It turns out that, if we use a mechanical metaphor, you can imagine beings who have developed a peculiar form of vehicle. This vehicle has »infinite degrees of liberty. It can travel instantaneously, not only to any single position in timespace… but it can ‘sum’ and present to its passenger(s), any possible arrangement or grouping of such positions. And not merely in time, space, or location… but in »consciousness as well.

But instead of using it to »travel and »participate in timespace, our imaginary species use it in such a way as to intentionally and ever-more severely »discard its degrees of liberty, for the sake of producing »representations. Images. Posturings. Dead museums. Or, if you like ‘false idols’.

On their world, these beings, each given such a device at birth, spend their entire lives and obliterate their ecologies… and minds… to produce »representations of the features they put an end to in this fashion. The vehicle becomes a museum of their failures to enact its actual nature and potentials. This results in language. Concepts. Models. Mathematics.

And so on.

And this is an analogy of what modern humans are doing with our minds. Seemingly on purpose. We are divesting them, almost entirely, of their originary natures and most noble purposes… to produce something that resembles a dead derivation of value. Like cash. But our minds were born for and of the myriad and ancient intelligences that structure timespace and living worlds such as ours. We are everywhere surrounded by the living fact of these relationships and their progeny… but can no longer recognize them, as, perhaps, our distant ancestors naturally did.

One imagines a species of bird that is gripped by such a catastrophic misapprehension of the nature of flight, that it never flies at all. It crawls. Into any trap it can find or compose. And dies there. Knowing nothing whatsoever of the sky, or trees… food or »relationships. Our species has become like this.

And it’s not because we are bad or evil, I think. Rather, it turns out, we are peculiarly »vulnerable to a property that naturally arises and seeks expression in specific aspects of our thought, memory and communications behavior. This property acts like a highly contagious disease. It’s aggressive, mutates rapidly, and vies among its endless species to become more contagious, blinding, and dominant.

Long ago, our distant ancestors were aware of this problem, and, I believe, committed themselves to ameliorating it… or, at the very least, to actively avoiding the production of contexts or forms of misrelation… in which it prospers. We moderns are doing the opposite of this. In our pursuits of luxury, ‘knowledge’ and ‘convenience’ we naturally propagate and distribute the contagion.

If even a small group of humans become capable of recognizing and responding to this threat, we will achieve something unimaginable. The active anamnesis of our human nature, history and potential. The Great Unforgetting.

Our minds were born for participation in a family of intelligences so astonishing that our boldest fictions have failed to imagine them. And the nature of that participation is virtuous, noble, heroic, and profound beyond the capacities of language to describe. But we must have the direct experience of it… together, and we must establish social, intellectual, creative and scientific contexts that resist the contagion, and awaken that which has … too long and desperately… hidden… in the deepest recesses of our hearts and souls.

And, one day, perhaps soon, we shall.

Not in a sudden awakening of the species.

But in the experimental success of a small group of humans absolutely committed to this mission. Together. With and for each other. And the history and future of life… and it’s origins… not merely on Earth… but in all of time and space.