A Purple Future
The world we see is the myth we are in
The following is my essay for Purple Magazine’s “Future Issue.”
When considering the future from where we are today, we tend to toggle between dystopian outcomes. Our culture, in fact, wallows in dystopia. We marinate in apocalypse. Films and TV series envision every conceivable dreadful outcome, from control by robot overlords to nuclear winters, from zombies to plagues, evil extraterrestrial attacks to ecological meltdowns. Overwhelmed by negative projections, people — particularly young people — feel disempowered, cynical, depressed, anxious. This perfectly serves the interests of those possessing power. When people feel dejected and hopeless, they are unlikely to find solidarity around any world-changing mission or movement. They will, instead, sullenly submit to what seems inevitable, escaping into virtual worlds and corporate metaverses.
In my past works — from Quetzalcoatl Returns to How Soon Is Now —I journeyed into the depths of possible nightmare futures but, in the end, proposed pathways toward utopian and joyful ones. I should say up front that one reason I can, still, see something extraordinary and amazing on our horizon is that I am not a materialist. I do not believe that consciousness is limited to these meat suits. In fact, this is not belief but knowledge from direct experience, attained through psychedelic experiment and exploration of visionary plant shamanism, including an initiation into the Bwiti tribe of Gabon with Iboga, their sacrament, and similar forays with the Secoya in Ecuador, the Mazatecs in Mexico, the Kogis in Colombia, and so on. My first book on psychedelic shamanism, Breaking Open the Head (2002), chronicled my journey from skepticism to mystical revelation, one that I believe anyone can make for themselves, if they maintain their skepticism rigorously while pushing themselves to the limit.
In Quetzalcoatl Returns, I explored the philosophical perspective of idealism. According to this philosophy, consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality, the “ontological primitive.” Each of us, individually, is a dissociated projection or “alter” of an underlying consciousness that is indivisible, instinctive, timeless, spaceless, and without boundary. The philosophy of idealism is rapidly gaining popularity. In Why Materialism Is Baloney and The Idea of the World, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup makes a rigorous, logical argument for it, demonstrating that analytic or monistic idealism is far more rational than reductive materialism or physicalism. The idealist paradigm meshes perfectly with everything that quantum physics has revealed about the nature of reality over the last century — the interconnection of observer and observed — as well as the “perennial philosophy” of Western hermeticism and Eastern metaphysical traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta.
In forfeiting the most crucial knowledge about the nature of reality held universally by indigenous and ancient cultures, modern and postmodern civilization utterly lost its way. We live in a world where the only things considered valuable are those which can be weighed, quantified, “objectively” evaluated. Our culture denigrates inner experience while holding up material accumulation and public attention as the marker of success. The traditionalist author Rene Guenon calls this the “reign of quantity.”
Like many occult and esoteric thinkers, Guenon believes that humanity passes through long cycles of decay and regeneration; the part of the cycle we are in now is known as the Kali Yuga. It is the lowest point in the cycle, when esoteric truth is almost lost. Without access to anything sublime or transcendent, humanity loses its mind, becomes deranged. This is what we see today in the world around us. And inside of us.
My perspective is that, if humanity is going to have a future on this planet — or elsewhere — we must, first of all, make the paradigm shift from materialism to idealism. This is difficult for many of us to do, and impossible for those whose egos are bound up with their materialist beliefs. However, I believe we already start to see it happening, with the rising popularity of Buddhism and Yoga, and with the worldwide growth and increasing mass acceptance of the psychedelic movement.
In The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, Patrick Harpur notes, “The world we see is the myth we are in.” When we change our underlying mythos, the world we see begins to ripple and transform around us. This only makes sense, as we are not separate from the world, and how we participate in it, transforms it.
I believe the traditional Left can expand its understanding to integrate the idealist paradigm, and this can lead to a worldwide victory for a regenerative, egalitarian movement based on nature’s principles. Liberals, progressives, and Leftists tend to be hyper-materialist, atheist and secular. They identify with the rational, scientific worldview that broke free from obsolete religious dogma a few centuries ago. For the most part, they still can’t imagine that this might not be the end of that story — that they need to make yet another breakthrough.
The great Communist thinker of the 19th Century, Karl Marx, was a “dialectical materialist,” even though he incorporated aspects of Hegel’s thought into his work. Hegel believed that the world was moving toward an ultimate spiritual concrescence. Marx proposed that this endpoint was not spiritual, but a material condition based on collective emancipation. We see this materialist bias in contemporary Leftist thinkers like Noam Chomsky or Slavoj Žižek. As brilliant as they are, they can’t interrogate this philosophical limit.
A future where analytic idealism is our collective paradigm looks and feels entirely different from any continuity of materialism. Our priorities and proclivities would undergo a radical transformation. Civilization’s primary goal would become the enhancement, intensification and evolution of consciousness, rather than space colonization, hyper-consumerism, or military dominance.
One area that I consider very significant for our future is psychic or “Psi” phenomena. Personally, I have had many varied and direct experiences of Psi abilities, ranging from telepathy to precognition to telekinesis to manifestation of objects — and I don’t consider myself particularly psychic. Many of my friends report the same. Materialists dismiss psychic experience, but it perfectly meshes with philosophical idealism.
The psychic researcher Dean Radin believes we are at a point in our understanding of psychic phenomena similar to where we were in the late 18th Century in our understanding of electricity. At that point, scientists had verified its existence but didn’t know how to utilize it — how to store, channel, or transmit it. It took generations of experiment to figure this all out. Once we mastered electricity, we transformed the entire geophysical environment of the Earth in less than two centuries.
What if Psi not only exists but is exponentially more powerful than electricity? What uses could we make of it?
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