 143. Sanity |
Awakening from the Word
The conventional culture of contemporary Man is primarily a culture of the verbal mind and the discrete or discursive languages of the left side of the average or common brain model. Thus, it is a culture that tends to be dominated by verbal and other discursively symbolic language systems (such as the potent visualism of television and movie theatre, which make inverted use of visual or spatial and right-brained phenomena in order to serve the purposes of the verbal or discursive mind). The contemporary individual is propagandized constantly by exclusively left-brained appeals, powerful verbal influences, promises of ultimate egoic glamorization and fulfillment, and the parentlike authority of analytical "knowledge." Our experience and our understanding are dominated and determined by these means - so much so that the media of discursive mental culture, such as television, and all other officially reported knowledge, are more fundamental to us than what we experience in our living relationships and our intuition of the ultimate Reality. The "word" has finally become our Parent, and we are being eaten alive.
The exoteric or common order of verbal and left-brained culture is the daily "TV world" of verbal conventions and commonly communicated "knowledge" or "news." But there is an esotericism or esoteric cultural core that is tending more and more to dominate the lives of individuals. The political and common social world of our too-spoken lives is the exoteric level of the dominating influence in our common culture. But the esoteric order that is the inevitable extension of our verbal or left-brained world is tending more and more to dominate us, whether openly or more or less indirectly, like a secret and high priesthood. And, like all high priesthoods, the Super-Church of our time is in league with the State, and ultimately seeks to control the State.
The scientific, rationalist intellectual, and technological core-culture of our social order is the secret esoteric "Mother Church" of the left-brained congregation of ordinary people. It is through the growing and pervasive influence of this exclusively left-brained esoteric or most highly developed core of our verbal culture that the holistic, intuitive, psychic, or right-brained communion with the conditions and the Reality of our world is being gradually eliminated as a possibility. In ancient times, the exoteric and esoteric influences that dominated the daily culture were predominately right-brained and hallucinatory, and this exclusivity produced its own symptoms of imbalance. But in a fully evolved human culture, the right and the left, or the psychic-holistic and the mental-analytical, aspects of the human potential must be mutually integrated and balanced, and then the whole and entire body-mind must be submitted to the All-Pervading Life and Divinity that animates us. If human societies cannot evolve into whole brain and whole body levels of adaptation, then the human being and the human world will inevitably be reduced to a mechanical and self-possessed destiny that is mortal, loveless, and absurd.
It is not that the rigorous and intelligent use of the verbal or discursive mind is not necessary. It is indeed culturally necessary. And both scientific and technological advances can do much to improve even the political and economic as well as intellectual estate of mankind. But the exclusivity of that influence and its pervasive philosophical disposition toward the contracted, analytical, and dependent or analyzed-self orientation are a negative extension of the egoic or exclusive and self-possessed disposition of the individual in his fear. From that exclusive viewpoint, the pattern of totality may be analyzed, but the viewpoint itself cannot be sacrificed into the pattern, nor can the ultimate and All-Pervading Reality or Condition of the whole and of every part become the dominant factor in the daily life of the individual or the society. Scientism and the left-brained predisposition can produce an age of analytical knowledge but not an age of faith (in the highest sense). Therefore, we must be culturally and personally awakened to the Mind and Intuition that is obvious only to the whole brain and the whole body-mind, or else the Parental Word will slay the Radiant Children of our Mystery.
