Today, after sharing a joint with my boyfriend and eating some really delicious tempeh tacos, I finished up the book Inner Revolution by Robert Thurman. The following is a fat excerpt from one of the best books I have come across:The existence of the great adepts is the proof of the positive development of ancient Indian society and of creative individualism as the fruit of enlightenment practice. Unconcerned with any institutional identity, they were regarded as outstanding exemplars by all traditions of the day, numbered as "The Eighty Four" by the Buddhists and as "The eighty" by the Hindus. These iconoclasts were the indian forerunners of the Zen masters of East Asia, of the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, and of American individualists such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. They embodied the full potential of life. They were the psychonauts, the leading experimenters of the inner technologies of enlightenment civilization, just as modern astronauts are the leading explorers of our outer technologies. The female and male great adepts found in their inner universes the resources to triumph over sorrow and inadequacy in order to bring joy and hope to people everywhere.
When we encounter these psychonaut adepts, we recoil from the scent of magic, from the joke of the supernatural, from the fantasy of the mystical, from the concept of a high technology of the mind. Yet when we come to materialistic high technology, no fantasy is too extravagant. We proudly extol the wonders of modern science and technology. We chuckle over how our own ancestors would have seen a picture on a television set as a product of witchcraft. How they would have thought the view of the microcellular world through an electron microscope was an alien glimpse of hell. How a rocket to the moon would have been condemned as violating the realm of the angels. How gene splicing would be a Frankensteinian tinkering with God's creation. And how the obliteration of all life on earth by hundreds of thousands of atomic and hydrogen bombs was a diabolical and ridiculous proposition. We have learned to accept all these wonders as normal, everyday realities. And yet we seize our present sense of how things are just as rigidly as did the medievals their sense of the flatness of the earth.
The enlightenment tradition discovered the micro and macro dimensions more than two thousand years ago by using sophisticated contemplative practices to augment the sixth mental sense of inner vision. They dicovered the infinite divisibility of the atom. They discovered microbes. And, most important to the pursuit of enlightenment, they discovered their own neurons and even the subatomic level of their own awareness. This realm is supernatural only in relation to a constricted definition of natural. It is mystical only when its analytic investigation is not completed. It is magic only when the technique involved is not understood.
Our minds perform magic all the time. When you see an item in your visual field, your brain has shuffled through the data bank stored in its neurons and has sent up a percept, a particular pattern stored in a set of these neurons. It has filtered through its rod and cone neurons the incoming photons reflected off all the objects in the visual field. It has organized a patch according to color and distance in relation to a foreground and a background. It has selected a group to distinguish; it has matched them with the synaptic percept pattern; and, lo and behold, we see a "tree," or a "house," or a "lake". This process is very like a software program directing a computer to produce a picture of a tree in response to our typing the word "tree" on the keyboard. Such a program is a very complex patterning structure, operating within a complex system. Now, if the software developed a virus, if it produced a car picture when we typed "tree," we would use another sort of software, a diagnostic utility program, which would enter into the software structure itself and look for a gap or a glitch. This program would have no idea of "tree" or "car" but would be looking through the binary switches within the system for a problem. It would be looking for a deficient microentity with a microentity subjectivity. Having reduced the car image to a blizzard of digital dots, it would look for the controller of the misperception that caused the car dots to be triggered by the "tree" command.
This diagnostic utility program functions like our sixth sense, the mental sense. It works within the structuring patterns that control the computer's attention to its input and output channels, which are comparable to the five senses of the ordinary person. It is a kind of subtle awareness that operates from the binary ground level of the machine. Enlightenment scientists have developed such an awareness through contemplation, systematic analysis, and penetration of course structures. They can perceive photons directly from the neuron level; they can detach subjectivity from structured coarse perception and exercise it from the more subtle levels. With this specially developed mental sense, they can grasp and transform reality in unprecedented ways.
During the European Enlightenment, Voltaire ridiculed the notion that this world is the best of all possible worlds, a notion that the Jewish or Christian monotheist is forced to wrestle with because of his or belief in the existence of an omnipotent, all-compassionate Creator. Voltaire sent poor Candide through misery after misery, having him stubbornly repeat, " It's the best of all possible worlds!" after every disaster.
The Enlightenment thinkers of that time were tired of the Church rationalizing everything bad that happened in the world as being for the best...So he ridiculed Candide to help Europeans have the courage to rely on their own reason. And Europeans responded by developing science and technology: They developed industry and intervened radically in the process of nature; they challenged taboos, secularized everything, and gained enormous new knowledge of the physical sciences; they set out to transform nature, and they succeeded to a very great degree. When traditional social structures got in their way, they overthrew them in the great series of revolutions that is still sweeping the world. When lack of wealth got in their way, they invented better weapons and travel technology and proceeded to subjugate all nations and races who did not share their science, power of travel, or warfare. They conquered the world.
From the seventeenth century until the twentieth century, Westerners thought this was working out. We came into the twentieth century thinking capitalism or Communism or bureaucracy, armed with science and technology, was about to create utopia, a heaven on earth, with freedom from disease, freedom from want and poverty, freedom from suffering. We were on the brink of making the best of all possible worlds out of stainless steel, plastics, chemicals, social systems, universities, and corporations.
But it hasn't worked. Some of us have sunk into confirmed nihilism and are waiting for pollution, population, war, and impoverishment to obliterate all life on earth. Others have reverted to old Candide-like attitudes and are sitting back, waiting for a savior.
The world is neither best nor worst - in an objective sense, the world is what the individual makes it. A world of individuals is the intersubjective, collective mind field of all those individuals....
We have imagined our world to be tamed, or civilized, since we live in cities and seem to have nature under control. It is hard for us to think of ourselves as wild and untamed. But "civilized" should mean something more than just living in cities. It should mean that we are wise, gentle, just, and even artistic in our dealings with the world and with other animals and humans. Our civilization is what I call an "outer civilization"; its modernity is an outer modernity. It is based on turning the full force of human reason on the enterprise of conquering and taming the outer universe - the universe of matter and energy, lands and continents, materials and products - and on viewing people as resources to be managed and developed for production. In the sense of being able to destroy things on a planetary scale, we have some power over nature - short of controlling major planetary phenomena, such as tectonic-plate movement, volcanoes, hurricanes, and so forth. Our creative power falls short, too, and we have found the pure land of materialism, the utopia of the capitalists and Communists, where people as bodies with interchangeable parts can be kept alive forever; where everyone can have a car; where population, resources, food, and wealth all are kept in perfect balance with no serious want; where all natural discomfort is controlled and moderated.
And what have we not controlled? We have not tamed our own minds very much at all. Our religions did do something of a taming job until the modern period...But they did not provide anyone, except a small monastic and mystical elite, with the methodology to overcome the negative instincts once and for all. And so, when the suppressive power of ideology, church, and state could no longer keep our inner balance in check, out it burst in all its violent glory, in fascism, in destructive orgies of technological warfare, and in the planetary terrorism of mutually assured nuclear destruction...
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