I very much appreciate Alberto Villoldo’s remark in the last post, on clearing the brain: “Once you clear the brain, you realize that all beliefs are limiting. So you begin to establish a hypothetical relationship with the world.”
But what is a “hypothetical relationship” with the world? To me, it’s one where I’m not sure about anything, and — very important — it doesn’t matter that I don’t know. I am aware that everything I think is somehow conditioned, that all my “windows on the world” limit my experience of the world to what can be captured within those particular frames. I am learning to live below the restless mind’s endless cogitations that aim, always, to fix the eternally moving, endlessly mysterious cosmos in place; to freeze it, to kill it — and then, of course, to fight others about whose dead world is the real one!
In another article on realitysandwich.com, I came across a couple of wonderful paragraphs which, to me lyrically evoke the kind of attitude that we might evolve into, both as individuals and as a species, in order to transcend conflict. In the article, the author is responding to the contradictory hoopla around “2012,” but his point is a general one.
Here’s the excerpt, from:
The Singularity Archetype and Human Metamorphosis
by Jonathan Zap
July 13, 2011
But what if there were an image of the future, a primordial image, low resolution but so brilliant that it glitters from the misty depths of countless dreams, and shimmers from behind the distorting mirrors of religious traditions, the fever dreams of saucer cults, the futuristic imaginings of science fiction, fantasy and other artifacts of contemporary mythology? What if an essential image of the future were overlaid, like an iridescent hologram, onto everything we perceive? If we tear off a little piece of the hologram, we see a very blurry version of the original image. This little piece of the hologram has the Rorschach-like blur of an image about to come into focus. The iridescent blur of the almost-image invites the psyche to confabulate various visions. Is it a beast with seven heads? A Ring of Fire? A King of Terror? Something cool and kind of Mayan? Every projection onto the blurry hologram is a bit different, but all of them are right about one thing: There is something there, some sort of image, blurry though it might seem. The image squirms and scintillates before us, struggling to come into focus. If we are too attached to our little piece of the hologram, what comes into focus is our projection onto the hologram. Perhaps we got our projection from a religion, a tradition, a self-proclaimed prophet, or perhaps it came right out of our own imagination.
But there is another way to look at the hologram. Instead of gazing into little pieces of it, we can look at the pieces as a vast mosaic. All of the pieces are refractions of a single primordial image. If we don’t fixate on any one of them, but allow them to flow back together we may see an image coalesce and emerge from the larger hologram. The image that emerges from the unfractured hologram is more than the superimposition of individual projections; it is a primordial image of a structure that exists within the potential of our species right now. This image is the seed of the future we are hurtling toward. I call this primordial image of the future the Singularity Archetype.
