Let Them Eat Sex Magic!
Could a path of esoteric development via Tantrism, meditation, and psychedelics replace the tedium of labor in a post-work, AI-based society?
Perhaps the meta-context of this particular series of essays is “What do human beings do when there are no jobs anymore because of AI?” My answer, in short: “Let them eat sex magic!”
That is me being glib, I admit. Let me try to explain what I mean: Under the regime of post-industrial hyper-capitalist production (or, now, technofeudalism, which sucks away and commodifies our attention), the human being’s capacity to develop their unique essence, creative or spiritual self has been massively curtailed. I often point to Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, where, from a late-19th-Century dandy’s perspective, he noted that we needed the machines to evolve to perform all of the drudgery so that humans could be emancipated to engage in what he called “cultivated leisure,” which he considered the proper “aim of man.” Wilde wrote:
At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
I concur with Wilde here: If we lived in a basically sane world, we would not fear the end of administrative drudgery and repetitive labor, but we would welcome it as a benevolent evolutionary phase-shift. But I also think there is another level beyond “cultivated leisure” which Wilde, as a product of his time, didn’t know about it: That is esoteric development and the phenomenological exploration of the infinite medium of consciousness itself. This is the domain in which we can, in fact, seek to redeem the human experiment itself.
The current psychedelic movement—which I helped to launch with my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002)—got trapped in the productive / commodification / utilitarian mode of our Capitalist paradigm. I suppose, in retrospect, this was inevitable. I caught shards of the zillionaire live-forever dude, Bryan Johnson, live-streaming his high-dose mushroom trip on Youtube last Sunday, with Grimes DJ-ing. His focus was on studying the biometrics and figuring out if mushrooms have benefits for life-extension, along with tripping out. That is all fine, but, ultimately, I believe we need to consider integrating psychedelics into a more coherent Western esoteric / hermetic / occult set of practices that have a directed goal of inner transmutation—something similar to what you find with Tibetan Buddhism, where they have a monastic system that actually produces realized beings. We are still “spiritual neophytes “ in the West because we lost access to any culture of initiation with the rise of Christianity, which did away with the Mystery Schools and initiation centers.
The problem with “enlightenment” is that most Western people — even spiritual seeker-types — actually want nothing to do with it, even as they pretend to be pursuing it. Apparently the Tibetan Lama Chögyam Trungpa (a fantastic thinker and writer, posthumously disgraced, of course, by sex scandals) once told his students at Naropa in Colorado: “You know, you probably could all be enlightened right now. But I don’t think you would like it very much: You would find it too cold and too spacious.”
The problem with enlightenment is that it means the annihilation of any sense of personal identity or ego. The realized person continues to exist and experience, but as a radiant expression of the Void or nonduality. There is no longer personal predilections, taste preferences, ambitions to strive for, and so on. Ultimately, being enlightened looks like great fun, but giving up all attachment along the way is extremely difficult and painful. As Gurdjieff said, to develop along the spiritual path you have to make sacrifices, and the first thing you have to sacrifice is your suffering—and who is ready to do that?
Anyway, there are a lot of steps along the journey to ultimate non-attachment and non-identity, and some of those can involve exploring and experimenting with higher-voltage states of consciousness and sensuous matter, as with psychedelics, meditation, conscious explorations of eroticism, or some combination of the above. Conceivably, people could move into those areas slowly, with proper guidance and patience, if our social paradigm and shared ideology made that possible. We still don’t really share the belief that consciousness is the “name of the game”— all that actually matters—and that it can be deepened, enriched, intensified, in various ways that were well-known to the ancients as well as most indigenous societies.
At the moment, our society is convulsed, ruptured, around a negative, suppressive ideology and subconscious conditioning related to gender and eroticism, as we live it under this system of Capitalist domination and exploitation of both nature and human nature. With the current U.S. regime, we are seeing the apotheosis of transactionality, which turns all human relationships into commodified exchanges. This is part of what seethes under the surface of our nonstop fascination with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. With the Epstein emails, we confront the cozy complicity of Right Wing and Neoliberal elites across arenas including politics, finance, culture, and spirituality.
From the Epstein emails we learn that Deepak Chopra, for instance, was close to Epstein. “Anything we share is between us,” the celebrated Indian-American guru wrote to Epstein in an e-mail. “I share nothing with anyone but trust you.” When Epstein wrote to Chopra in 2016 about a woman dropping a lawsuit alleging that Trump and Epstein had repeatedly sexually assaulted her when she was thirteen, the paragon of New Age spirituality wrote back: “Did she also drop the civil case against you?” Epstein replied, “YuP,” to which Chopra responded “Good.” No doubt hoping for financial reward through his close relationship with the disgraced financier and Mossad agent, Chopra expressed zero ethical qualms.
I reflect frequently on the bizarre temple on Epstein island, a blue-and-white striped structure capped by a golden dome.
