Grab Them By The (Everything)

If a theory of mind allows one to interact with others through projection, then a theory of society allows those in power to interact with society through projection, and those out of power to navigate that society. Whatever the case, it is staggering to watch the massive distortions in thought made available by power and privilege. 

You have a group of people that feel society is some sort of stable resource to be mined, which can be controlled and shaped according to one's will. Perhaps this is temporarily the case for those with enormous amounts of power. But this intoxicant of power is ever more unbelievable as it reaches new heights, in which powerful people think they can loot and take whatever they want, even under signs that the society is gradually becoming more squishy, amorphous, and antagonistic to control and exploitation. Of course, we know where these transgressions generally lead. 

Mirage

It really is quite odd, the contrast between the way in which we carry on thinking about ourselves collectively and the way in which we actually collectively exist. One brief example should suffice for now.

SEO writing is like a contemporary version of ad writing I suppose. And though the remote nature of freelance work does remove oneself from the actual firm where collective activities take place, in which one's contributions can be glimpsed - at least momentarily - in full, one does get satisfactory glimpses of the inner and hidden way in which things are now built.

I say "inner and hidden" because corporations do in fact generate powerful implicit images - not just in advertising - that convey the monolithic power of the products that they are bestowing on the public, in exchange for money. They have to do this because the exchange logic that undergirds market activity requires this cognitive process.

Upon every exchange, we can't simply converse with each other and coordinate all of our collective activities to produce something exchangeable for another mass of collective activities. It would be overwhelming. Instead the business says, hey this is fair, I'm going to give you this amazing thing that I produced, and you give me your offer in turn, the money you've worked for, and we're square.

But this basic compression, this social heuristic that allows daily social life to carry on without causing nervous breakdowns over their sheer complexity, eventually runs away from us. Through its repetition and fixing of convention, it takes on a life of its own, and the landscape of thought that it generates manages to conceal all of our true relations, causing all sorts of distortions. And on the these planes of distortion, further distortions are built, as over time distorting reality becomes the basic operating principle of society. But back to a more concrete example.

When you have to market for a given business, you tend to see certain things. You see what a business is willing to do in order to perpetuate itself socially, as marketing involves making a compelling appeal to the customer to initiate a "voluntary" exchange.

On the Internet, this appeal is coupled with a technical requirement to visually persist in the search engine landscape. So all of these companies that want to capture as much of the online market as possible are constantly having to expand and optimize their virtual content, their online presence so as to appeal to search engines. It is like filling up space with one's advertisement on a billboard.

So you have online company blogs that make certain appeals like, hey here is some advice straight from us professionals. For example, a legal company may offer legal advice on its blogs. This is intended to produce that feeling of indebtedness to the visitor: how nice of this company to offer free professional advice on their website, maybe I should check out their services? So companies proceed to fill up their corner of the Internet with blog posts that contain all of their advice. Except that it is often not their advice.

No, many of these companies simply hire freelance writers at rock bottom wages to put together blog posts for them. In freelancer practice, this means scouring the Internet for whatever can be freely gleaned on a given subject, and re-written for the paying company. It simply takes too much time and energy coordinating writers with companies that produce goods and services to provide quality content that reflects the actual knowledge the company has. Especially with the availability of a least path of resistance like the open Internet.

Much of the content is taken from online content generators, whether through free labor or online publications scratching around for advertising eyeballs.

What's more, this is merely a pattern overlaying countless other patterns that are similar in nature. All of this Internet posturing takes place over posturing in the real economy. A business presents its product as a monolithic and magical whole which comes solely from itself, whereas the supply chains and production centers are distributed all over the globe, and the actual effort from the developed nation company in question is merely a fraction of the finished product, which generally consists of concept, brand image, control of the company and its associated wealth, and etc.

So many of these businesses don't actually have any interest in producing something of genuine value for their customers, and you can forget about finding quality advice, or quality service for free on a blog post. Some companies do in fact do this, but the average mass of activity cuts the other way. These lies are structural in that they are constructed through the necessity of working with the actual logic of the system.

The actual logic of the system is horrific: it consists of spreading the means of production as far and wide as possible, that is, if the spreading makes economic sense, and to maximize exploitation of those resources - human and not - that possess the least protections, all for the enrichment of a center of power far removed from that center's sources of power. It is the image that is spread across this horrific landscape that denies and erases its existence, in the hope that the horrors can perpetuate themselves, layering over each other ever higher on the pyramid.

The practice of generating image, and working underneath that image within a sullied reality, is widespread and so everyone becomes accustomed to regularly furthering it. This destroys trust. It causes despair. And it cultivates the social tolerance for functional fictions. All processes I'd like to explore at a later time.

But for now, this basic practice of image maintenance seems to be an old human social function. Nothing new really. We've seen the old discussions around "commodity fetishism," and we also see this regularly and universally in interpersonal interactions: one represents only a portion of oneself in a given social interaction so as to temporarily preserve the integrity of the interaction.

The only difference is its sheer scale and extension in time and space. The weight of these multitudinous and interlocking fictions is so profound. For them to collapse would spell great calamity. No wonder then that totalitarian rule, as a modern phenomenon, has arisen in such conditions. The alternative to a world of horrors is the threat of oblivion itself.

We're Upstanding Moral Folk

Moral language is peculiar in that it tends to put up a blockage against further analysis.

If something is considered bad or evil, you simply can't engage in it if you want to prosper as part of a community that deems it so. The argument ends at "bad." If you try to argue for it, you're a collaborator, furthering the bad through indirect actions.

This isn't entirely a bad thing in itself. Inter-community killing can simply be sanctioned as a taboo without further argument, because it isn't productive to argue endlessly over whether one should be able to kill one's peers. This argument changes of course when you are talking about relations with outer communities that may be hostile in one way or another.  

But what tends to happen is that the power of the moral language stops at the power of those charged with upholding it, and that power is derived from the assent of those under the power, assent that is won through the continuation of a community's well-being. 

Happy Holidays (It Hurts)

At the end of a rather tumultuous year - it seems like they've all been tumultuous for some time, hence the cliche - it feels as though the advanced economic and political polarization of the country has permeated every aspect of society; in daily realities its palpability is undeniable. It oozes out of every relation as a constant hurt, and one looks tenderly over the growing gaps that are set to become yawning gulfs. And the holiday season, with its pulling together of far-flung relationships into proximate spaces, casts this reality in a starking light.

You Gotta

Compulsions represent curious phenomena in their own right. Washing one's hands for example probably falls into a realm of socially inculcated compulsion, as opposed to a basic drive like hunger or thirst.

But it is a good compulsion, if one has the available water to do so. It is generally a good practice, that acts to sustain human communities and buttress them from harmful bacteria. But it appears out of a basic fear or discomfort that is taught very early, and becomes internalized as a compulsion. Those nasty germs are out to get ya, so you better wash your hands, and etc.

One may or may not wash one's hands and be perfectly fine, and skip out on the possibility of picking up some harmful contaminant. But statistically, it is ultimately better to wash. One can pick something up somewhere at some time, and then spread it, and so on. So then compulsions do occupy a space between reasoned deliberation and bare feeling. But they seem closer to the former, and proliferate with the growth in strength of the former.

Spiritual compulsions are a different matter, but maybe not entirely different. Catholics cross themselves for example, to protect themselves psychically from unwanted sullying feelings, or to enter a psychically sacred state - a sort of psychic hand-washing if you will. Though this behavior seems strange and superfluous to the secular-minded, it does indeed fulfill a definite function.

On the micro, or individual level, it serves as part of the fabric which perpetuates the faith. It is bound up with an entire body of practices and beliefs which embodies the faith. It is a compulsion which is first socially inculcated and internalized, and then becomes a necessary operation for maintaining one's psychic well-being in the faith, a psychic well-being that acts to convert, whether through force of benefit or just plain force.

Whereas a compulsion like hand-washing can be said to perpetuate humans materially, a compulsion like crossing oneself can perpetuate a certain spiritual tradition or even the body of a deity.

But if it is the case that claims are being made that one's deity is dying or dead, what could be the conditions for such a death? If it is true, perhaps it is meant to be? What does that compulsion continue to serve to do, if not perpetuate the ravenous appetite of the living dead?

Attention Splitter

The flip-side to the convenience that compressed labor in the commodity and capital provides is the splitting of the attention and the confusion that the logic of specialization and the nature of capital in general introduces.

It is the whip of hunger and one's fitment into the social order that drives one's life disciplines. As the direction of society proceeds away from each individual, that drive has been split from one's ectasies, except for a lucky few who have come into control of higher society, or who have otherwise landed a fulfilling job that combines one's joys in a holistic package with general sustenance.

Everyone else then is stuck bobbing around on a tether, struggling in vain for ecstasy but constantly dragged back to one's position as dictated by supply, demand, and competition in the market. That is, if one hasn't already dropped out of the avenues of absorption and landed on the streets, in prison, in a daily fight for subsistence, or in the grave, as so may victims outside of the imperium are fated to end up. 

As the market is structured, that is, as the market is populated with a small amount of huge and complex firms, a greater but declining number of medium-sized firms, and a greater but declining number of small businesses, and so on, the vast majority of positions available consist of highly specialized and limited tasks.

And so most employees spend their days with minds numbed, and exhausted, return to some isolated habitation with fast food or a frozen dinner. There isn't the time to develop those faculties that drives one into creative, intellectual, culinary, physical, or spiritual ecstasy, and there isn't the time to generate one's own environment, political culture, or immediate community - all of which take time and energy to build their respective disciplines - and so one drifts passively to those created for them commercially, a sphere that is constantly expanding as commercial activity expands, both of its own internal pressures and to attend to growing markets caused by the shrinking sphere of autonomous individual activity, attributable to shrinking wages and resources.

So this generates confused, scattered, anxious, and fearful people who are tethered to their life raft careers, who are willing to entertain votes for authoritarian demagogues. Conveniently enough, binarist, conventional white people are all too happy to ignore the universality of this condition, if only they could hoist themselves up on top of compressed and marginalized communities, and perhaps throw some of their own peers down into the killing floor to keep together what tatters of this so-called "party" are left. It is a grim business.

Have It Quick

Like oil, commodities and capital can be viewed as compressed time.

In my most neurotic moments, I've found myself pacing about, helpless over some mess on the floor because I don't have a washcloth or paper towel at reach to clean it up with, which is an action that has largely become automatic.

Without money, which however imperfectly, does indeed represent labor time, one can't buy a towel to wipe up liquid. One would have to spend hours upon hours learning to weave and procuring the materials to weave. By then the liquid would have dried up, or grown some sort of mold, depending on circumstances. Perhaps one could take one's hand and wipe it up! And then one would be compelled to wipe on some other absorptive surface, say clothing, or furniture, all of which is still compressed labor ready for purchase.

The anxiety itself is predicated on economic and cultural processes underway. We are taught very young with the tools and materials we have to oversee our environments so that they are in order. With this ability shattered, one becomes anxious.

The maintenance and reproduction of life is largely built on a set of tiny repetitious actions that have been proven to work towards some end.

If I was to weave my own towel to order my environment with, it would have to be the case that I had access to or permission to access the raw materials, and then have access to the knowledge and techniques built up to properly weave a towel. As a person in a modern industrial and urbanized society, such a state of affairs is not currently the case.

So here my fictional composite sits, suspended in time, defenseless without basic items that are formed by generations upon generations of knowledge and labor. And further, the environment snaps into place those modes of labor. I can't just walk out of the house and find weaving materials in a state of nature. I'd more likely find dust, fragments of glass, and concrete. I'd have to buy some sort of fabric or thread. And it is less likely I am to come across someone in the street ready to teach weaving. I'd have to pursue some establishment, or tap into a social network, or read a book, or log on and retrieve the information on the Internet. All actions which take place within a multitude of cultural and economic forces.

The modern individual finds itself in an environment in which an acceleration of activity and expansion of activity has been the case for some time. One has to go out and buy a towel because one simply doesn't have the time or the means to weave it.

Buying a ready-made towel is so fast, because one is benefiting from centuries of refined towel manufacture, which has also been spatially located outside of one's community, where individuals far removed from one's life are squeezing all of their life's energy into producing the manufacturing infrastructure, the logistical systems, the towels themselves. That life energy - oftentimes of international communities of color - is squeezed, sacrificed, and ultimately compressed to reduce the amount of time it takes to procure the towel, so that those buying the towels have more time to squeeze and compress their own life energy into producing other things for others.

It is the hope of those upstream that their lives are a little less squeezed and compressed than those below them, those procuring the raw materials and producing basic commodities. Because to the modern citizen, producing a towel is not fun or interesting. So much more fun and interesting to pursue what the dominant members of society worship, whether it is the worship of certain facets of entertainment, high technology, athletics, statecraft, business, etc.

The higher these aspirations, the more these aspirations extract from the environment and lower general rates of return in resources and energy, the more the lower processes have to speed up, the more life energy they have to compress to maintain the ratio, or the pyramid-like shape of human labor, whose base, crushed under the weight of the superstructure, quivers and trembles to hold up the highest heights to the heavens.

Further it is this constant acceleration and mounting pressure that drives the proliferation of disposable products and greater flows of waste. As is the case throughout the rest of history, the benefits from this general process flow upwards to those with the wealth and power to eject waste, direct its flows, and flee unforeseen calamity. 

One is already present in a historical material flow which takes time and energy to depart from.

And to depart, it means compressing one's own life, making gradually more room for those trapped at the bottom, and shedding unproductive burdens. Generally, re-negotiating the structure of one's life, which implicates everything one is connected to.

Cyber-Scared

One of the things that becomes apparent when delving deeper into issues of cybersecurity is that the basic fear of the other that pervades nations and peoples in this era is so easily transmitted now.

Naturally this requires a little unpacking.

First, we can start with nations, these strange spatial and geographical conventions built off of the echoes of walled kingdoms. These are conventions which disperse in times of expansion, bathing populations around the world into the homo economicus ether, desperately swimming upward into the market fluids which have risen through global trade.

We have found in the course of studying the great wars that in contraction, the nations gel and retract their interpenetrating trade relations. A people, upon finding that it is the nation, that instrument of violence, and not the abstract ideals of human rights, that protect their security and property from the feeding frenzy that is capital accumulation, and so they clamor for the nation.

Of course it turns out that the nation in geographical space is most aggressively sought out by the reactionary, who simultaneously prizes violence, aggression, and ethnic purity, and so becomes the first mover wrapping up a monopoly on the instruments of violence, and points them outwards and inwards towards all others.

And of course all of this is happening again simultaneously and globally, thus accelerating the process towards mutual destruction.

Now we have the issue of Internet connectivity, with its whispy tendrils of worldwide communication, and its increasingly dense and local tendrils of automation and systems administration. All of which is subject to cyber attack at any time by anyone with the skills, hardware, and knowledge.

This category of person is far more expansive than the mere state actor ,which however irresponsible that category has become in general, is at least partially constrained by a feeling of weight by presiding directly over world political affairs.

Out of the nation, arises the commercial activity and eventually the communication infrastructure that becomes universalized through its global reach, while nations remain localized and dedicated to the opacity and autonomy of their Internet-connected regulatory systems, which are rapidly becoming more vulnerable to military and even civilian attack.

These tensions are playing out regularly today. We see an almost daily pitter-patter of cyberattacks, and if you read a serious cybersecurity expert, you will know that these attacks can come from anywhere and happen for any reason, and technically, they are very difficult to pinpoint and illuminate.

However! The cybersecurity industry is not run by serious experts. It is run by opportunists who want contracts and accumulation. And the opportunists know that state actors are increasingly paranoid, and increasingly ignorant of complex technical matters, and unhesitant to worship that which is slick, shiny, and well-marketed, and they are all too happy to take up unsound accusations if they fit into the nation-establishment worldview, and if the accusations come from someone slick, shiny, and well-marketed as well.  

There is a constant electrical storm which reaches all nations, within which countless actors for any reason are attacking various commercial and political targets through the Internet. And there is an industry that is fed by cozying up to the paranoid state actors and pointing the finger at the favorite bogeyman, which the state-specific media are all too happy to echo, as they too are fed by access to state actors, sensationalism, and a desire for accumulation.

For now, much of it is heated talk and saber-rattling. But if this is the state of discourse, and if this state of discourse is repeated and establishes conventional truths, and if the talk eventually materializes action, action which is grounded in the discourse set in place by the talk, then well, there you have it. Wonderful.

Eat Your Greens

Without paying attention, eating salad greens often seems a chore.

The resistance to do so grows as one grows tired. The greens don't taste great, and their texture is grassy. One seeks salt and sugar. And starchy textures.

But when one is afforded attention, through a clear head, and one directs one's attention to the greens and to the body, one can feel the greens work.

When they work, one feels: "ah, these are friends."

It raises affinity for the greens, and lowers resistance to eating them. 

The New Master

Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray asks: "Who is the alpha?"

Not me. I don't want to be the alpha. But I don't wish to exist under an alpha either. What does one do with that?

Karin isn't the only one. Everyone asks it all the time, even in minuscule daily behaviors.

Perhaps we could look upon each other as masters in development, which fit into each other.

Donkeys or Elephants?

If the Republican Party has reached hitherto unsurpassed heights of cruelty in its current iteration, the Democratic Party itself is the nurturing and binding element that reconstitutes the republic, smoothing over the worst excesses of the Republican party, and which, in its current state, largely leaves the forces of destruction in place, slowing them down, so as to preserve the system overall.

The Democratic party, unless radically restructured, preserves the springboard from which the Republicans can eventually reach new levels of viciousness altogether. Both parties are forms of abuse on the body politic. And the body politic, unfortunately, largely welcomes it, though not always of its own volition.

If it bears repeating, it is a trap. The current flows of power require that governance is capitalized. The administration of the modern state requires vast arrays of communication and transportation infrastructure for starters, all of which are fed and reproduced by mining, chemical, manufacturing, steelworking, logistical, and petroleum infrastructure, which are fed by and reproduced by communication and transportation infrastructure in turn.

And all of that infrastructure is presided over by various familial dynasties, individuals, and financial structures that are only consolidating further, and becoming more opaque and paranoid about potential loss. And the wealth dynasties are maintained by managerial labor plyed with a motivation for short sighted self-enrichment, a desire mimicked from the captains of industry themselves. 

So the election process requires capital. It requires the permission to use vast tissues of machine and electricity, a permission that is won from those motivated only by accumulation, at least in the current paradigm. Good luck restructuring any of it without a fight!

It is also worth saying that this isn't a phenomenon local to the United States, but to the entire industrialized world.

This is a largely banal observation at this point, at least from a radical perspective. But it is worth repeating. It should be a banality on our lips! Perhaps the tired old earworms dispensed by the Rs and Ds can be replaced by another earworm: enough with old and useless paradigms! Though of course inflation exists in the realm of discourse too. Eventually a certain volume of talk edges past illumination; its inflationary forces cheapen it.

Much like money, where increasing volumes of talk no longer have anywhere to go, they curl back on themselves and destroy their own functions, precipitating another phase of crisis.

Feeling

If you assent to using your heart to see, you are listening to it and responding to it. The contours of its communication become more clear, and it is strengthened. The mind is brought into deeper relationship with it. 

Here we are just talking about a colloquial way of describing "feeling," whether that feeling is for places, people, or whatever else. This is not to say that the heart runs away and suddenly becomes the master. No, it takes great external pressure for that to happen. Here one can order one's activities taking into account how one feels in a given state of affairs.

Where much of the external pressure is currently flowing is towards the executive functions, which our world of symbols and stimuli is constantly feeding and strengthening. So the mind's relationship with itself is strengthened. A powerful tool certainly, but a tool that must still exist in relation with the heart and the rest of the body.

And applying various mental concepts to attempt to drive the heart only goes so far. It all has to be taken together, and balanced together.

Whether You Like It Or Not

Another way that trauma unearths itself is simply when its tensile forces are too great to contain. The more systematic the depositing of the trauma, the more spectacular this revelation can become. And so for example one bold (and high profile) accusation of sexual violence calls forth many more, unraveling at least a partial set of conditions that made that build up of trauma possible in the first place.

Unearthing Trauma

To communicate some deep trauma to another - even when it isn't directly generated out of the relationship, which is a lot of the time - necessarily implicates the other in that trauma. Traumas are social in that they evoke a set of emotions and feelings that can be shared by anyone, and so to reveal this set of feelings is to share it in most cases.

This hurts quite a bit, for both people involved. It reverses the causal relationship of doing violence to another to preserve oneself, a relationship that is widespread and continuously extended in modern society, as trauma is escaped by displacing it to another region.

Instead, one strikes out with the knife, and one doesn't merely cut the other: one is cut back instantaneously. Or else one cuts oneself and the cut is mirrored in the other.  Both participants are asked to do violence to themselves in the process of unearthing shared traumas, and so many of the times this isn't done; the threshold for it happening is not reached, and oftentimes privilege lines are drawn over these fault lines. In the late modern world especially, if one has the privilege and power to escape trauma and suffering, it is often taken.

This pattern even shows up in progressive politics, where charismatic leaders take social transformation outwards, to banish trauma by restructuring society, while skipping out on the hard interpersonal work that must also take place simultaneously. Both categories of political transformation are essential and require each other.

If a society is restructured without interpersonal work, the bad relations will restructure that society. Inversely, altered relations without a restructured society will revert under the structural pressures kept in place.

Of course all of this ignores external societies that have committed to destructive patterns, or natural calamities for that matter, though these things are better weathered with less dormant trauma, a tensile quality that amplifies external force when acted upon.

Unearthing trauma, especially deep trauma, is not necessarily healing in itself. But it does generate a landscape in which understanding is afforded and suspicion is lowered, which can deflate paranoid spirals where they occur. If one is acting to protect oneself in accordance with one's trauma, it often looks threatening to those unaware of the traumas hidden underneath. However with trauma made visible, what may first appear as a threatening act is now revealed for what it is: an act of self protection and nurturing.

Eon Pt. 3

Standing at the cusp of a profound point of transition, one becomes mesmerized by the study of eons, of the vast stretch of deep time that contains so many beginnings and ends. There was a good reason for spending so much time earlier trying to tease out what is meant by a beginning or end.  

With so many beginnings and ends, or births and deaths over the course of human history, why is it that an individual has the desire to carry on at all, especially as the temporary vessel for one's temporary consciousness is obliterated? We all die eventually. Why is it so important to each of us to build up some sort of life work, and pass it on to later generations? For that matter, from where does the concept of heaven come from, or the concept of reincarnation? In the present, one must come to terms with one's future death. 

These are typically spiritual matters: the harmonization of the cycle of the individual with greater cycles and movements, which has to occur not only on the intellectual level, but the emotional as well. If one fights one's eventual end with all of one's heart, even though that end is necessary within a greater movement, then one is suffering. Whether that suffering is needless or necessary is another matter altogether, also up for spiritual evaluation. 

It does seem as though one of the most compelling instincts permeating the entire life-purpose of a given individual is that of establishing some sort of continuity in thought, which transcends the individual and even community, but which is nevertheless a continuity partially grounded in the nature of the individual itself. The individual must be psychically and emotionally connected with the life and death of a greater body, whether that body is a community, nation, species, or planet. 

Once one gets past the prospect of individual death, one can turn to continuity. Even the practical-nihilistic and death-worshiping Nazi labors for some "master race" or "homeland." But what happens when continuity itself is threatened?

Beginnings and ends, and continuous things for that matter, are strange things. What of the cyanobacteria that flooded the atmosphere with oxygen three billion years ago, thus paving the way for animal life and glaciation? The continuous flow of cyanobacteria came out of the earth and precipitated great change with their flood of oxygen, killing off many of their peers and supporting the rise of others. 

It casts our species in a strange light too, its continuous flow coming from the earth and finally making contact with so much buried organic material, setting it free and depositing it into the sky and earth as carbon dioxide and plastic. Whether what emerges is a vast elaboration on the technological formations we've developed, or simply the conditions for the slurping of civilization and its co-evolved living forms into the earth, leaving a new slate for another milieu of life forms, it is fairly certain that all that exists will be radically transformed in one way or another. 

Without a doubt, this piercing energy into the continuous plane of the Phanerozoic eon - or whatever lower of tier of geological time that is to end - is causing great suffering for those unaccustomed to the end of such profound stretches of time.        

Surrounded by suffering, one comes face to face with a recurring and ancient understanding: that suffering is as much a function of one's mind as it is a natural function of the universe. Winters come and go, in which energy wanes, as do summers, which can produce too much energy. Things come to end at the moment that other things begin. And there are periods in geological time in which there is a greater concentration of ending, and a greater concentration of beginning for that matter. 

If one is surrounded by suffering, and one suffers as a result, one of the first things should be to inquire after the nature of one's perception and sensibility, so as to harmonize oneself with the greater body one is a part of, regardless of whether that body is embodied destruction itself.  

Here I've operated through an intense interrogation of ideology, but there are plenty of other ways to go about it. And indeed, it is the dominant Western spiritual tradition at the moment that gives us so much trouble, with its infinite yearning into the heavens and its refusal of its own mortality, and all of the bellyaching that comes with those drives in the face of a reality where precisely the opposite seems to be taking place. Plenty of other cultures and spiritual systems - and even less dominant ones in the Western body - have figured this out with far more grace and elegance. But anyway. 

In the modern world, there is a tendency of a conscious subjectivity to build ideological structures for understanding the dynamic and chaotic natural forces, and this tendency also plays an important part in modern spiritual life.

Ideology itself, that supposedly demonic drive responsible for the great (and unforgivably violent) mass movements in the modern world, has always been with us. It only took its present form - as a self-relating structure of ideas - in the modern era when a greater emphasis was placed on individual thought and rationality, and our energy and attention was focused on the products of these things. 

Christianity for example had ideological structures growing out of its early mystical experiences far into the past, only they weren't necessarily experienced as such. We can call it ideology today because of the emergence of ideology in the consciousness as an efficacious force, as it fully develops in force, and we project backwards within the fully developed environment of this thought and language. It is the tool of thought that we currently have most refined, and any sort of re-emergent spirituality may re-emerge within this milieu, while it also may re-emerge in various bare experiences as well. 

So we have a classic developmental process in reverse: where an ideology once crystallized out of a connected set of practices and experiences, ideology can now direct some sort of spiritual inquiry. Today in a hyperstimulated world of symbols, it is sometimes difficult to listen to higher spiritual bodies, though they certainly do leak out appearances in many ways, say through visions, hallucinations, dreams, etc. 

Out of an ideology and its practices, these leaks in communication can be further developed, perhaps into floods, and new spiritual experiences may be had, which could very well obliterate the housing ideology itself. 

It is the fundamental instability of this age that demands a spiritual readiness for change and even obliteration. As a living thing, one may build houses - whether physical or psychic - while still expecting them to be eventually swept away. The life on a flood plain generates in anticipation of flood. And the alpine flower on the slope of the mountain fully blooms even in the face of avalanche. 

One must become what one is, but that becoming has now taken on the nature of the passing away. What one is necessarily includes what one will become: in this case, it may be something radically different, or something in a state of disintegration - sooner rather than later.