Materialism’s Demise and the Search for a New Existential Myth: Some Personal Observations

Prepared for the “Mind, Matter, and the New Real” symposium held at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, December 3–8, 2017

Abstract: Local realism’s limitations for a complete view of reality have been empirically proven time and again in the laboratories of the world’s physicists for over a quarter of a century. Despite this fact, philosophical materialism remains modernity’s reigning existential myth and continues to infect the contemporary world’s popular culture like a narcotic fantasy, serving as the default intellectual setting for many of our private assumptions, global media corporations, information technologies, political ideologies, and public entertainments. What does liberating ourselves from its restrictions imply for the future? What might a restoration of things like meaning and purpose to reality portend? And what are the evolutionary/revolutionary implications of such an emerging consciousness?

Nature is always right.
Goethe

[Materialism] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Borrowed from Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”

Mistuh Kurtz – he dead.
Epigraph to the poem “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot

So it begins.
Spoken by King Theoden in the film of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Two Towers”

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
First stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem, “Annus Mirabilis”
 

Nineteen eighty-two was perhaps even more epochal for the international scientific community than 1963 was for the British poet Larkin, for it was in that year Alain Aspect, inspired by the genius John Bell, and following in the footsteps of scientific iconoclasts like John Clauser and Ed Fry, published his famous experiment proving local realism was untenable as a complete explanation of reality. Fifteen years later, Nicolas Gisin demonstrated Bell inequality violations at up to ten kilometers – and this outside the laboratory, at that – in his groundbreaking experiment near the shores of Lake Geneva. Since that time scores of even more tests by other physicists have replicated, refined and extended Aspect’s and Gisin’s findings. Nature’s nonlocality (with no hidden variables) is now experimentally confirmed to approximately 70 standard deviations (https://phys.org/news/2013-06-bell-test-loophole-photons.html); a mind-boggling degree of accuracy considering the fact that science never says something is certain, preferring, instead, to speak in probabilities. Seventy sigma is about as probable as anything in this world is ever likely to be. Like Conrad’s diabolical Kurtz, or, if you prefer, Monty Python’s parrot, materialism as a complete explanation of reality is herein pronounced quite, quite dead.

According to quantum physicist Henry Stapp (an old friend of Esalen), nonlocality is the most profound discovery of science. Note this. It is not simply an interesting finding or significant advance, but the most profound discovery in the history of science. The reigning materialist paradigm that has dominated Western culture for three hundred years is thereby definitively empirically dethroned as a complete explanation of reality. In Stapp’s words, “During the 20th century this morally corrosive mechanical conception of Nature was found to be profoundly incorrect. It failed not just in its final details, but at its core.” That is not to say that Newton’s F=ma and Einstein’s E=mc squared do not apply in their proper domains, but there is more to reality than the horizon of classical physics. How much more so is still a mystery.

More than seventy-five years after reductionism’s demise in the labs of Bohr and Planck, and nearly twenty-five after Aspect’s shot straight to its heart, in 2015 Nature magazine printed local realism’s obituary in its article entitled “Quantum physics: Death by experiment for local realism.” Reasonably viewed as guardians and high priests of the establishment materialist myth, its editors must have swallowed hard before publishing this, and all the more praise to them for doing so.

However for something to be pronounced dead, does it not necessarily have to have been alive at some point? Materialism as complete explanation for reality never was, but its cousin philosophical materialism is another matter entirely. In point of fact, it, too, is proven untenable by Nature’s behavior. That said it stubbornly refuses to politely go away, lie down and decompose. Despite all the many considerable and even dramatic scientific, replicable evidences and observations against it, philosophical materialism remains modernity’s reigning existential myth and continues to infect the contemporary world’s popular culture like a narcotic fantasy, serving as the default intellectual setting for many of our private assumptions, global media corporations, information technologies, political ideologies, and public entertainments. To varying degrees I firmly believe this applies to everyone in this room, however unconscious the case may be; me included, of course. Perhaps that’s why I fight it so hard. I suppose an analyst would say it activates a complex of mine. It is unavoidable. We are indoctrinated by our culture, schooling and professional training. Materialism is the sea in which we all swim, if only down the block to Starbucks. And how risky it is to saw against this tough grain! To declare on public media stages, in the classroom or via online platforms that there is something more to living life as a human being other than briefly and meaninglessly wandering the surface of the Earth as a mechanically twitching bag of meat, water and bodily waste powered by weak electro-chemical impulses is to open one’s self to charges of promoting woo, obscurantism, superstition, delusion, bad faith, fraudulent behavior, and stupidity, if not downright intellectual retardation. In this jealous, old myth, the universe’s crowning achievement to date, contemplative consciousness is, at best, only electro-chemically emergent, merely the product of brain processes and neurological firings, and, at worst, nothing but a delusion . . . non-existent. For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett says you’re a robot, and this one of the nicer things on offer. Reactions to views contrary to the materialistic myth are swift and very real. Apple Inc.’s perorations aside, thinking differently brings on a host of troubling consequences to professional and personal reputations. Scientists as well credentialed as Rupert Sheldrake have been de-platformed from contemporary media stages like TED talks and popular web sites such as Wikipedia are patrolled by scores of amateur non-authorities who, their complexes triggered, often react within seconds to edit and/or terminate entries which suggest things like the fact that consciousness might transcend time and space, NDEs are veridical, reincarnation happens, or that exceptional experiences and abilities like remote viewing and mediumship are often efficacious and very much real. No matter. Although they may retain their careers for the foreseeable future as media pets and public entertainers, as philosophical emperors the materialist cohort of “I Love Science!” popularizers, scientistic poseurs, and hard line reductionists are now shown to be quite, quite naked. Who says? Why, Nature herself, and Nature, as Goethe reminds us, is always right. After all, she’s been hard at work for 14,000 million years.

Being wrong never stopped anyone, however. Marxism, which contends that all reality is only matter in motion, has wrecked national economies, enslaved whole peoples, and been directly responsible for the murder of over 100 million individuals in the last century. Based on untenable scientific premises and despite abundant evidence refuting its antique Weltanschauung, as a philosophy – especially in its cultural interpretations featuring postmodern, anti-realistic presuppositions – it is still confessed on American and European campuses in various guises. (For a cogent debunking of postmodern antirealism, see philosopher John Searle’s 2008 work, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. Searle diagnoses this antirealism as a form of will to power.)

Hard core, scientific materialists of evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin’s stripe are equally – to employ an au courant term – problematic, because scientism with a big “S” is the only commonly agreed upon religion that continues to thrive, or is, more accurately, allowed to thrive unmolested in contemporary American popular culture. As self-incriminatory testament to this charge, Lewontin himself once famously wrote, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” (The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997)

Talk about triggered! Both Lewontin and I are, although for different reasons. Are not good scientists only supposed to prefer what is true and only supposed to go where the evidence leads them, not wasting precious time – and grant money – constructing ideological temples to false gods, all contrary observables be damned? For the last century, the main problem for those so motivated is that they haven’t liked where the evidence is leading them. One of the most troubling facts to them is that the scientifically out of date viewpoint of classical physics in all its once proud, three hundred year-old glory has been recently been discovered flat on its back in the ditch that runs beside that road. And it is a road they dare not travel down due to their own quasi-religious presuppositions, hence all their defensiveness, anger, disdain, projection, anxiety, and general agitation. James Randi, please call your office.

The reality bending denial inherent in the presuppositions of the senile scientific myth warps modern society in manifold ways. Pauli’s protégé Stapp helps us here at a bit more length: “More than three quarters of a century have passed since the overturning of the classical laws, yet the notion of mechanical determinism still dominates the general milieu. The inertia of that superseded theory continues to affect your life in important ways. It still drives the decisions of governments, schools, courts, and medical institutions . . . This mechanical picture of human beings erodes not only the religious roots of moral values, but the entire notion of personal responsibility. Each of us is assumed to be a mechanical extension of what came before. This conception of man undermines the foundation of rational moral philosophy. Science is doubly culpable: It not only erodes the foundations of earlier value systems, but also acts to strip man of any vision of himself and his place in the universe that could be a rational basis for an elevated set of values . . .The conflating of Nature herself with the impoverished mechanical conception of it invented in the 17th century has derailed the philosophies of science and mind for more than three centuries by effectively eliminating the causal link between the psychological and physical aspects of nature that contemporary physics restores . . . even your own choices [are affected] to the extent that you are influenced by what you are told by pundits who expound as scientific truth a mechanical idea of the universe that contravenes the precepts of contemporary physics. Educated people need to understand these 20th century developments in science. We need to touch upon the social consequences of the misrepresentations of contemporary scientific knowledge that continues to hold sway, particularly in the minds of our most highly educated and influential thinkers. What fascination with the weird and incredible impels philosophers to adhere, on the one hand, to a known to be false physical theory that implies all our experiences of our thoughts influencing our actions are illusions, and to reject, on the other hand, offerings of its successor which naturally produces an image of ourselves fully concordant with our normal intuitions. What we value depends on what we believe and what believe is strongly influenced by science.” (All quotes are taken from Stapp’s Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer, Springer, 2011, 2nd edition.)

Driven, at least in part, by an illogical thralldom to a superseded world view that posits people are essentially automatons not responsible for their actions, popular entertainment effectively renders individual sanctity nugatory; others beyond one’s self are simply means to selfish pleasure or opportunities for pecuniary exploitation, not unique ends in their own right. In summation, materialism’s effect on popular culture is all too often solipsistic, corrupting and dehumanizing. Extreme violence is routine and much of the sexual behavior is sexist and cruel, if not downright sadistic. Reference the hugely popular Game of Thrones television series for a field demonstration of this argument.

What can we do? Personally, I don’t think we have a choice. No matter what dire consequences with which contravention of the rotting old myth and its acolytes threatens us, we must journey down that road blazed by Aspect et al no matter what. None of us can return to our former reductionist, materialist gardens, however cozy they feel. Quantum physics has bitten the apple for us all. The terrible angel of the new physics with her flaming sword gestures and frowns, commanding us onward, down that mysterious road, one to which we will very likely never reach the end. Not in our earthly lifetimes, at least, for quantum physics (which has never been proven wrong by experiment) reveals that the “fundamental process of Nature lies outside space-time” although it generates effects and experiences in space-time (Stapp). For the collaborators psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli this refers to the “psychoid,” unknowable, unified reality (unus mundus) from whence physis and psyche appear in space-time as aspects of this mysterious, underlying reality. This same unknown realm is termed “veiled reality” in the late Bernard d’Espagnat’s work. From here to what nascent existential myth are we summoned? What is reality with a big “R”? This may prove unanswerable, but we have hints. We may never ultimately know what this ground of origin is, but at least we now know what it is not. And whatever the phenomenological aspects of this underlying reality prove to be, surprisingly enough, I think, in a very real way, they somehow lead us back home.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. taken from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”

It’s all true, you know. Psi, NDEs, OBEs, remote viewing, personal survival, death bed visions, materializations, apports, reincarnation, ghosts, PK, remote viewing, telepathy and precognition in dreams and waking, clairvoyance, siddhis, healing prayer, mediums, UFOs, meaningful, acausal synchronicities . . . all of it, the whole kit and caboodle, is true. That is to say these things are true if by true you mean that exceptional (anomalous) human experiences that can fit into these categories roughly or smoothly enough have continually happened and been observed and reported down through human history and are, in many cases, replicable (in the lab and out), and may thereby be deemed scientifically verifiable and veridical. They happen and they go on doing so, full stop. That we have good data for them is thanks to scores of researchers who have diligently labored throughout history, often with little recognition, favor or funding, to make sense of such strange, and stranger, things. This roster include names like James, Myers, Rhine, Eisenbud, Ehrenwald, Gauld, Jahn, Bem, Targ, Grof, Tart, Puthoff, Roll, Ullmann Krippner, von Lommel, Fenwick, Schmidt, Stevenson, Greyson, Kelly, Haraldasson, Radin, Pauli, Jung, Atmanspacher, and Kripal. I hesitate to continue because there are so many contributing researchers with impeccable credentials and sound scientific protocols who have studied and/or delivered observables for these exceptional phenomena that I fear leaving out someone. And at any rate, enough is enough. In the words of a not bad amateur psychologist from a long time ago, those who have “eyes to see and ears to hear” and are scientifically literate enough to understand statistical analysis and probabilities have confirmatory evidence aplenty to make their decision. It does require intellectual objectivity, however, which is ever in short supply. And under the still enthroned tyranny of a waning materialist myth, however flaccid, it also requires courage, which is in shorter supply still.

These disparate phenomena show themselves and Nature is unfazed. Of course, their sheer reality doesn’t explain them; nor does naming them. By definition, exceptional experiences remain elusive; shy even, hence the term “anomalous.” But, funnily enough, they ALL seem to have something to do with consciousness . . . whatever that is.

Daniel Dennett –style reductionists think nothing is conscious and panpsychists think everything is . . . including rocks. Intuitively, I rather like that one a lot. The John Hopkins University physicist Richard Conn Henry thinks consciousness creates the illusion of matter while the late Francis Crick thought it was very much the other way round, that consciousness is only electro-chemical firings in the meat jelly at the top end of your nerve cord. It is all very confusing. There are easy problems of consciousness (all that chemistry in the meat jelly) and hard problems (those ever elusive qualia like red tomatoes or the blue of your lover’s eyes). This problem is a very hard nut, indeed. And no one has cracked it yet.

One thing is certain. If “exceptional” experiences do, indeed, occur, as has been empirically established, then mind operates nonlocally. In other words, individual consciousness transcends time and space. This being the case I think one can safely rule out the reductionist, electro-chemical meat jelly fable as the only explanation for consciousness. Nature has long been proven to operate nonlocally at the subatomic level and this is now demonstrated at the macroatomic level in photosynthesis, bird navigation, and DNA. Nonlocal mind seems to suit Nature just fine. The Myers-James transmission model of the mind works here, too. Brains are located in time and space. Broadcast through these fantastically complex biological receivers, consciousness/mind acts trans-temporally and trans-spatially. In perhaps the most salient question for any human being ever, is it then possible for an individual’s consciousness to survive the death of her brain? Based on the aforementioned exceptional experiences; yes. Yes, it is. As Jung once said in one of his BBC interviews, “The psyche doesn’t seem obliged to be confined to time and space.” Meaning and purpose are therein restored to the Universe.

Over twenty years ago, journalist Tom Wolfe published an essay on then current developments in neuroscience entitled, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died.” It appears that you just got your soul back. Not that it went anywhere. Nature does what she wants, not what scientists want, no matter how badly they want it. Sorry Dr. Lewontin . . . you, too, Dr. Dennett. Just kidding, I’m not. Telling people that their traditional understanding of being a conscious being imbued with free will, meaning and purpose is nothing but a sad delusion, and this same depressing message all based on scientifically untenable premises, has no doubt caused much psychological harm over the years. Nihilism, scientistic in origin or otherwise, destroys lives.

So what is the original provenance of nonlocal consciousness? My guess would be Jung and Pauli’s psychoid unus mundus. Explaining mystery with another mystery may be unhelpful, but it is all we have at present. Nature communicates through symbolic images in dreams. Maybe that might work here. I liken the Universe to a prism. White light, please stay with me, it’s a metaphor, emanates (breaks symmetry?) from the unknown, unknowable underlying psychoid reality and then, from the Big Bang onward, is refracted throughout Nature over the eons into a rainbow spectrum of substances, matter, forms, and creatures, some with complex, biological brains. Throughout it all, like an interwoven thread, consciousness is entangled. There’s that panpsychism, again. As to this choice of imagery, according to the standard cosmological model, space-time began with photons (“Let there be light”), so why not?

Refining, evolving and growing contemplative consciousness is what the Universe does. It’s what the Universe makes. In a very real way, it’s what Nature is “for.” She is, in a manner of speaking, a living organism that manifests and exudes consciousness. And she does it best through her children, one by one. Jung wrote, “The individual is the only reality.” As noted in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, “the Tao grows out of the individual.” And that, to me, might serve as the initial spark for a new existential myth.

Every discrete, individual being, from a paramecium in a puddle in Papua New Guinea to a majestic Big Sur sequoia; from an ant on a leaf lost in the Congolese rain forest mists to a green-winged beetle frantically navigating a café sidewalk in Rome; from a portly ethnologist huffing to class across Harvard Square to a suburban backyard mutt in Liverpool; from a migrating grey whale spouting off California’s Channel Islands to a timid first grader in a Sao Paulo favela on her first day of school; and, yes, even down to that stolid, uncommunicative rock on its granitic ledge somewhere in the middle of Utah, the Universe, Nature herself, is experimenting in an unprecedented, unrepeatable way at what it means “to be,” playfully challenging herself to be born anew in a such a manner that this great mystery named consciousness that is entangled throughout her expansive body may appear in a way never seen before, in time or out. Every living being, every natural manifestation, organic, or, yes, even mineral, plays a meaningful role in this new story and has a unique, unprecedented, and never to be repeated contribution to make to its ongoing telling.

And so, once upon a time, a spark was kindled and a universe was born. Over time, microorganisms of simple complexity and organization gradually evolve in the inferno of the early Earth with its violent landscape of crackling lightning, spurting lava, and steaming geysers bursting from ruptured rock. For eons the situation is precariously touch and go, as simple organisms arise and then fade into extinction. Then comes the biggest bang since the first, the so-called Cambrian explosion, a spectacular eruption of creatures half a billion years ago, wherein a rapid and almost hallucinatory proliferation of multicellular diversity comes almost out of nowhere in what can only be described as another creatio ex nihilo. Over time, a phantasmagoric array of organisms able to “move freely with well-developed sense organs and nervous systems capable of interpreting all manner of signals” (Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge University’s Chair of Evolutionary Palaeobiology; see his Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Cambridge University Press, 2003) takes center stage. Encephalization occurs in anthropoid apes and hominids on the African savanna and in their cetacean mammalian cousins, the whales and the dolphins in the murky depths of planet-girdling oceans. And an even more distant relative on the tree of life sprouts an uncanny intelligence in the deeps, the cephalopods; octopi, squid and cuttlefish. On land and sea, mind is on the move; and not only there, for in the air among the rain-soaked canopies of the Central African forests gray parrots display abilities exceeding even those of the monkeys cavorting in the branches around them, and in distant Pacific islands crows learn to craft twig hooks to get at insects, an astonishing tool-making and goal-directed activity rivaling that of Jane Goodall’s beloved chimpanzees.

Scientifically speaking, it appears that this emergence of intelligence was a relatively robust, species-neutral phenomenon. Metaphorically speaking, over time cognitive sophistication tenaciously works its way through matter, evolving and sharpening its acuity across numerous species as it creeps and crawls and walks across the planet, flies above its treetops, and swims along its coasts and roams its watery abysses. Something new in the realm of Nature is embodied in this beautiful and majestic thing called mind, laying the evolutionary groundwork for something greater yet, still unnamed, that is struggling to emerge and break free, biding its time, waiting for its proper opportunity to be born and step into the light and assume its rightful place in a blooming, buzzing cosmos.

To employ contemporary AI phraseology, evolution almost looks to be a search engine laying the groundwork for this approaching and most mysterious of ends. And then one day it finally happens: contemplative consciousness appears. Herein the objective psyche is revealed and Meaning enters history.

Where did this second Creation, as Jung called it, this mysterium tremendum et fascinans that changed everything always and forever, first happen? Where was the setting for this prophetic encounter between Psyche and Physis? The answer is unknown. Did it first take place in the sea? Possibly, for we now know that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors, a marker for self-awareness, so one cannot prohibitively rule out a submarine setting. Was it in the air or the leafy branches? Gray parrots’ amazing abilities certainly attest to this setting as an option. Most surely from what evolutionary biologists now understand, this second “making of the world” could have come to pass in any of these spaces, for natural history now confirms that for millions of years all of Nature was converging on this single moment, this very special point in time that would begin the world anew. Mind and intelligence across the globe were fortified by the first stirrings of culture and transmitted innovative learning, ever quickened and evolved in the thousands of species that flew and crept and walked and swam in, above, below and through this three dimensional theater of wonder that is Planet Earth.

So where was it then? Where would this Second Coming be most likely? Where did this natural renaissance begin? Where did this most divine of all fires first descend? My intuition is that it had to be Africa, and science supports this view. As human beings have mental states that transcend any other sentience on Earth (as to elsewhere? that remains to be discovered), it seems only natural that this greatest of all awakenings first occurred in the birthplace and original home of Homo Sapiens. Somewhere on the African savanna, on a morning forever unknowable and lost in time, one of our ancestors realized that she was at once a part of, and apart from, all that surrounded her and she smiled, and in that smile Nature became self-aware. On that long ago African morning, a door opened and a conversation began . . . a conversation in which the Universe is in dialogue with itself through the consciousness of its creatures, and the most direct portal is the psyche of Man, a conduit from the no-time before Time into the Now, a medium wherein, as Jung said, “The creator sees himself through the eyes of man’s consciousness.” In the bright light of day, this experience comes in signs and wonders, thoughts and musings and intuitions, seined through perceptions and presuppositions, but in the night it descends in awesome primal power, unfiltered by the ego’s discriminating net. Transcending time and space, it comes in the Dream . . . the lingua franca of Nature herself.

There is a dream dreaming us.
Nineteenth Century Kalahari hunter to German linguist Wilhelm Bleek

Bees sleep. Some scientists think they dream. Even jellyfish and fruit flies enjoy periods of quiet, a slowing of activity. “The evidence appears to align with this idea that sleep is shared across all animals. There’s no universally-accepted exception,” says University of Wisconsin sleep biologist Barrett Klein. (www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160621-do-bees-dream)

Every night as they have for over 100 million years, gifted as a legacy from our evolutionary forbearers, dreams emerge from the unconscious depths bearing clues to unlocking the labyrinth that is our waking existence. Knowing dreams to be spontaneous products of nature, depth psychologists recognize them as healthy and creative messages that employ symbolic images to help guide us toward self-realization. Self-realization entails consciousness.

The creation of contemplative consciousness (or might it be better to say its liberation, nurturing, and refinement from its universal unconscious entanglement) provides meaningful fuel aplenty I think for a new existential myth. Bees, octopi, and humans may all serve as midwives in this birthing. For the time being at least insofar as we know on Earth, humans mid-wife this delivery best . . . and if our silent friend the rock can help us in this uplifting enterprise, the more the better. In a quote as graceful as her legendary choreography, dancer Martha Graham said, “The main thing, of course, always is the fact that there is only one of you in the world, just one, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.” Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger put it this way: “Every human experience, to the extent it is lived in awareness, augments the sum total of consciousness in the universe. This fact provides the meaning for every experience and gives each individual a role in the on-going world-drama of creation.”

To speak in the symbolic language of myth, Nature brought us into existence to discover and craft existential meaning, consciousness and compassion (love and knowledge are two of the most frequently referenced existential questions stressed in the life review portions of NDEs) for our planet and all her children, whether they run, slither, creep, crawl, swim, fly, or root themselves in the soil. Once we cease to do this, I think we no longer serve any evolutionary purpose. And in this mission of healing work let us welcome our planetary cousins near and far; octopi, New Caledonian crows, blue whales, mountain gorillas and even that mighty sequoia and stolid rock on his ledge, and, of course, all of our 7 billion brothers and sisters in our human family. And if one day we happen to meet sentient beings from other star systems or dimensions may we ally with them in this work, too.

An evolutionary prototype, a pattern, if you will, for this more organic way of being at home in the Universe already exists. To limn it, we need to return to the world of that Kalahari hunter who spoke to Bleek. He was one of the Ju/wasi people, sometimes still called Bushmen, an appellation his descendents tend to prefer, the ostensibly more politically correct term “San” now being understood as pejorative.

According to the most recent anthropology, the Bushmen are the last living representatives of the first people on Earth. That is to say they are not only the oldest and most continuous living culture on the planet, in a very real way they are genetic Adams and Eves. Geneticists have proven that the Bushmen have the most genetic diversity in their DNA of any group of human beings. Science tells us that they are the direct descendants of our early Homo Sapiens ancestors who left Africa 75,000 years ago to populate the rest of the planet and linguists regard their "click" language as the most ancient form of speech on Earth. The Bushmen truly are the First People, the Old Ones.

At the greater world's hands, in a manner crueler than our own often pitiful powers of imagination can do justice do, the Ju/wasi are now nearly driven to extinction. Out of ancient millions, only 100,000 or so remain alive in southern Africa. Virtually none of them live exclusively in the traditional hunting and gathering way, being confined to settlements and farms. More the tragedy is that we extinguished the best part of ourselves, too, when we so unfeelingly engineered their demise. Despite this, thanks to our evolutionary heritage, there still remains an Old One in each of us (see psychiatrist Anthony Stevens’ The Two Million Year-Old Self, Texas A&M University Press, 2012). She comes and speaks to us each night in our dreams. The danger is that, consumed as we are with our modern day hubris, vanity and intellectual smugness, with all our "smart" phones, unsocial media and electronic noise, we all too often are no longer humble enough to listen to Nature as she did. Moderns are teetering on the lip of the cliff, if you will, on the verge of losing “eyes that can see, ears that can hear” and tongues that can speak to what matters most, what is truly most valuable in life. Once we lose these abilities, we lose everything. If we ever step off that precipice, the only thing left whatever unspeakable existential horror that awaits us in the abyss below. On that day, we moderns will go the way of the Ju/wasi, too, and at our own hands.

For 100,000 years or more the Bushmen lived in peace with themselves and their environment. In their small family bands, they roamed the earth as if it was their own garden, and so, indeed, it was. They lived and laughed and loved in the midst of their animal brothers and sisters and told their ancient stories and danced their healing dances under the myriad stars unto countless generations. They fought no wars in their long history. And, in the bloody slaughters that heralded their end, they only killed other human beings in extremis and only then to defend the lives of their elders and young ones. They left no mark upon the land except their exquisite rock art that depicts their dreams and Nature almost as well as the hand of the cosmogonic artist that molded them. Nearly vanished as they are, heirs to one thousand centuries of culture, I think their time, as never before, is now. They did not live, nor did they die, in vain. And if we simply have eyes to see and ears to hear, they can save us. They asked the greater world for nothing, and that is exactly what it gave them. One hopes we can repay them with our own survival, but only if our way forward in this great task is in keeping with those dreams and visions that danced above their modest campfires in those Kalahari nights of so long ago. We must reintegrate ourselves back into Nature as children, partners and siblings, not rulers and destroyers. We need to rediscover and reunite with the First People within before it's too late for the skies and the seas, the rocks, the sequoias, the bees, the blue whales and, indeed, ourselves. We must learn from the old way and live it out anew, reincarnated afresh, creating as much consciousness and compassion as we are able and putting them to work in service to Nature and the Universe. Planetary survival depends on this immense and world-redeeming task. Perhaps this might serve as our new, existential myth. It would be a good one.

Maya, the illusion of the world and matter, ever dances her dance before us, however, blocking our path to this nascent way of being. Virtual and mixed (augmented) reality technologies are here to stay and growing only more sophisticated by the moment. Cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) for sex, work, and war will follow shortly. Speaking with intelligent technology developers and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley will disabuse one of any notions that these things won’t happen . . . they will and much sooner than one supposes. They stand on our doorstep and they are going to barge in regardless of what we think. This leaves us at a crucial danger point. We must be careful here that the old materialistic myth does not reach out with its bony fingers and pull us into its grave at the last minute.

Virtual (VR) and mixed reality technologies, robotics and cyborgs possess tremendous potential to do good in the fields of scientific research, education, national security, public safety, entertainment and care-giving, the latter particularly on a globe with a rapidly growing geriatric population. Japan is already far ahead of the rest of the world in this category. VR especially offers remarkable upsides for enriching and reinvigorating the world’s ancient myths and legends, making them live anew in never before seen all encompassing glory, as well as providing an unprecedented platform for explicating dream work and analysis, making these night visitors walk the earth in the light of day. Encounters with the objective, autonomous psyche can be facilitated and experienced through immersive modes of active imagination never before thought possible. This said an ethical crossroads confronts us.

As much as it may heal, virtual reality (VR) can equally as well do great harm, divorcing us from Nature and the mineral/organic realm where we belong, imprisoning us in false worlds, however lush, hypnotizing, and sensually enticing they may be, and eventually remove all too many of us from participation in Nature and the ongoing evolution of natural physical reality.

Neither should we succumb to the fantasy of somehow getting the better of her, and living in hermetically-sealed mind spaces of our own devising. The potential implications of VR for political control are the most frightening. Jaron Lanier, one of the seminal pioneers in the development of VR technologies, cautions, “A plague of sadistically false elements of reality would be both dangerous and present insane levels of potential for abuse of power. Control someone’s reality and you control the person.” It is a warning from someone who knows. We should listen.

Sufficiently aware of such challenges, let us go forth into Nature and do this work we are all called to do; creating more and more nonlocal consciousness. In my ears ring Christ’s words, “Be of good cheer”, before my eyes I see the abhaya mudra, the Buddha’s fear dispelling gesture, and in my heart I thank and take as an example those Kalahari Ju/wasi men and women who lived integrated into Nature as her children for a thousand centuries. We cannot go backward, only forward, but we can do it in such a way that it fulfills the original trust placed in us by that mysterious, underlying mystery out of which both mind and matter spring.