Beyond the Singularity: This is the End of What World?
In one of the late Terence McKenna's most famous discourses about a DMT trip he took, he emphasizes how elvish voices kept telling him, "don't abandon yourself to amazement." I found that amazing, in fact utterly astonishing. He goes on to say that they commanded him to pay close attention. But one can both pay attention and be in a state of full-on astonishment at the same time. Some have taken literally his advice not to give way to amazement. But that is more often the command of the superego. How can we not be in amazement, astonishment, at every moment? Astonishment is what creates natural DMT in the brain. In fact, there is a lovely book that emerged from the Kashmir Shaiva yoga tradition, probably a thousand years ago, recently translated into English, and given the title The Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and Astonishment. In this teaching, otherwise known as The Vigyana Bhairava, it is revealed that the most direct path to Liberation is precisely through surrendering to astonishment.
This is the Mother of All Rites of Passage!
The Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge
We have entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as psychotic knowledge.
To call it psychotic is not to disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging. It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons of possibility.
We can trace this problem back to the period immediately following the Second World War, when the government of the United States created a national security establishment and a general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.
Why create a community to save the world?
Questioner: Dear Shunyamurti. Good morning here. I am reading your book now. You mention multitudes and empire (Deleuze, Guatari and Negri comes to mind).
You mention Signifiers ( the good Lacan). I can add Slavoj Zizek to see the world through Lacan, Hegel and Marx and say: ..the Real (of Lacan) is not external to the Symbolic: the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of non-all, lacking an external Limit/Exception....
Or Benjamin:..capitalism is actually, at its core, a religion, then it is an obscene religion of the 'undead' spectral life celebrated in the black masses of stock exchanges..
I have been there for years, trying to understand and save the world, in my mind, excusing God, denying him, seeing his deserved death and ultimately giving up on intelligently comprehending that there is no logical sense to history and what I see through my eyes as happening through my 60 years of witnessing.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj says then: You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth and love, intellligence and goodwill, imploring God and man - all in vain.