Last night, perhaps for the first time, I was able to conceptualize something of profound import. This is a complex topic that has many domains of nuance and potential. What I will present here is a crude introduction in text. The idea itself is not exceptionally useful, except as a seed that can be initialized and developed in direct experience.

The concept is ancient, and is probably deeply involved in many domains of our activity, albeit in ways we are not conscious of. It is involved in our experiences of personhood, family, work, nationality, pets, and adventure. It is also involved in our experiences of reward and punishment.

It is the idea of forming what I refer to as ‘a satellite mind’. We have all already done this, the problem is that we did it in the forms that I would associate with most of our activities: the forms given by our experiences of human culture, language, and conceptual understanding. Nearly all these forms are badly damaged; many of them comprise something like rape.

The basic idea is to distinguish from ourselves a secondary position of awareness or consciousness. Again, we do this naturally when at work, trying to determine why we are being observed, if we are doing right and wrong, attending a pet or loved one, and so on. But most of us have only had this experience from a prefab context, with prefab agendas.

Many drugs ‘eject’ us into a simulation of this. This is not the same as what I here describe, and is also falsified in most if not nearly all cases. Role-playing games, when taken seriously, often do something similar, except that our ordinary mind becomes the satellite, and an imaginary pseudo-incarnation of ourselves becomes the subject (in play, usually).

What I recommend, however, differs from most of our common experience. It is the practice of establishing ‘an orbital position’ that shares in some aspects of our common mindsets and activities, but is ‘alien’ to them in others. In case it is not immediately obvious, this is a crucial feature of modern technology: the transformations that occurred once our collectives were able to establish orbital machines were staggering. I am here suggesting that this was no accident; instead, that we were instancing in technology something that was familiar from our cognitive evolution, but lost to nearly all of our common ways of life, thought and relation.

In the beginning, one may simply imagine a splitting off of a portion of our identity, intelligence, and abilities. This aspect ‘flies’ beyond the self, and looks back upon it, ‘reflecting’ it back to itself, without any of the ordinary ‘drag’ produced by our ideas of how we are ‘supposed to’ be, act, think, relate, or learn.

From this new position, powers and abilities (even whole minds) become available to us. These are not available without this practice because habit and expectation form a kind of ‘drag’ or anchoring that we cannot usually depart from. The satellite is free of all these histories and identifications. From this position, our natural creativity, intelligence, prodigy and depth can be ‘re-introduced’ into the systems we are ordinarily dominated by. This practice has shocking potentials when pursued with wise and heartful purposes.