Wish I could go. I love Evolver already. www.raptitude.com -- The gentle art of sanity amidst civilization

"It has to be understood that psychedelics are a way to the Gaian mind. They are not metaphors for sacraments, they are real sacraments, and their efficaciousness can have political consequences....The energy of the attractor is so great in the mystical dimension that it creates a situation in which saving the earth is not something we argue about, it's something we go out and do....The people who can lead the psychedelicized green movement have been training themselves for years without understanding what they have been training for. Called upon to do so, they will step forward. Terrence McKenna, in: Trialogues At The Edge Of The West: Chaos, Creativity and the Resacralization of the World. Daniel, This Evolver network is a nice idea and it has gotten me thinking. It has gotten me thinking - especially in light of a couple of your recent posts, that the scenario outlined by Christopher Bache in Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind, in the chapter entitled, The Great Awakening, may just illuminate a possible course of action, as I know you have considered before. As Bache says, "If humanity enters a sustained global ecological crisis, the field of the species mind might be pressed so hard that it might be driven far from its "normal" operating equilibrium. It might, in effect, come to resemble...a far-from-equilibrium system...." The major assumption behind his theory is that the species mind is a unified psychic field. He points out that when some physical media shift into a far-from-equilibrium state that they can "phase-lock in unpredictable ways to allow previously separate systems to act as one." He goes on to say that, "If the species-mind were driven into something analogous to a far-from-equilibrium state, it too might show increasingly nonlinear characteristics. Non-local psychological effects might become more prominent; something like psychological phase-locking might take place. Under these extreme conditions, systems that were previously isolated might spontaneously begin to interact with each other to form new connecting patterns. The capacity for synergistic experience that is inherent within the collective unconscious could emerge into our collective conscious experience. If this were to happen, it would feel as though the human psyche were becoming alive at new levels....Interconnections between people that had previously been too subtle to detect could start to become obvious." He continues, "I want to suggest that the global eco-crisis may push the field of the species-mind so hard that it...may draw forth new structures from itself, structures that reflect its inherent capacity for higher degrees of self-organization....If this were to happen, synergistic tendencies that are latent within the species mind may become manifest, exerting a coordinating influence within seemingly disparate human activities." He continues, "Chaos theory tells us that when a system is driven beyond equilibrium, the subtle interconnectedness that lies latent beneath its surface can sometimes emerge to reshape the system itself....When driven into far-from-equilibrium conditions, some systems do not just break down; they generate new structures that pull higher forms of order out of the surrounding chaos." He continues, "If the eco-crisis is indeed driving humanity to a bifurcation point in its history, we are entering a time when small changes may be disproportionately amplified by the hypersensitivity of the species field. In such a pressurized environment, the clarifying effect of the spiritual practices and "right action" of a comparatively small number of persons may become greatly disproportionate to their actual number." And he concludes, saying that, "My point here is that in this supersaturated psychic matrix, our individual choices may have enormous ramifications if they reflect our higher potential and seek the greatest good of humanity as a whole." I was motivated to come back to Bache's theory while re-reading sections of a book I read long ago, Kenneth Ring's book, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters and Mind at Large. This book explores the idea that Extraordinary Encounters (EE) are manifestations of the planetary Oversoul/species-mind along the lines that McKenna postulated in, for example, his talk on the Saucer as Oversoul. Obviously the entheogenic experience is a form of Extraordinary Encounter that shares characteristics with the near-death experience and the "contactee" experience (McKenna has humorously portrayed himself a a "contactee", in the above-mentioned talk, and I can perfectly understand why). Further, all three of these EEs share characteristics with the reliving of the phases of the birth-trauma that Stanislov Grof calls the Basic Perinatal Matrices, and Bache and Tarnas have expanded the concept with the idea that our present planetary crisis is itself a species birth trauma and that as a species we are entering a death-rebirth encounter which Bache has characterized as a "dark night of the species soul." In the last chapter of his book, Ring begins with an exploration of the ideas of Michael Grosso. "His thesis is beguilingly simple. The threat of mass death from nuclear warfare, ecological catastrophe or both is evoking a new level of consciousness from humanity at large. It is a consciousness that is aimed at lifting humanity above its usual sensate and materialistic concerns into the realm of the transcendent. This emergent level of consciousness is serving an adaptive evolutionary end, for evolution is teleological. Specifically, it is one that can foster our creative adaptation to the unprecedented requirements of living in an age when technological man now has the power to poison or other wise murder the earth. And behind this evolutionary imperative operates a kind of planetary Overmind that Grosso characterizes as a "helping intelligence": Mind at Large." He goes on to say, "...Grosso follows English biologist John Randall in postulating that Mind at Large is a benign transpersonal aspect of mind that is conscious, purposive, intelligent - and capable of interacting with matter. Again, drawing on some of Randall's ideas, Grosso assumes that in critical times...or at points of extreme peril - Mind at Large may intervene in earthly affairs in an effort to help bring about certain effects. In our own singularly dangerous ecocidal era, as we are confronted with our possible extinction as a species, and with the specter of an irremediably polluted mother planet, Mind at Large has lately been attempting to broadcast its message concerning the kind of evolutionary change necessary for survival. ""Broadcast?", you ask. "How?" To understand Grosso's conception here ( and of course he is far from alone in postulating the existence of some kind of guiding planetary intelligence), you must assume that Mind at Large is the apparent source of "signals" that are redolent with symbolic meaning for humanity, and that must be decoded before they can be understood. Imagine, that is, that humanity - or more precisely, an especially psychologically sensitive segment of humanity - is now susceptible to something like a set of common images of a universal dream churned out by, as it were, its own collective unconscious, Mind at Large." This is reminiscent of McKennas ideas, where he says in Trialogues At The Edge Of The West, "For me, the key to unlocking what is going on with history, creativity and progressive processes of all sorts is to see the state of completion at the end as a kind of higher-dimensional object that casts an enormous and flickering shadow over the lower dimensions of organization....All these intimations of great change suggest a transcendental object that is the great attractor in many, many dimensions, throwing out images of itself that filter down through the lower dimensional matrices." A few pages further, McKenna says, "I see each of us as a cell in communication with the Divine Imagination, which is sending images back into the past to try and direct us away from areas of instability. The Gaian mind is a real mind; its messages are real messages, and our task - through discipline, dreams, psychedelics, attention to detail, whatever we have going - is to try and extract its messages and eliminate our own interference so that we can see the face of the Other and respond to what it wants. This isn't for me a philosophical problem. It's a problem that relates to the politics and action that we take as a collectivity and as individuals." McKenna also sees, for example, the function of the psilocybin mushroom as turning the human nervous system into an antenna for the Gaian mind, and notes that, "Shamans and mystics and psychedelic travelers may be getting a very noisy, low-grade signal about a future event that is somehow built into the structure of space and time." Getting back to Ring, he further postulates that, "This collective dream, spawned by the benevolently intelligent Mind at Large, itself in part a reflection of humanity's own deepest foreboding and intuitions, is a sort of diagnostic [dia-gnostic! - hehe] warning dream , a kind of prophecy, which correctly interpreted, spurs us on to right action. Coded in images and symbols that reflect our contemporary space age's fascination with life elsewhere in the universe and using one of the dominant archetypal figures of our era, the extraterrestrial alien, as the metaphysical symbol of our own alienation, the abduction story is a call, sounded by humanity itself and in turn reflected through the agency of Mind at Large, to awaken to earth's plight before it is too late." Further, he says that Grosso is "arguing that there is a kind of helping intelligence, a planetary mind that reflects our collective concerns as a species and then feeds them back to us symbolically in the form of an archetypal abduction drama that is orchestrating these experiences in imaginal space." Later in the chapter, after exploring some of the ideas of John White - who postulates the emergence of a new species: homo noeticus (and let's not forget it was Timothy Leary who postulated, in 1979 in his book, The Game of Life, a Gaian-DNA directed evolutionary teleology in contradistinction to the Darwinian game of random mutational chance, and hence, the idea of the Gaian-selected mutant), and Whitley Strieber, Ring speculates that, "If Mind at Large is both the source and reflection of these evolutionary energies, and if it not only generates mere signals and symbols but also helps to transmit inputs that alter the body and nervous system (as Grosso does in fact suggest), then perhaps the world itself could be said to be undergoing its own Omega Project. That is to say, one could regard Mind at Large as orchestrating the "production" of more highly evolved human beings, Omega Prototypes, as if it were conducting an Omega Project in its own right." In the next section of the chapter, Evolution in the Imaginal Realm, he not only speculates that, "the world of the dead and the world of the living are ones between which there may eventually be no longer a sharp distinction [ an oft reported characteristic of the salvia divinorum worldspace - me.]. Veils will be lifted from the face of the nonphysical....I believe, in short, that the increasing fascination with and immersion in the domain of extraordinary encounters may well presage the shamanizing of modern humanity." Expanding on this idea in the context of the evolution of consciousness as "the frontier of humanity's evolution today", Ring suggests that "we could be in the beginning stages of a major shift in levels of consciousness that will eventually lead to humanity being able to live in two worlds at once - the physical and the imaginal. This is of course precisely what the shaman in traditional cultures is trained to do...." "What I am asserting is that the whole range of extraordinary encounters - NDEs, UFOs, and other mystical and visionary states may be understood as helping to develop our latent capacities for imaginal perception....Because we are apparently seeing such an influx of these extraordinary encounters, and with them, as our data indicate, a flowering of psychic potentials as well, it can be expected that over time the evolutionary momentum will establish and stabilize these imaginal domains as our shared reality....Humanity would be led back to its true home in the realm of the imagination where it would be liberated to live in mythic time and no longer be incarcerated in the doomed prison of historical time." He ends the section with a quote from Grosso, who says, "My contention is that these different forms of contact are related and that in all likelihood a single source of intelligence is using whatever openings it can find to penetrate our collective mind and modify our basic ideas of how reality works." Ring then introduces an idea from the Jacques Vallee influenced theorist Carl Raschke, who posits that the extraordinary encounter is meant to confound us. "That is, these experiences are visited upon humanity to loose it from the fetters of its encrusted habits of thought and action, freedom from which is absolutely essential if the next state of human evolution and the reclamation of the planet are to occur. As Raschke puts it, "...UFOs can be depicted as what I would call ultraterrestrial agents of cultural deconstruction." Ring then notes that both McKenna and Grosso agree with this "deconstructive intent behind the protean and shifting forms of the UFO and other mind-bending encounters", and quotes Grosso, who concludes that, they have the effect of "shattering our metaphysical complacency." At this juncture, I would like to introduce some ideas from Jorge Ferrer from his book, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, because I think they are crucial to an understanding of the course of action we need to take and to the kind of intentionality we need to exercise. His main thesis concerns the idea that in attempting to understand transpersonal phenomena, that we cease to frame them as intrasubjective experiences and instead look at them as participatory events. Ferrer says, "Let us look now at the implications of this distinction between experiences and events for our understanding of spiritual phenomena, for example, the visionary transfiguration of the world that occurs in nature mysticism. In nature mysticism, as well as certain ritual uses of entheogens, the natural world can be drastically transformed and unfold with an exalted quality of depth, pregnant meaning, profound numinosity, luscious Life and sacred Mystery. "In the context of the participatory vision, this transfiguration of the world is not seen as a mere change in our individual experience of a pregiven world, but as the emergence of an ontological event in reality in which our consciousness creatively participates. In other words, it is not so much our experience of the world that changes, but rather our experience-and-the-world that undergoes a mutually codetermined transformation." In the light of all of the above, this orientation toward, and revisioning of the transpersonal offers us a deeper understanding of how we can act collectively to effect change in the world, because this understanding gives us a deeper insight into our relationship to the species-mind, the Kosmos and the Divine. Ferrer goes on to say that, "...what should be clear here is that participatory knowing is not geared to a Cartesian subject-object model of cognition. In contrast to traditional epistemologies, participatory knowledge is not knowledge of something by someone. Rather, participatory knowledge is lived as the emergence of an embodied presence pregnant with meaning that transforms both self and world. We could say, then, that subject and object, knowing and being, epistemology and ontology, are brought together in the very act of participatory knowing." He goes on to say that, "...the participatory vision embraces an enactive paradigm of cognition. Participatory knowing, then, is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the bringing forth of a world or domain of distinctions cocreated by the different elements involved in the participatory event. "Some central elements of transpersonal and spiritual participatory events include individual intentions and dispositions; cultural, religious and historical horizons; archetypal and subtle energies; and...an indeterminate and dynamic spiritual power of inexhaustible creativity." The key revelation here is then, that the central elements of these events are us, all of us who are, in fact, in a co-creative, dynamic participatory relationship with the collective consciousness of humanity. And what Bache has posited is that, as the species-mind moves more and more toward a far-from-equilibrium condition, that in direct proportion, the "stand-alone" mode of the "skin-encapsulted ego" will more and more dissolve, whereby we will realize that at the level of the World Soul, I am a Network. Neo-Learyian Antero Alli http://www.verticalpool.com/8circuitbrain1.html has characterized this level as: (Circuit 7) C-7 Mytho-Poetic Genetic Intelligence via the DNA matrix of all life forms Currents: ancestral and past life memories, realms of autonomous archetypes, persistent synchronicity, planetary (Gaia) mind, cosmic consciousness. The Shock of Indivisibility or Cosmic Unity (absence of dualistic consciousness Taking all of this in account then Daniel - and in line with your idea that we are moving into a "both-and" mythical consciousness, I suggest that we re-envision your statement that "It seems highly unlikely we can phase-shift to hyperspace, the fifth-dimension, or whatever it is until we have learned how to take proper care of this material world and those who share it with us" from this both-and perspective and realize that these two modes are not separate but complimentary and that what we now need to do is integrate an ecological consciousness with a shamanic-hyperspatial consciousness. Indeed, that seems to be what the World Soul is trying to tell us...or is it what we are trying to tell ourselves? Further, if we posit the idea that we are in a two-way, dynamic co-creative relationship with the World Soul, and as we learn to tune into this psychic Network-that-we-are at the deep transpersonal level, we will be continually strengthening the mophic resonance as an on-going process and thereby making this level more and more accessible. Also, we will ever-continuously be increasing the signal-to-noise ratio as we learn to harmonically resonate to this worldspace, and therefore increase the clarity and resolution of the visionary knowledge disclosed by this worldspace, bringing it more and more into actualized manifestation and functional comprehension, rather than just fleeting glimpses of "what-might-be." The more we can allow it to transform and mutate us, the more we will transform and manifest it as a dynamic-feed-back-process-to-infinity. The more we tune in, the more accessible we make this worldspace, the more intricately will we be weaving the network interconnections/World-Soul-Antenna-Array, the more we will be able to act as channels - tuned-circuit configurations - both alone and in Initiatory Circles - for the disclosure and emanation of pure Being-Light and revelatory Consciousness-Intelligence. At the same time, as we enter into purer and purer harmonic resonance, becoming more and more synchronized, mixing our individual signals into one grand symphony of ego-transcendent reality-fabrication, our effectiveness in collective action will continuously increase exponentially. Indeed, it will become effortless: all we will have to is surrender freely to the Gaian Dance and allow it to dance us! Twenty-nine years ago, I envisioned this as what I call "A Network of Balancing Points", the creation of a collective network-antenna-loom upon which we would co-creatively weave the World Soul, actualizing its radiant healing Life-Light, making accessible its navigational Knowledge, both of which would act as a stabilizing force as humanity entered into the collapse of the old world, and which would absorb and transform the destructive chaos engendered by the wholesale release of history's toxic karmic residue and provide the foundation of a New Dawn consciousness. It is true that this is very similar to the visions of Jose Arguelles and indeed, coming across his book, Earth Ascending: An Illustrated Treatis on the Laws Governing Whole Systems in 1984 was a reinforcing revelation for me. And the central idea was always to do all of this for the purpose of minimizing as much as possible the suffering that would accompany this World-Shift. Indeed, Arguelles' "psi bank matrix" is an elegant formulation of the emerging World Soul. As he puts it, "When we speak of the activation of the planetary biopsychic field of resonance, we refer directly to the psi bank....Though the majority of the human race might have been unconscious or unaware of the total field phenonenon of the psi bank, this does not mean that the psi bank had not been fully operative. It had. Whether as the Dream-Time, the Houses of the Sun, the White Isles of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields, Valhalla, Tir-na-nog, and all manner of heavens, paradises and hells, or even as the collective unconscious, the psi bank has been ever-functioning. "As the network repository of cumulative human thought, and the guiding psychic field - the holonomic recollection circuit...the psi bank has always provided the matrix of vision....Indeed and in truth, the psi bank is the planetary mind, and humanity but the single multimembered body of that mind. "The visions, the chromatic patterns, the weavings, the bipolar calendars, the temple structures, the pyramids, the myths and legends of heroes and heroines, the ascents to the rainbow domains, the successions of oracle/healers/seers, the geometries, number formations, musical architectures - all are engendered from the matrix of vision through the primary principle of universal binary resonance. This matrix of vision is the psi bank itself, both spontaneously produced and coproductive of the binary resonance field, man and nature. "...though the imperative remains with us to radically alter the direction of present-day civilization - to call an end to history, no less - we may also give our attention to the mechanics of the psi bank and apprise ourselves further of how we may accomplish the double-end - individual realization and collective harmonization - by completing the historic process and initiating the posthistoric." Thus possible mottos for an Evolver-net based project or operation - and in honor of Arguelles, we could take a phrase from him and call the project "Operation: Armageddon Bypass" - might be something like: "NOW IS THE TIME to co-create the World Soul." Or, "Gaian Mutants Powershifting The Planetary Mind Into Hyperspace." We could collectively write a Statement of Intent. But what would be really nice to have to go along with that Statement of Intent would be some form of mandalic artwork portraying this idea of a Network of Balancing Points and an integration of ecological consciousness and hyperspatial-shamanic consciousness. I am thinking here of something like the artwork of Jose Arguelles and Alex Grey. Such artwork, accompanying the Statement of Intent, could be used for focused meditation, the entire package spread virally across the Internet. What do you think? In other words, we learn the game of harmonious collective reality-fabrication by playing the game. It's obvious we are heading for global catastrophe if we cannot act collectively to change direction and build something new. We have nothing to lose...but a possibly horrendous future. We might even set times - say 7pm and 10pm EST, when people could focus on the Mandala, alone or in groups, for one half hour - or even a minute or two, wherever they are, bringing focused intentionality to the idea of co-creating the World Soul and entering into harmonic resonance together with everyone else who is participating, and in this way strengthening the morphogenetic-psychic field. . People could pray, dance, engage in rituals, Invocations, group meditation. Afterwords, people could have gatherings, study groups, and/or discuss it with other in email, forums, chatrooms, IM, Twitter etc., working to actively spread the meme-hieroglyphic throughout the planetary network, adding their own creative input - transformational music anyone? - as in Arguelles' idea of a Planetary Art Network, and sharing knowledge and revelations, co-creating a Mythic Consciousness. Introduce all of this to places like Auroville - surely Aurobindo's Work is very, very relevant here - Findhorn, etc.. Indeed, as Aurobindo said, "The experiment of human life on earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again be a million times repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labor will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated [via non-local morphic resonance? - JK]. The plan, the peripetia, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man Nature are the three perpetual symbols." These are the ideas that came to mind after I read your Evolver post, and I share them in the spirit of brother-sisterhood as one seeking to heal and open my heart so as to better serve the Light, Life, Love and Beauty. Warm regards, Joseph

If anyone's interested in creating an Evolver Regional in LA, creating a local scene and helping to bring various groups together under our transformational umbrella, just send me an email through my profile page. I'd love to hear from you.

I was on a library computer running out of my alloted time fast and wasnt watching what I was doing. If the sys admin wants to delete this here to save sys memory, I will repost in the relevant area of the blog. Sorry about this. Joseph

nice meeting everyone! Mike www.mikehedge.com