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THE NEXT LEVEL
BY DAN ARMSTRONG
There is an organic mind that persists in
all life, animal and vegetable. Minimally an
Innate Will, it serves impetus to the involuntary
operations of the mind and body Within this life
motive is a common fund of evolving racial
memory, an ancient imprint echoing up through
the chromosomal chains, seeding our dreams
and guiding our intuitions. A collective uncon
scious to match our collected conscious, this
subtle transpersonal sub-conscious connects
us all. If the body of human knowledge is our
somatic oversoul, then the complement is this
clear spring of life: the subliminal racial under
soul.
The spirit of humanity flows from these
twin wells of inspiration When we disregard the
sanctity of our own planet, when we concentrate
too much on the gew-gaws of modem life, we
disrupt the planet beyond the limits of its natural
balance, we create stresses and strains on our
psychological being as well as the organic whole
of the earth. We take on a silent grief. Because
we are so intimately interconnected with the
body of life, when the water, the air and the soil
are toxified, so are our minds,
Stripped of social pretense the human is
as proud and dignified as an eagle, as energetic
and playful as a porpoise.The embodied apex of
life on Earth, more than animal, a thing of body
and creative consciousness, this is the noble
calling of human being. But packed and
stacked in cities for acre upon acre of urban
sprawl, our minds become like our populace —
cramped, stressed and paranoid. And this is
proportionately reflected in the direction and
production of our culture. Deep innate survival
drives are turned inward and perverted. Streaks
of violence and sexual exaggeration color the
oversoul. The electronic iconoscape warps with
narcissism and vain distract-ion The global
conscience becomes convoluted by a propagan
da of spins and counterspins. The moebial
container of our somatic knowledge becomes a
disturbing funhouse mirror instead of a tool for
conscious human evolution. The oversoul, like
the atmosphere and the waters, darkens with
psychic pollution. And we struggle under its
choking screen of smoke
Take a look
At every book
Each life
In our historic tract
Understand each sign
Of the scientific mind
Each geometric fact
Grasp it all
For it is our call
To extend
The somatic soul.
It is difficult because of the stretch of
time to completely absorb vtfiat it means that we
represent the crown of human creation. Some
ten thousand years ago humans began a steady
conversion from nomadic hunter/gatherers to
planted agrarians. The evolution of these seed
communities into cities then city-states, then
industrial nations and the alliance of these
nations is the process of human civilization The
sum of this process — all cultures, all literature,
all architecture, all science throughout recorded
history— is presently coming to life in the cyber
space of the global community. Three thousand
human generations stand stacked one upon the
next and the grand perspective is finally
showing us the outline of our own human
horizon. What can be seen is both stunning and
frightening.
The sophistication of the electronic
sciences in the last 50 years has opened these
vistas.From global media to nuclear reactors to
Jovian probes, at bottom is electricity. For the
time being regardless of what source the energy
— steam, solar atomic; whatever — it is the
most use to us as electricity. It is the defining
element of the modem age, and with it we are
about to discover, enmasse, that we have been
laboring under a drastically limited understand
ing of what it means to be human. Whether we
want it or not, the technical awakening of the
20th century offers a reciprocal and equally
necessary awakening of human consciousness
in the 21st. ..
The Information Age
FRANS MASEREEL
We live enmeshed in information From genetic code
to lasered discs, our consciousness knows more than we
cognate. The invisible fabric of our imagination is woven upon
an iconoscape of media image and threaded through with an
.encyclopedia of facts. We have televisions, newspapers, maga-
aines, radio, and the Internet integrating information sources
from all over the globe We have electron microscopes and the
njdimentaries of genetic engineering, drawing us closer and
closer to the workings of the atom and the very spark of life. We
have launched a series of sophisticated space probes aimed at
the outer reaches of our solar system and armed wth remote
cameras and electronic sensors to scan the planets and their
moons for traces of life — and it is there! We have a powerful
telescope orbiting the earth beyond the atmospheric veil, peer
ing galaxy beyond galaxy into before untold temporal depths,
actually anticipating the origins of the universe and time itself
These are miraculous achievements. No, more than that! —
Humans verge upon a nominative godhood It is true. We are
the off-spring of Deity.
All that remains to crown our deification is the wreath of
impassioned wisdom. Humans must grasp the significance of
their libraries of knowledge We must grow into the implicate
meaning of the human potential The clear evidence of our
genius demands that we step to the next level.
The present vanguard of civilization shares a dynamic
information pool In it is the imperfect sum of our somatic know
ledge, the collected works of humankind It is a multi-cultural
collection of histories, astronomies and religions. It contains a
scheme of numbers, a geometry, a physics, a science of medi
cine, hundreds of languages, and is sustained in an electronic
global miiTor of the present. It is our shared knowledge Our
global dictionary The language within the languages And it
operates as a mutual objective consciousness. It is something
that nearly all the people in the vorld partially know It is our
collective conscious: the somatic oversoul.
The world-wide web is the perfect analog. Nested in
the memory banks of the Internet is a growing fund of informa
tion. Encircling the globe is a pulsating electromagnetic net,
and accessed by phone it is available all the time Turn on the
computer. Punch in the digital codes And suddenly the indivi
dual in on-line with an instantaneous global network. With links
to computers in libraries, museums, archives and offices all over
the world, nearly all that humankind has recorded — music, art,
science, literature— is but the touch of a finger away This trans
personal collected conscious, this interactive media-mind, if you
will, has become the new social contract: the individual's respon
sibility to conceive of an objective global reality from the sum of
modem society's multi-media output. It is, without our hardly
acknowledging it, an habitual stretching exercise in intellection,
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synthesis and abstraction It is the expansion of consciousness
through the brute facilitation of the electronic oversoul
Yet this age of information is happening so rapidly we
have yet to fully grasp v4iat it is and vtfiat it offers and what it
suggests. Our base of knowledge and empirical facts increases
as quickly as the capacities of computer chips. With each day
we further detail every branch of scientific study, each field of
literature, every realm of history So much so, and with such a
timely collapse upon the present, that for the first time human
kind has the perspective to clearly evaluate the imprint of civil
ization on the planet Earth and to truly judge "what man hath
wrought."
And what hath man wrought? The stunning and the
frightening for sure! We transplant human organs. We mimic
natural hormones. We clone sheep and monkeys. We drop
tinker toys on the moons of Jupiter. We imprint entire lexicons
on a silicon chip the size of a mustard seed. We tap the energy
of the invisible atom
But all at an egocentric cost.
We have stockpiled enough nuclear warheads to blow
this third rock from the sun to Kingdom Come — 10 times over.
Our creative forces have so overrun the land masses we have
all but deforested Paradise. The waters of the oceans and rivers
run toxic. The air bums our lungs. We have color TV to bake our
faces when the sun has gone down We have so senselessly
procreated our number is coming up. The animals are dying
The lands lie scorched and desertified We watch all this as it
occurs and do nothing but continue to consume. Ten thousand
years of civilization and we still seem no more than hungry
puppies wolfing down our kennel ration Stunning and frighten
ing indeed!
There are few optimistic scenarios for the future. It is
difficult to imagine a world without major catastrophe in the next
50 years Something must change. We have ignored the rhythms
of the planet We have partied on our neighbor's lawn. We have
asphalted-over the lungs of the earth The entire globe, flora and
fauna, wheeze with every polluted inbreath Who are we? What
are we? What are we doing here?
Primarily diminishing species — including our own!
This cannot be right. It is time for the human race to do
some soul searching We are the only visibly conscious being
on the planet, and we persistently stumble over that conscious
"self" We must somehow acknowledge and/or re-define our
purpose as humans — if only to acquiesce and seek harmony
with the other living things Should our goals be more than that,
we must name them. The talent and creativity of the human
demands it. We are limited only by our imaginations There is
no end to what we can do We are not just happenstance in a
universe of randomness. The moral of human existence on this
planet screams of meaningful allegory and unanswered poten
tials. Either the empire will blindly bring about its own end or
humans must awaken to their greater being The Age is chang
ing. It is unavoidably so
Pollution of the Oversoul:
\Ne have great faith in technology If we put a man on
the moon, surely we'll find a way to purify the waters Adjust the
ozone densities Find a clean, efficient energy source Solve
every virus Antibiotic every bacteria.These feats are not outside
our abilities Yet if we must continually use science to solve the
problems of the way we live, maybe the point is being missed In
the case of humans on earth, having fully realized we are cons
cious, as a group, the question is primarily one of balance Our
own fully conscious being cannot be realized until we recognize
our place in the entire spectrum of living things We are not apart
but implicate in the design Our society tends to separate and
isolate: vtfien times dictate we should conjoin and commune
The Next Level:
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate Our
deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our
light, not the darkness that frightens us.''
-NELSON MANDELA
\Ne must find a way to match the vast genius of our
intellectual mind with commensurate humanity and a profound
respect for the living thing. We must match our achievements
in science and technology with a grace for what we are. There
exist a wide variety of religions in the culture of humankind.
Though the clear sense of the sacred is evident in every one,
for the most part they are provincial. The global society enters
the 21st century a collection of folk people whose conscious
nesses have been unified in an electronic hyper-space. Because
of the unknown potential of unified consciousness, this offers
humankind a stranger and more powerful challenge than atomic
energy. Still we open the godhead hastily.
It is evident that something more exists. We can be
certain life pervades the cosmos. We are not just a planet of
multi-various peoples. We are the physical personification of
a consciousness that permeates all reality. And that is not
fanciful transcendentalism. Revealed in the limitless application
of our science is the clear beauty of the symmetries of the
human mind. And we are special because we know this. We
think therefore we are!
What does this mean? It means there is mystic mean
ing in life. There is something immortal in us. That the story of
humankind is linked to the larger story of the universe and that
the interconnective tissue is mind. That the balance of our con
sciousness is sacred and that the organic and somatic mind
are equal parts of a larger thing. That we have the potential to
surmount ourselves. To be dimensionally-larger beings. To
understand that we are deeply enmeshed in and part of a living
consciousness. To step to the next level, we must realize that
we are children of the universe. We have been entrusted with
one of the jewels of our galaxy There is a way to live here. It is
our duty as well as the human path to seek it. It is only in our
best interests to achieve it.
Dan Armstrong is a frequent contributor to the NCTE.
His most recent article The Fatal Path appeared in the Octo-
Novo 96 issue. He lives in Astoria
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