the All-Together plunge

From day to day I revise every position I take on every aspect of life.  I must seem as insane from the outside as other people seem to me.  We are standing on the edge... A few nights ago, half asleep in a state of utter intoxication, I mumbled something to my wife to the effect that living in this time is like learning deep sea diving:  there is an utterly strange moment when you first go under the water with a regulator in your mouth when you must inhale, though every part of your conditioning resists what seems to be an existential threat.  I feel now that I am standing on a high ledge and I must jump, but my body is frozen and I have not the courage to take the plunge. 

Am I afraid of losing myself?  Of being cast out?  Of madness?  Am I mad?  No, I only fear the strangeness of what is coming.  To be stripped bare of the safety net of culture and its comforts is appallingly exciting.  Is that what is happening?  Are we wading back to the shore of immediate experience and a pure state of pagan eros and vegetable consciousness as if civilization was a bad dream?  No, of course we will take some kind of insight back with us, but what will it be?  Is there some leap of technology yet to be taken that will give us the One Great Thing to take back into the naked forest ?  Teleportation, time travel, telepathy?  Probably a form of telepathy is what we’re after; it would be the only thing that would be worth 10,000 years of hell.   Perhaps what we really want is to hardwire all of our minds together to become one great big overmind.  Sounds like science fiction horror, but maybe that’s just an expression of ego-fear from the insane civilized western head.  What we truly fear is being alone, so we will engineer ourselves out of it entirely and become All-Together. 

That must be the foundation of the great nervousness of our time.  We are all growing less anonymous to each other through digital connectivity, and we are very uneasy about the implications going forward.  It is unnerving enough to spend a day together, to talk about traumas and fears together, to be naked together.  We tend to cling to our isolation so that we don’t become too vulnerable but this is actually the source of all of our psychosis and despair.  In fact, we really do want total intimacy, and I think we are going to have it.  The moment (and the technology) will come when some of us will summon the courage to jump and become absolutely intimate, totally merged and in full communication- this would equate to liberation from the human tragedy.  We’ll have it, and the implications will make a future that is unimaginable and an experience of multiple-subjectivity that will probably be quite beautiful.