Eros Unredeemed, Reality Sandwich, May 2012

I start to re-read Dieter Duhm’s Eros Unredeemed again, and once again, it is like waking from sleep to recognize the true idiocy of our current situation when it comes to love, sex, and relationships. According to Duhm, our incapacity to bring our full consciousness and analytic intellect to this area imminently threatens our species and the biosphere with apocalyptic ruin — and I agree with him. In New York City, full of so many incredibly brilliant and beautiful people, I feel like I am walking through a desert — a wasteland of love, abandoned, forfeited, of puppets allowing themselves to be pulled on invisible strings… or as Duhm’s title puts it so aptly, unredeemed Eros.

As Duhm writes, “The progressive-dynamic sports shoe generation of today adorns itself with super-electronics and galactic hair styles, but in their hearts they still dream the same fairytale dreams of our grannies. The cars and the changes in fashion have become faster, but serious reflection on matters of love has not. If today we want to create a transition from a period of violence to a new era of structural non-violence then we have to totally change our priorities. The same love and attention, the same conscientiousness and reliability, the same force of will and intelligence with which humans have thus far used to destroy each other must now be used to promote sexual love. We can no longer confront the omnipotence of war with white doves and pious songs. Our latent fascination with war and destruction is too great, too sincere and too profound, whereas our ideas and images of peace have so far been much too weak, immature and half-hearted. Not until we have found something even much greater and more fascinating than warfare and power play will we be able to believe in the possibility of overcoming war on a global scale, and this something could well be sensual love based on friendship and solidarity and on a sincere, powerful, and erotic relationship between the sexes, in short, a true reunion of man and woman. The only kind of will power and intelligence which can enable us to thoroughly and permanently clear out the ancient martial nooks and crannies of the soul is one which is capable of creating the basic structures of a love-life without fear and violence. Human beings, who have sent space ships into outer space, will also be able to solve the problem of unredeemed Eros if they fully dedicate themselves to this task with all their will power and intelligence.”

The “free love” or “sexual liberation” of the 60s was not a failure, but an experiment that remains incomplete. Just as humanity was not up to the task, in that epoch, of reckoning with the psychedelic experience and integrating the psychic and visionary aspects of our being into the repressive social structure — the system we have inherited, which is now obviously breaking down — we have not been capable of fully comprehending or integrating what the emancipation of Eros means in terms of new social forms and also a new living experience of the Divine. “The sexual revolution, which is necessary for creating a humane world, can only take place if it is linked to an equally indispensable spiritual revolution,” Duhm writes. We are still sleepwalking: unable to confront or realize what is directly before us — putting it off to a “later” or an “away” that remains vaguely on the periphery. Another hundred yoga sessions, another thousand therapy appointments, and perhaps we will be there…

Our cultural system spins like a hamster wheel, essentially devoid of new, original or incisive content. Artists, filmmakers, novelists pursue the same old rewards in a system based on establishing careers and making profit.  The actual content that needs to be expressed is contained in the love, sexual and spiritual revolution that people still don’t want to reckon with, because it threatens the structure and ideology they have been conditioned to maintain. Art and culture have been domesticated to serve the system of ego and profit — in these arenas, also, a true realization and inner revolution is necessary for a regeneration of our world to take place.

Far more than another political revolution, which would end up with some new miasma of jealousy and power and frustration, we need, first of all, a love revolution, which is also the form of a revelation: A totally fresh and clear-eyed approach to love and Eros. “The historical double meaning of apocalypse is being fulfilled, step by step it is turning into a conscious experience of revelation. The ‘Kingdom of God on Earth,’ i.e. the sexual and spiritual power of love, can no longer be confined behind society’s masks, dogmas, and institiutions,” Duhm writes. The “revelation” comes when we bring into consciousness the patterns of the past, and then construct a new societal structure that accords with our deepest drives and impulses.

The same ideas that Duhm works through here are also discussed in another one of my favorite books, Pain, Sex, and Time by Gerald Heard — though, writing in the 1940s, Heard was not able to fully perceive that the liberation of love, sexuality and Eros was also necessary for the evolutionary potential of humanity to be realized: He thought this energy needed to be channeled through new initiatory practices. “Modern man’s incessant sexuality is not bestial: rather it is a psychic hemorrhage. He bleeds himself constantly because he fears mental apoplexy if he can find no way of releasing his huge store of nervous energy,” Heard wrote. He noted that the tremendous force of the human sexual drive — beyond anything we find in the animal kingdom — suggested a surplus of extra evolutionary energy, which we will either consciously master, or it will destroy us.

We find our civilization has attained a tremendous mastery of techniques of war, while we have ignored love and sex, or treated it as something that we can’t fully explore with our conscious minds or approach with forethought. Sex remains something private, secret, and shrouded in darkness. “Whereas the cerebrum is applied in war technology, in love man lives and thinks out of his spinal cord,” writes Duhm. Even the everywhere evident fact that almost invariably (with very occasional exceptions) monogamous couples either break apart, or lose their spark, hasn’t compelled us to deeply consider the possibility that it is not our natural instinct in love that is wrong, but the social framework and belief system we have inherited — that we reify through our ongoing thoughts and actions — that is deeply flawed and in error. As Duhm also notes, there is no contradiction between being in a couple — finding a soul mate — and freedom in love. The contradiction only exists in our own minds — as the inheritance of patriarchy, of the “mind-forg’d manacles” which keep us from life and truth.

The lack of trust that we find throughout our “civil”-ization has its source in the failure of men and women to be truthful with each other. If your desires are in conflict with what society allows, you either express your desires and get exiled from society, or you make the best bargain you possibly can to attain some modicum of happiness and comfort, with the permanent acceptance of an underlying current of anger, bitterness, and resentment. Once you have allowed yourself to deceive yourself and the person who is theoretically closest to you, then you have created the intrinsic pattern for a society based on lies and delusion… You can then listen to the half-truths of our politicians and pundits without throwing up, because you are living in the same state of compromise. From that initial error, we collectively fail to safeguard or care for the environment as a logical consequence. After all, why would we want to protect a world that has betrayed us at its core?

“The liberation of Eros cannot succeed until we have wiped out every trace of the old idea of fidelity, which is based on the principle of the exclusion of others,” Duhm writes. “Faithfulness has nothing to do with a ban, with a vow, or with a contract. It is a concrete love relationship between two human beings. I am faithful to him because I love him. My love cannot depend on the condition that he should not go to bed with anyone else. If my partner is an attractive human specimen, then it is normal that others should desire him and that he should desire others. Should we really be expected to show our loyalty and devotion by renouncing such pleasures for the sake of another? What sort of farcical, masochistic idea is that? Faithfulness is love, but love is not renunciation. If our devotion for one another falls apart as a result of other sexual contacts, then our love was built on sand.”

The realization that the intrinsic paradigm for a planetary shift of consciousness is nothing “out there” but the internalization of a new mode of love that is shared, that flows like a river, that knows no fear, that has no need to possess or control: I believe that this is the next phase of the transformation of consciousness that needs to take place. Subconsciously I always knew this to be the case — probably you did as well — but I am grateful to Duhm (who founded the community Tamera in Portugal, which I recently visited) for bringing it out into the light of day.

He notes, “Humans will continue to butcher their environment, to destroy their fellow creatures, and vent their hatred on nature, as long as they do not achieve inner peace. And they will not find inner peace as long as they continue to rape love. … This entire worldwide process of destruction and self-destruction contains one strange component, which I have never completely understood, but which I have encountered again and again: Individuals are not even interested in freeing themselves from the system that ravages them.” Because an incredible force of historical repression and violence was exerted in this area (by the church, the colonialists, etc), our ancestors acquiesced, for purposes of survival and self-perpetuation. We have continued in the inertia of that internalized repression, because we didn’t know better.

The mass media functions as an ideological battering ram, blasting us over and over again with idealized images and visions of the monogamous couple and the nuclear family: This unit still forms the basis of the capitalist system, as theorists from Friedrich Engels to Slavoj Zizek realized. The acceptance of intrinsic dissatisfaction is part of what the system perpetuates. As we learn to accept continual discomfort and dissatisfaction at the thwarting of our instinct for love and sex as somehow “normal,” we then perpetuate this misery by accepting a world that we know is far beneath our true potential.

Nobody from outside of ourselves can integrate this realization and bring about this revolution of love, the liberation of Eros and redemption of instinct. Everything in our contemporary society continues to conspire against us: the complex of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” is the mechanism used by the dominant system of patriarchal repression to distort our vitalizing impulses and channel them into areas that are easily commodified and controlled. The first step is to make what has been unmentionable and hidden into something we openly discuss and explore — then we can embody it.

Original Article on Reality Sandwich

Planetary Initiation, Reality Sandwich, Nov 2012

The following article presents notes from a speech delivered on Saturday, November 3, at the TedX at the La Calaca Festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. 

Last week I was in New York City, my home, for Hurricane Sandy. At 7 pm that night, I walked to my corner and saw the floodwaters rising toward my block. I hurried home, grabbed a few things, and set out for a friend’s house on higher ground. As I was hurrying away, I heard muffled explosions and saw eerie lights in the sky. It was the Con Edison plant blowing up.

Once-in-a-century super-storms and “Frankenstorms” are now annual events, regular occurrences, and quickly growing worse.

Sandy supports what I have been writing and saying for years about this time as one of intense transformation and planetary initiation. I wrote a book and made a film about the Mayan calendar and the year 2012. I believe that we are seeing the fulfillment of prophecy — based on the precise understanding of cosmic cycles held by the ancient cultures of MesoAmerica — in the transformation of planetary culture and consciousness. At the end of the process, we will either have transformed as a species and reached a new level of consciousness, or we will be on our way toward extinction. The choice is ours to make.

In tribal cultures, initiation is the necessary ordeal that turns adolescents into adults through accessing extrasensory perception, visionary states, and by transcending or subduing the ego. Through this process, the initiate becomes a full-fledged member of the  tribe and takes responsibility for it.

As we undergo our planetary initiation, we are going to transcend individual ego and local boundaries to identify ourselves with humanity as a whole, becoming one global tribe. We are on the cusp of realizing ourselves as one species organism, in symbiotic relationship with the planetary ecology as a whole. Once we make this leap, we will share resources equitably, adopt cradle to cradle and no waste manufacturing practices, and shift from competition to cooperation as our basic paradigm. We will go from acting like a parasite or a virus on the earth to becoming the earth’s immune system.

As Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman write in Spontaneous Evolution, “Science suggests the next step of human evolution will be marked by awareness that are all interdependent cells within the super-organism called humanity.”

As an analogy, we can look at the process of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings. Its entire body melts down into a biotic goop. The code for the transmutation of the organism is held by a handful of “imaginal cells” that start to propagate as the caterpillar dissolves. Although attacked at first by the dying caterpillar’s immune system, the imaginal cells install the program that produces the butterfly. Our modern civilization is now in the process of melting down and decomposing, and we have to become the imaginal cells engaged in the process of its transmutation.

Climate change is clearly accelerating, as the vast preponderance of climate scientists warned us it would. Glaciologists found that “roughly half of the entire warming between the ice ages and the postglacial world took place in only a decade,” with a temperature increase of 9 degrees during that time. Our continued tinkering runs the risk “of producing a runaway change — the climatic equivalent of a squawk on a sound system,”  writes Fred Pierce in With Speed and Violence.

In The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock predicts “an imminent shift of our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot so deadly, that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.” According to Lovelock, a maximum of 150 million people will be left alive at the end of this century.

Is this true? Do we have a say in what happens? Can we cooperate to co-create a rapidly different outcome?

In nature, we see the sudden emergence of radical new forms at higher levels of complexity during junctures of crisis. According to the principle of emergence, at a certain level of complexity, entirely new forms appear that could not be predicted by the nature of their parts. Can the same thing happen to our global civilization as a whole?

. . .
Initiation is not just a marker or a rite of passage. It appears to have a biological purpose. It activates the higher function of the prefrontal cortex by forcing a “mutation of awareness” — a leap of consciousness. The prefrontal cortex is the most recent brain structure, emerging 40,000 years or so ago. It is the structure that allows us to become aware of awareness, to differentiate qualities, and to use symbols.

When the prefrontal cortex is functioning properly, it does other things as well:

• Self-Consciousness (Awareness of Awareness)
• Ethical Judgment
• Capacity to Defer Pleasures and Wants
• Responsibility for the Community
• Transcendence of the Ego (the realization that “The soul is not in the body, but the body is in the soul.”)

Western civilization rejected or lost contact with initiatory practices and disciplines some time ago. We thus failed to create a system that induces higher functioning of the prefrontal cortex. What this means in practice is that the mass of people in modern society can’t rise above their lower impulses and sexual compulsions, or their greed for material things. In fact, consumer society depends upon keeping people fixated in this state. We have made a world for “kidults,” trapped by ego-based desires.

For a human community to endure, initiation is not optional.

The initiation process has a number of stages:

• Separation from the Community
• Undergoing the Ordeal
• Integrating the Vision
• Returning to the Tribe: Celebration and Homecoming
• Sharing the Knowledge

I believe that modern humanity is unconsciously bringing about a self-willed cataclysm to force its own transformation. How else do we explain how it is possible to ignore the overwhelming data on climate change, the risk posed by genetically modified organisms, or the obvious danger of nuclear plants, and so on? As an aside, if the Indian Point nuclear reactor was in the direct path of Hurricane Sandy, I wonder if we would have fared any better than Japan. I kind of doubt it.

If enough of us undergo a conscious process of initiation, our civilization may be spared the worst. When we make this inward mutation, we can then use our intelligence, skills, and resources to awaken the others and redirect society as a whole.

Individually, we can use tools like meditation, yoga, vision quests, ayahuasca shamanism, and so on. But these can quickly become new forms of spiritual materialism. We are being called upon to push beyond our comfort zones by sharing what we learn and by sacrificing our ego-based desires for the sake of the planetary community.

Consciousness is revealed, not in words, but in deeds. Seeking to overcome the inertia of modern civilization to bring about its transmutation is a powerful initiatory path for our time.

How can we make this rapid change? We need to apply a design science approach in all areas of life and look at our society from a whole systems approach. We can work both from within and outside of the system to bring about its transformation. Some crucial areas include:

• Media
• Business
• Economy
• Social Technology
• Art

1. Media

The primary function of media is not to convey information but to coordinate behavior. The mass media coordinates the behavior of the global multitude. When behavior is learned, it becomes habitual and subconscious.

Mass media, today, functions as as instrument of indoctrination. Media can be used as a tool to liberate rather than dominate the mass mind, and to rapidly alter our species’ behavior patterns, instilling new habits that enhance resilience, community building, and sustainability.

2. Business

The corporation is an artificial life form. The development of the corporate form was a great evolutionary advance for humanity. We created an entity out of legal code, financial data, brand insignias, and ideas and injected it into an artificial game called the stock market. The corporation is the most powerful tool for transforming matter and energy that the human mind has created.

Unfortunately, we programmed it to behave destructively because we set its single-minded goal to maximize profit for shareholders — so that is what it does, monomaniacally. By its nature it must corrupt or evade costly environmental restrictions, and keep people in a state of insatiable desire craving the products it makes, whether plastic toys or anti-depressants.

We need to change the underlying program. We see efforts in this area, such as the B Corporation, which seeks to make companies environmentally and ethically responsible. But that won’t be enough. We also need to change the financial system — the mechanism through which value is exchanged — to support sustainable behavior.

Immature ecosystems are characterized by competition, and mature ones are characterized by cooperation and symbiosis. As we realize our unity as one planetary super-organism, we can reprogram the corporation to be extremely beneficial instead of destructive. Corporations are like nascent organs in the collective body of humanity: an energy company is like the blood in the body, a media company is like the perceptual mechanisms of our collective organism. When we reprogram corporations to be consilient and to help us coexist with the biosphere, they will be a great tool for conscious evolution.

3. Economy

Ultimately, what is capital? Capital is a social agreement. The gigantic hyper-complex cathedral-like edifice of the financial system is designed to hide this simple fact.

The current financial system enforces competition and artificial scarcity through interest and debt. We need to disseminate new tools for exchanging value, complementary currencies, that create different beliefs and behavior patterns. For instance, the economist Bernard Lietaer proposes instituting a global trading currency with a negative interest so it loses value quickly. This would lead to sharing rather than hoarding of the resource when you have it. Local Credit Clearing Houses — consortiums of local manufacturers and service providers  — can issue zero interest loans to local enterprises.

Tribal cultures were largely gift economies. Eventually we can return the gift to its centrality. We see this starting to happen on the Internet through websites like Couchsurfing.com.

4. Social Technology

Social networks are proto-political and have extraordinary implications for the future of society. We can design social networks to facilitate cooperation, resource sharing, group decision-making, and direct democracy. Clay Shirky writes, “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.” Networks for voluntary participation can replace functions of a centralized government, which will soon be incapacitated by the increase of natural disasters and economic issues in any case.

5. Art

The planetary emergency requires us to become conscious of what we are doing and to take responsibility for the fate of the earth. We will need to shift our belief systems and behavior patterns in order to serve the community of planetary life. Art has a new role in our changing world. Art can provide a model for recreating our society on humane, egalitarian, and regenerative principles. Art is an infinite game where there are no winners or losers. Your enjoyment of a painting or song doesn’t take away from my enjoyment – if anything, it enhances it. A society based on creative expression is the opposite of a Zero Sum game.

Two thoughts from an Imaginal Cell

“Civilization, in the very real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and true contentment.” –Gandhi

In a state of Enlightened Anarchy, “each person will become his own ruler. He will conduct himself in a such a way that his behavior will not hamper the well being of his neighbors. In an ideal state there will be no political institutions and therefore no political power.” –Gandhi

We face the inevitable collapse of our current civilization. Rather than a traumatic meltdown, we can intelligently redesign our current social systems to rapidly advance global civilization toward the ideal state of enlightened anarchy — the rule of all by all. We can instill a new ethos of participation, self-sufficiency, and cooperation in the global multitude. However our time to accomplish this goal is limited.

The first thing that we need to do is think about it.

Original Article on Reality Sandwich