“What was once the province of students of spirituality, of visionaries and seers, of prophets and mystics, of poets and mythmakers,” states Powe, “is now in the reach of everyone with access to electric super-Nature, as McLuhan insisted.” (Powe, 696) From my point of view, one that is determined by my own immersion in the culture of music, art, and poetry, these visions experienced in meditational trance states are one of the highest forms of art. Instead of going to the theatre or the opera, one experiences a personal and highly interactive art form. As an adolescent my mystical experience of bliss and the opening of the third eye came as an aesthetic one as I was listening to a Beethoven string quartet. If cognitive scientists wish to explain away Bach and Beethoven, or dismiss love as a matter of pheromones and neurotransmitters, then let them live on with their lives dismissed. But I shall persist in my folly with love and beauty. As William Blake said, “if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise” (69) Shamanism was the form of spirituality that evolved in the oral culture of preliterate societies. Religion was the form of spirituality that emerged with literate societies and their new temple-based readings of the stars and sacred texts. Though traditionalists may wish time to stop, it does go on, and now in our global electronic society, a new transreligious form of spirituality is emerging, one that will not replace religions, anymore than the nucleus of the cell replaced the mitochondria, but will envelop them in a much vaster form of consciousness… expressed in a cultural retrieval of animism. In the smuggled esoterism of children’s (and popular culture generally) literature, comic, books, music, science fiction, and in the structure of digital and social media content and its manner of experience, the many becoming one is being expressed… the beginning of a unique/universal self-similar architecture of consciousness that is based upon individual experience and not upon priestcraft, rigid dogma, and collective forceful indoctrination. We discover, on the other hand, a more surprising and delightful politics of Being behind the mask. (85) -William Irwin Thompson, Beyond Religion: The Cultural Evolution of the Sense of the Sacred https://youtube/watch?v=4a75S2r60ec
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 22:23:05 +0000
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