluid transactions. Ecologies of corporations, non-linear trans-national octopi devouring each other in the economic system.
Amidst this vast and hyper-complex sprawl of re-configured stone and glass, flows the 0′s and 1′s from which it emerged : Us.
The skyscrapers and teeming valleys become illuminated by the rising sun, reflecting off wet stone and glass. Now the circuitry of the city looks like a nest of golden crystals. These gigantic skyscrapers, bustling streets, everything, are forms of emptiness, of ancient vibrational energy in a state of continual renewal. Time is nothing but the transformation of this energy.
We humans are timeless life forms in an infinite universe beyond comprehension, flame-like vortices of consciousness in a mysterious cosmos that vastly predates the language we use to describe it. The human race has a future of eternally receding mystery ahead of us. Everything that is known, subject and object, is the big bang, the universe manifesting into infinite patterns.
We are told in this scientific fable of ‘the Big Bang’, a blazing forth of supernal light, into something deeper and darker than night. The light, the fire, mixing with the darkness, the primal waters, swirls forth the myriad ten-thousand things, from shining stellar nurseries to spinning globes of rock, crystal, magma and waters, leaf and dew, eyes and lips. In these chthonic garden temples and templates of creation, pterodactyles, and salamanders, pumas and lithe, elfin women. In this giant mind metabolism of this world, has come forth bodily forms, vehicles of experience.
Over great historical swathes of time, world ages have risen and fallen, governed by mysterious archetypes, constellated by the great mind-lattices of the Zodiacal wheel. In the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the random throw of the dice, generations race forth from the forests and deserts, and gather in vast coral fortresses of the city.
Cities
The city is rock rearranging itself under the sun, sand crystalised in the glass spires, woven from the elements by children of star fire, birthed from and inseparably OF Gaia. Woven from a confluence of forces, histories, bio-regional pressures.
Cities reflect the resources of the land, express the mineralogical, hydrological and psycho-symbolic nature of the land it is built upon, replaces, and is surrounded by. Urban landscapes are of ‘artifice’. Whilst the natural creation is all one, a mysterious emergence, an unfathomable creation that self-organizes according to mysterious laws, the city is different, because it it birthed from human axioms. It is birthed from certain kinds of human principles, logistics, practicalities, conveniences, prejudices, philosophies. Generation after generation, it is the solidification of the human collective consciousness with its self-serving, anthropocentric priorities.
Now the city, constituted from assemblages of rock and sand, is the substrate for a digital and psychic holographic overlay of media streams that impell its cyborg inhabitants, through guiding their behaviour, toward a systemic pattern, that belongs to the city alone, and allows it to perpetually resurrect itself through the repetitions of its constituent human atoms.
The city is therefore a standing-wave expression of the state of mind within much of the human race… it is an expression of perennial, unresolved fears and appetites, as well as established economic and structural conventions. The haunted Gothic vistas of our psyche expresses itself as the economic cathedrals of wall street. Stilleto-boot vistas made of obsidian, shiny, crystallized lustrous portals of baroque, biomechanical social and institutional processes. It is a meta-pattern that perpetuates itself, by imposing certain laws of operation upon the subsystems that compose it.
Cities and Anthropocentrism
Like Oroborous, the mythical snake devouring its own tail, causality is cyclic, effects feed back into causes. First we make our buildings, then our buildings make us. As we dream, so we become. Urban conglomerates express primarily an anthropocentric world view; anthropocentric in the sense where our reality becomes honed down to the priorities and central preoccupations of human life alone, at the exclusion and detriment of its wider natural context. Cities of the Kali Yuga also reflect a cybernetic view of life, based upon mechanically determined processes of information and matter.
As people grow up within such environments, they are conditioned by all the philosophical presumptions and emotional charges that such urban assemblages express. This run-away process reflects a deep polarization throughout a greater part of the species mind, and in turn the ‘mind of Gaia’ which we are inextricably expressions of.
Anthropocentrism is fear. It is fear of other, it is fear of nature-crawling-under-your-skin, it is fear of being eaten, it is fear of disease. These are ancient sufferings and it is an old habit to shy away from anything associated with suffering. As the imagination of ego, the ‘simulation of self’ crystallizes over countless generations, such a hallucination begins to actually manifest and embody itself in the walls, separations, divisions that sever the earths boundless flows and so cut off the human essence from the pranic logos flowing through deep currents.
Deep Ecological Communitas
What would happen if the human being created without an anthropocentric perspective ? What would its cities, its communities be like ? They would be permeable to nature. They would be yin, receptive in quality. They would represent something akin to a special moss or mineral formation growing in a particular fissure of rock. The emergent creativity would encompass all of natures systems and not just anthropocentric ones. Creation would occur ‘within’ and not ‘upon’ the land. The community would be a self-renewing food bowl, not just for humans but for many beings.
If we think of the awe-inspiring self-emergent growths of cells, crystals, forests, human beings would find themselves in that order, not within an ‘enlightened’ separateness and self-distinction. Humanity will find its pattern through an intimate relating, a great blessing that each being is heir to, to mingle its unbounded essence with all life, and discover a great world beyond that of human logistics, beyond that of form.
Baroque, Gothic, taoist realms of exquisite natural pattern, producing miracles of beauty and poesis, will flower within the post-oil shells of the city.
Such communities are rooted in an animist experience of the universe and the world, the great field of sentience, where whirling eddies and spires of mysterious perpetuating spirits and archetypes are en-nested with the physical world of nature; the physical world appearing at once as a grand nervious system, and also a great mind.
Facilitated by the plant teachers of the Earth, such as the psilocybin fungi or the great medicine Ayahuasca, it becomes perceptible. Speaking simply of the mystery of the forest – the living interconnectivity appears as a Great, Leafy Mind. Forests atop of hills appear like clumps and mounds of soft, living brain leaf matter. Tree trunks and branches, arches and curves of the glade temples of Gaia, are lattices supporting efflorence of receptor sites – flowers and pollen transmitters, symbiotic, form filling ergonomic sex uplinks between insect and flower consciousness, infinite sparkling synaptic panoramas of micro-nirvanic orgasms as flower stamen meets bee, distilling nectars in hives and combs. This living temple is the pulising, vibratory eternal energy, arrayed by divine evolution, the baroque creation of Gaia is the flowering fractal which ever transcends like an epiphany of luminous, self-organising mystery.
Tantra
The Sufi Hakim Bey does a lovely job of envisaging a life -not human- centered community of beings living in oneness and realisation of this Animist consciousness…
“The appropriate architectural form for a society based on radical conviviality might best be characterized as grotesque – that is, in the original sense of the word – the cave. Since the paleolithic, ritual space has always been envisaged as a hollow earth, and in Mao Shan Taoism, for example, heaven itself is honeycombed with countless grottoes of faeries and immortals, dripping with cinnabar and sprouting with magic mushrooms. As an aesthetic term, grotesque refers to the organic-looking forms of stalagmites, to the curving spiraling line of flesh and vegetation, which reappears underground and is transformed into the crystal architectural space, without losing its snaky, flowery, curviness or its matrix like slick wetness, or even its colors. The body is not separated from the rest of the world, it is not a closed, completed unit ; it is unfinished, outgrows itself ; transgresses its own limits.”
The radical conviviality that Hakim Bey is referring to is a sensual and tactile ‘information society’ which is bodily integrated, where humans are returned to full-body perception and relating, rather than the cerebrotonic and linguistic emphasis that we currently exist in. It includes a radical unboundedness and permeability which sounds almost orgiastic :
“Life uses and violates borders, and life constructs media of its own to fill up the extra spaces. Viral-like DNA are exchanged in gushes of juice and slime, liquid with paradoxical form – the very liminality of form itself, secret secretions, the viscous slippery in-betweenness of the organic.”
In the gushes of juices and subtle energies shared between the sexes, the yin and yang is balanced and the ten-thousand countless things find their place within the self-organizing tao. The sexual act is commensurate with the act of creation. Sexual connotations can hardly be removed from understanding the world of nature and spirit since a kind of cosmic sexuality or love-play powers manifest creation itself.
“Sexuality anywhere is a polyvalent function, whose primary and supreme valency is the cosmological function. To translate a psychic situation into sexual terms is by no means to belittle it. For except in the modern world, sexuality has everywhere and always been a hierophany and the sexual act an integral action, therefore, a means to knowledge.”- Mircea Eliade (1975:90)
A kind of desire attracts all things into compounded form to create the nebulous myriad realms of nature, through a play of complimentary pairs. Thus, health and harmony within human sexual relations maintains the flow of pranic, fertile energy throughout the interrelating systems of culture and nature, as we iterate on our own scale of experience the dance of atom and void, Sol and Gaia. This process of marriage of opposites occurs in the eagles flight to the sun, the mystic journey from the earthly to the solar so central in many forms of yoga and shamanism.
Sexual Energy, Life and Sun
Understanding the transmission of energy from the Sun into the ecological networks of the planet was experiential knowledge to the ancestors. It is a relationship that occurs not only on the level of observable nature, but analogously as a metaphysical understanding of the maintaining of the dynamic life and fertility of our own creative essences through shamanic gnosis:
“The Indians are deeply preoccupied with the concept of reproductive energy as manifested in nature and society by fertility and growth. The existence of plants, animals, and people and of a viable balance among them are thought to depend upon the continuity of this energy, and the payé’s or anybody else’s tasks consists in maintaining the cycle of reproduction and growth and in controlling it so that there will be a balance between society and the natural environment.”
The shaman often accomplishes harmonization of cycles of psycho-ecological energy through the re-creation of a passage of ‘higher energies’ between the life-giving Primal Sun with the fertility of Gaia and its beings. In Tukano cosmology the payé , the illuminate, the healer-visionary, exists as an agent of integration between the solar and the earthy, conscious and the unconscious, the natural and the cultural, the masculine and feminine, to re-fertilize the dense realms of matter with life-giving vibrancy, energy and information, thus maintaining the strength and potency of the people and the ecological web.
“The sun’s fertilizing energy is transmitted to the payé in the sense that he himself becomes a carrier of a force that contains procreative and fortifying components… There are the creative and enlivening rays (bogá), from the Sun above empowering the generative forces from below (dári) within budding and sprouting plant forms, the biological fecundity and fertility of Gaia. These circuits of energy regulate the reproductive and productive cycles in the forest, river, garden and village, as well as in animals and people. (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1996).
Wisdom, equality, balance, sacramental potions, tantric reconciliation of opposites regenerating the Tree of Life advanced spiritual development, sacred dances, crystallizing coherence in meditation, poesis and art, transcendence of anthropocentric ‘self-simulations’, these fruits of the spiritual cultures of the earth, are all medicines in the earth. ‘Medicine culture’ assisting in building and maintaining the vigor and strength of the race, the strength of the species in its cosmic journey, to stand upright and face the dazzling vistas of the future with clarity, joy and vitality.
~
Bibliography
‘Boundary Violations’ by Peter Lamborn Wilson
von Hildebrand, M. (1988). In Gaia, the Thesis, the Mechanisms and the Implications – Symposium I (P. Bunyard and E. Goldsmith, eds.), pp. Wadebridge ecological Centre, Cornwall.
The Shaman And The Jaguar. A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia. G.Reichel-Dolmatoff. Temple University Press. 1975.