"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream"
It's so telling, isn't it? Everyday I hear about how "reality is a simulation" or how we "create our realities" and it really makes me wonder, what is this reality made of? What gives it form?
Ancient people lived mythically, wandering a living landscape, where every stone and bird and moment was besouled. We understand beliefs to represent and model reality, providing us with explanatory meaning, but ancient people did not have "beliefs". They performed enactions of experience, modalities of relation that nourished the inter-relational resonance of the besouled world. They were not conceptual abstractions but dances with the divine, ways of moving and being that arose from the interplay of animistic reality. They dreamed the first dream.
Although sadly, the ancient cultures who danced with the souls of the world have mostly been stomped out by western imperialism. Consciousness became abstracted to the point where interanimistic relation became almost entirely obscured. The primary modality of being is that sensuous reciprocal exchange of animistic understanding. It's what we call our "unconscious", ironically enough. From this unconscious soil of reciprocal exchanges, we started developing a way of modeling reality we call the "conscious" mind.
But that's what gets me, what caused the split in consciousness? What caused us to move into this abstracted and inanimate reality from a relational animate reality?
It was language.
Language arose from the purely expressive interplay of being. Originally "words" were expressions of emotions, articulated through us by the sensations of joy, agony, hunger, etc. As we developed language further, we created a layer of reality distinguishable from the animate reality we related with. It was a layer of arbitrary abstractions, structures of meaning seemingly held in place by convention alone. Over time, the only way we could develop this abstract and conventional reality was by paying attention to it and neglecting the evocative and mysterious discourse of the unconscious mind. We displaced our capacity for relation to increase our capacity to model and represent.
And that's when we started dreaming the dream within the dream. We created an abstract reality with language, a heaven separate from earthly suffering, and we imagined ourselves as Gods. We trapped ourselves in a world of forms, within a world of enigma.
Shortly after, we started conjuring up deities in our image and building "civilization", our Kingdom within heaven. Once we started writing, we started to eternalize the static forms we conjured up, forever trying to capture the elusive "meaning" that language is in pursuit of.
And that's the thing, it can't be captured.
The universe presents itself to us as an unfolding of various vectors, dynamic movements of a universe in flux. We cannot construct a static system of meaning that represents a dynamic universe. The movements of the conscious mind are asymptotic, in that we're always approaching this "meaning", but never quite getting there.
And the quest for meaning haunts us all.
The split in consciousness becomes really apparent when we take psychedelics and get a glimpse of interanimistic reality and assume those glimpses to be conscious entities.
I mean really, who are the "beings"?
It's us, silly. The shadows of our unconsciousness casting lights onto the abstract models our consciousness whips up.
And that's kinda the point I'm getting at. Language was emergent, and not necessarily a mistake. We've brought the natural world to the edge of ecological disaster with our word games, and now we have to somehow reason ourselves back into symbiosis with the natural world with word games.
That's our great test. That's why we're experiencing a psychedelic revival. That's what the archaic revival that Terence McKenna talked about is really about.
We need a reawakening of the unconscious archaic perspectives. We need to realize that the models we create and the cultures they constitute are made up. We need to realize we are dreaming. We need to learn to forsake conceptual understandings in favor of the universal relation underlying it all. We need to learn the cosmic dance again.
We need to learn to relate with the universe and eachother again, because the reality we constructed in our heads is on a crash course with animate reality, and it won't be pretty when the smoke clears.
