Fissures, Dream Worlds, and Revolutions

An alchemical approach to Climate Week

I keep wanting to propose — to tease out — a strange, complex idea that ever-so-slightly eludes my capacity to properly articulate it. Let me make another attempt this morning. Please let me know what you think in the comments, if you follow me.

To sum up what I was saying yesterday: “Free energy” is, for a subset of the alternative New Age crowd, what carbon capture is for the Davos/WEF community, and what nuclear fusion and the Singularity is for the tech / Silicon Valley community: An extremely convenient technology-of-the-near-future that will provide us with instant, guilt-free “redemption” / “salvation,” when or if it arrives. 

The tempting promise of these always-nearly-arriving super-technologies means that we don’t have to do anything much now — like, for instance, radically change our lifestyles to become carbon-negative, or literally start a revolution against Capitalism to save the Amazon rainforest along with the rest of the planet. 

Let’s zoom out a bit…

It is clear to me that we are aspects of a long, turbulent dream that this infinite, instinctive, ultimately indivisible consciousness is having. During this dream, this unified field of mentation constructs innumerable transitory “dream characters,” dissociated projections of itself, which we, individually, are. There are many subtle gradations of awakening within this dream, which evolves through various stages or levels (called cultures or civilizations or paradigms). The dreaming consciousness creates all kinds of little dream-worlds within the big dream. Some of these little dream-worlds are fantastically compelling, others quite dull and drab. 

This is why we find it so easily to sink into fictions and fantasies, to float between dream-worlds. This is also why we tend to find con artists and snake oil salesmen to be so charming and believable. The distinction between “real world” and dream-world is not very firm or stable. 

I wrote about Jean-Luc Godard the other day. His films from the 1960s illuminate a glamorous, complex dream-world of a certain segment of Parisian counterculture that existed, in itself and for itself, as a psychological and physical space; bound by time, place, and language; which he captured in celluloid. It is the same for the dream-worlds of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Kraftwerk, and so on. 

Some day, there will be nobody left on Earth able to remember or even understand what made Godard’s films art for some of us, at this time. But the fact that art is a transitory flicker doesn’t make it any less meaningful, poignant, or beautiful — quite the opposite. As William Blake put it, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” 

Human consciousness, culture, and technology are inextricably linked. 

Through my initiatory journeys, I inadvertently stumbled upon the discovery that consciousness is the only “technology.” Actually, anything can happen — as long as it is within the dream-logic of the dream-world, within the archetypal structures and mythologies which form a kind of container or boundary for the current shape of consciousness to explore and evolve. 

That instinctive, indivisible consciousness has, in a sense, all of the time in the world to experiment, to fail, to try again. On the other hand, as an intuitively guided artist in a perpetual state of flow, that consciousness also follows a kind of formal logic. Within the particular dream, it seeks to intensify creative conflicts for maximum drama and effect.  

In case you were wondering, I don’t think this immanent “God” consciousness works like a human artist, creating drafts and sketches and tossing them out. It works differently than that. To quote TS Eliott: “You are the music / While the music lasts.” (This is also why I reject the infinite timelines hypothesis: It is terrible, on purely aesthetic grounds.)

For example, in our current 2022 Earth reality, it would be totally pointless if the atmosphere suddenly filled up with tiny pink rhinoceroses. It would simply break the tension of the story. 

All around us, we see the structural fault-lines of our current civilizational order starting to crack and open into fissures and gaping voids. It is vertiginous, terrifying, and almost insane. But all of it makes perfect sense within the current plotline and story structure.