A Cell in the Body of God, part 2

The Globalists are hijacking our best altruistic instincts for their selfish ends

(Listen to a reading of parts 1 and 2 here. Part 2 begins around 15:30)

4. Mystical Union

Like William James, I have never had a direct experience of cosmic unity, but I wish to learn from people who try to describe such experiences. One report that I can relate to my own experience is the confidence people acquire that the universe is caring for them. 

During a decade of daily meditation practice, I felt this feeling ripen without my consciously seeking it. I now feel that the unwelcome experiences that come my way have something to teach me, so I no longer wish it would be otherwise, or that this thing should never have happened. I recovered slowly, miraculously after my bicycle was stuck by a speeding car in 2021, leading to eight surgeries and many months of rehab.

Here’s a passage from Cosmic Consciousness by R. M. Bucke, as quoted in Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

“I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.” [from Cosmic Consciousness by R. M. Bucke, as quoted by William James]

A common theme as people report mystical experiences is that a feeling of wellbeing and immersion in love is associated with this experience of oneness. 

“Something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all—the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on.” [Edwin Starbuck, quoted by Wm James in The Varieties of Religious Experience]

I believe, again after William James, that such experiences are actually quite common. More of my acquaintances than I can count have privately confided their own experiences to me. What is rare is the ability to describe the experience in terms that convey anything at all of their magic. One of the best I know comes from Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception.

“Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

“There seems to be plenty of it,” was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.

Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

The legs, for example, of that chair — how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes — or was it several centuries?–not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them — or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for “I” was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were “they”) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.” [Aldous Huxley, from The Doors of Perception]

In congregational religions, obedience is enforced and the individual will is subjugated to a “higher power” that is represented by an agent here on Earth, a Pope or an Imam or Rabbi, a prophet or religious authority who tells us how we must behave. From childhood, my instinct was to be suspicious of people who say that they speak for God, and I fashioned myself an atheist beginning well before puberty. But during a lifetime, I have outgrown resentment of organized religion, and I can appreciate that rebellion against authority is only a first step toward freedom. When I feel most free, I am not asserting a stalwart independence, but heeding a call to action that — whether it originates within or without me — feels deeply authentic. 

With discipline, you’ve stayed temptation’s pull
You’ve worked to do the right and noble thing
You realize one day, your life's half full —
Uneasiness, but too remote to sting.
Good karma (you had reason to expect)
Would bring reward someday for all your pains.
But lately you’re beginning to suspect
There is no guarantee that justice reigns. 

Refusing others’ rules, shunning convention
You’ve freed yourself, only to rebuild walls.
Self-discipline had not been your intention,
Instinctual being from the distance calls…
Outside your window float the singing birds
When freedom comes at last, you have no words.

Lao Tzu described a way of being that is effortlessly wise. The sage refines her instincts so that they encompass all her worldly knowledge and intellectual faculties, and integrates telepathic connection to a larger source. Then action comes without a decision or an act of will. 

Oneness with Dao supports an intuitive mode of being that does not violate but transcends free will.

5. Childhood’s End

Can human communities be eusocial? Are we evolving on a path toward eusociality? It was formerly theorized that eusociality requires that all individuals in the hive have identical genes. Worker bees had to have been born of the same queen, inseminated by the same drone. But eusocial insect populations are not always genetically identical, or even genetically close.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, humanity reaches an inflection point when those who are ready make the transition to a state of entrainment. They no longer have wills of their own, but act in concert continually and always toward a common end. In Clarke’s version of the story, this transition is effected via telepathic powers. Not all humans, and certainly not all intelligent beings have psychic powers, but a generation of humans is born in which occult powers of the mind are nascent.

Though they appear individually to be automatons, these children have enormous psychic powers in the aggregate. They play with altering the earth’s spin and the orbit of the moon, thinning the atmosphere and remaking the planet into a new habitat. 

The breakaway — we might call it a singularity — has been managed by Overlords from an extraterrestrial advanced civilization who are vastly more intelligent than humans but who lack psychic powers entirely. The Overlords are not working on their own behalf, but in service to a higher intelligence which they understand only as a shadow.

The essential mystery of the novel is resolved for the reader in a passage where the Overlords explain their role to humanity:

“In the centuries before our coming, your scientists uncovered the secrets of the physical world and led you from the energy of steam to the energy of the atom. You had put superstition behind you: Science was the only real religion of mankind. It was the gift of the western minority to the remainder of mankind, and it had destroyed all other faiths. Those that still existed when we came were already dying. Science, it was felt, could explain everything: there were no forces which did not come within its scope, no events for which it could not ultimately account. The origin of the universe might be forever unknown, but all that had happened after obeyed the laws of physics.

“Yet your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely. All down the ages there have been countless reports of strange phenomena — poltergeists, telepathy, precognition — which you had named but never explained. At first Science ignored them, even denied their existence, despite the testimony of five thousand years. But they exist and if it is to be complete any theory of the universe must account for them.

“During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.

“That could not be allowed. I cannot explain the full nature of the threat you represented. It would not have been a threat to us, and therefore we do not comprehend it. Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality which in its inevitable dissolution would have poisoned other and greater minds.

“And so we came — we were sent — to Earth. We interrupted your development on every cultural level, but in particular we checked all serious work on paranormal phenomena. I am well aware of the fact that we have also inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all other forms of creative achievement as well. But that was a secondary effect, and it is of no Importance.” [from Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke]

The novel ends, as it must, with the first stages of this transition from individuals to superorganism. Our limited human experience cannot conceive the mental universe of a superorganism or relate to its processes or its concerns — any more than a paramecium can appreciate a Beethoven symphony. Clarke left off, wisely, because he knew that the superorganism’s superconsciousness can only be a direction toward which our human minds might stretch. 

Clarke took his inspiration from the world of ants, who don’t seem to us to have much of a life as individuals. But perhaps that is because they are ants. I like to imagine that the human becoming a cell in the body of God need not leave behind any of her humanity. The transition can be realized without sacrificing any of the richness of human experience, and in fact participation in this larger purpose is the ultimate fulfillment of our individual lives. An ant has only its ant-self to offer the hive, but we, each of us, has the fullness of our humanity, which we may offer in service.

In Clarke’s world, telepathy is an add-on, an extra appendage that is not necessary for intelligent life. My guess is that this connection to One Mind is actually what defines life itself, that telepathy is present in animals and plants (you must read Monica Gagliano). Individuality and this sense of separation that we take as the Human Condition are really cultural artifacts of a human civilization that has strayed so far from nature that we have forgotten our essence.

6. Globalization and the Great Reset

In the present age, we are invited into a transhumanist future in which our lives are blissfully regularized, homogenized, regulated, surveilled, and centrally controlled for the smooth function of a global society that supports and nourishes all. But this is not a step into an open-ended collective future; it is a retreat into feudalism. Rather than integrating the diverse creative powers of 8 billion humans, the globalist agenda reduces glorious individuals to their least common denominator and confines them in service to the very limited vision of a few individuals of impoverished imagination. Much as they try to convince us that we are doing this for the collective good, we can see that it is a deception originating with megalomaniacs and purveyed to us through a well-developed science of managing public perceptions. It is the endpoint of Edward Bernays’s vision, articulated in the 1920s. 

Here is how Allison McDowell describes this Brave New World: 

“Based on what I am seeing in the Web3 space, I'm picturing a new NGO culture emerging in which Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), with a pretense of tokenized cooperative governance, manage legions of platform laborers all tied to ledgers and wearable tech. Algorithms weigh individual needs against those of the collective and mete out payments for digital public goods production. Officials, whether they understand it or not, are setting citizens up to become precarious impact commodities for high frequency options trading. One hand washes the other as the masses are made to power the matrix and build out digital empire. Everyone plays their assigned role in the spectacle advancing the plot without wrapping their minds around the game they're in or comprehending what the stakes are.“
— Alison McDowell

7. Tentative resolutions

You don’t have to become a slave or automaton to serve a larger entity than yourself.

Individual bees and ants are among the most sophisticated insects. Ants have sensitive chemical senses and respond to hundreds of pheromones. Honeybees have a shared dance language that tells them where to look for flowers, and they have eyes sensitive to polarized sunlight that they can use to navigate in all weather. The point is that social insects don’t sacrifice any of the richness of their individual lives even though their lives are organized around service to a community.

Likewise, the individual cells in our bodies have lives as rich as the Lacrymaria. Maybe blood cells are an exception. They are highly specialized to carry O₂ and CO₂ and they do little else. I like to think that biology is organized hierarchically and evolution creates ever new and higher levels of cooperation in such a way that experience of individual at all lower levels is enhanced at each stage of the process. 

Of course, I cannot know. After years of daily yoga and meditation practice I have yet to have an experience of oneness. But I’ll venture a guess that you can’t have a healthy body without healthy cells. Likewise, there has not, to my knowledge, been a thriving national community based on individual repression, where the individuals have no freedom, but a central authority assures that the collective becomes prosperous, with artistic and scientific advances and global influence.

My intuition is that our lives as individual humans are indeed steps toward a destiny in which we dissolve in service to a larger consciousness. My intuition is that Mr Global is a perversion of our collective instincts for selfish ends, rather than a step on the path in our collective evolution. But we cannot yet see the glory for which we are destined. Its gradual unveiling is the drama which invests our lives with richness and purpose.