True Mutation: on the Edge of Science, Technology, and Consciousness #9

Song, dance, sculpture, poetry
all of these cognitive activities
when we participate in them,
we cross out of the domain of
animal organization and into
the domain of a genuine
relationship to the transcendent

To my mind, the breakthrough,
what the surrealists were doing,
what the abstract expressionists were doing,
the replacement of phonetic alphabetic linear print culture
by electronic media that has happened over the last twenty-five years,
these things are all well and good, but they are insufficient because once
you begin to zero in on the notion of the archaic mentality and
what it really means, you discover that at the center of it is,
God forbid, the psychedelic experience.

To my mind, this is the great untold secret of our civilization.
To not know about this is to be absolutely in the dark about what is going on.
And how many people do know? Some of you may know a story
by the Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borges, called The Cult Of The Phoenix.
He says that there is a cult; its practitioners have suffered in every pogrom in history;
its practitioners have participated in every pogrom in history;
it honors no class, no race, no place, no time; one child may initiate another;
ruins are propitious places. The initiate do not speak of it, and to some it seem