The Power of Art
The artist is a shaman. The artist’s role, especially in the West, has always been to alter the state of consciousness of the viewer, and to force the big Other, the capital “O” Other, the collective superego, to face its own shadow—as well as to face the super-consciousness, the One that is beyond the Other, that it denies.
The collective superego denies that there is any power greater than itself. That is why powerful nations, identifying with the big Other, can appropriate the right to invade smaller countries or otherwise determine the destiny of our planet. But this hubris, whether played out on the scene of international politics or within a family system or even within a single individual mind, can never be successful.
The power of karma will eventually restore justice and balance to the world. One of the most potent instruments of that power is the artist. The artist reveals the higher Truth to an arrogant establishment that claims hegemony over the world. And it is that revelation that then moves the conscience of the world toward reconciliation of the great powers with the greatest Power of all. This archetypal battle of vision between the artist and the political establishment has created much of the tension that has formed the trajectory of history. In this context, even religions can be considered as works of art. Religions begin as visions of Truth, and become refuges within which the arts can flourish. But the religious establishments soon become battlegrounds themselves, being appropriated in time by the big Other, and the artist is soon cast out once again into exile.
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.
Schrödinger’s Cat(aclysm)
For some thinkers, including Einstein, this was obviously impossible, a reductio ad absurdum. But for others, it was clear that quantum physics points to just this possibility. To explain such theoretical high strangeness, many theories have since emerged, including the possibility of parallel universes.
But Schrödinger’s cat has today emerged from its box, and is dead-and-alive and well and smiling uncannily at us, like another cat from Cheshire, from every point of our macro-reality. We are clearly now passing through an extraordinary moment of the revelation of quantum superposition in our phenomenal plane.
Further Reflections on Psychotic Knowledge
The line that separates sanity from madness has never been clear. In fact, it is not clear that such a line ever existed. This is because what passes for sanity today is in fact still a kind of madness. Even the psychoanalysts admit that normality is neurosis, a form of mental illness. They also admit that one of the most tenacious forms of psychosis is what they call normotic disease, meaning the insane need to appear normal. What if all normality is really normotic? This underlying insanity of the normal is becoming more evident every day as normal people and societies fail to adapt to reality, fail to respond to the climatic and other changes in our natural and social world that should put us all on red alert. Instead, we are being terrorized by propaganda regarding conspiracies that are themselves delusional. Reality-based discourse has become impossible.
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.