Once again on the road
Vision Quest or a trip to Mesa Verde?
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
My thoughts have been about our relationship, not only to a spiritual world in the present, but as to our future relationship to the world as a species. I would contend we are miserable failures as an advanced species at present. We are mind and body so intertwined as to be one thing. A spiritual existence and those things unseen are equally real in our being. I would add to the old trilogy of mind, spirit, and body the concept of ascendance. We are not divisible things. Body and mind are interlinked. Intelligence is equally intertwined in our compound nature. Spirit exists not as a form of intellect, but as tendrils of connection. Our spirits create a wake in the timeline; we leave this wake in our passing. Our spirit projects forward, as we interact in the zone around us. Our spirit then lingers in the aftershocks as we have passed. Our mind and body is our vessel anchoring us in this timeline. We are affected by and do affect something beyond just mind and body. Spirit is interconnected in our physical world. What is encompassed in our physical mind and body? The food we consume? Its molecular elements as they break down? How about the microbes? If you look at yourself from the nano-level, there is much about us intertwined in us at a cellular level that isn’t us. When we look to the mirror at the gym the sweat pouring from us, was it us, is it us?
Mesa Verde near Morefield Campground
The spirit state is not an isolated individual. Spirit is connection. It is connection between our individual selves and outside forces. We often talk about team spirit or the American spirit. Spirit is a real thing. It can be observed, it is capable of measurement, and it is impactful on real world events. It is a blindness of the conscious being to not acknowledge spirit as an essential part of being. Spirit does require external connection and interaction. If someone describes us, as a Spiritual being, it is something they have observed in our interactions with others. Without a larger community we can be thinkers, but not spiritual actors. Our minds and bodies are interconnected and our spirits are intermingled with the body of mankind. It is essential that we pursue a spiritual life individually as we become the healing elements of the collective spirit. We are either attuned components of the collective spirit and help guide, direct, and heal the collective spirit, or we are malignant virus cell in the body of mankind. When we are attuned we bring harmony, we join in a blend of the complex spirit that adds beauty to the whole.
We exist as body and mind; secondly we interact as a spirit element in the collective spirit. Our third state of being I am calling ascendance. It is the state of being we are in the process of evolving to, currently a transience state. We have yet to achieve the evolutionary level of ascendance. Evolution is often only thought of in terms of bodily attributes, but evolution is more. Our consciousness and the capacity of being human have evolved as well as our physical features. We need an appendix just to remind us of our mortality when we age to around 50, at least it was that for me. We do not all incorporate an evolutionary development at the same time. Some humans are in the transient state and others are not. Adaption and natural selection suggest it will always separate the success of an individual in future challenges. Human beings, looking much as ourselves, have been in existence for a long time. A long time at least in our narrow capacity to reckon the arc of time. Scientific discovery reveal interesting theories of Homo sapiens and other evolutionary cousins. We have evolved capacities overtime that improved our communication, perceptions, and other adaptive behaviors. At Mesa Verde I observed adaption, but mostly I was struck as to how little difference their society appeared to be organized from ones we are familiar.
Sunrise rising at Mesa Verde
I believe ascendant humans will have perception capacities we lack. If we were to observe a group of humans confronted with a changing circumstance. Within the group perception of the change would occur not all at once, but for some sooner than others, for some not at all. Sometimes people use the phrase being on the right side of history, but if there is a right side why are we not all on that side? We live in a more complex world than we know, and there are many reasons people pick their sides. People are often motivated not by their highest capacities. We react with habits, traits, or behaviors that become a part of us, maybe because they are a part of us. I think tribalism exhibited today by extreme partisan politics is a part of our evolved instinctual behavior. We are driven to trust our own and distrust our perceived outsider. One of the aspects of globalization is many are confused as to who is in our tribe. We do not live in village communities developing an index of everyone who is ours. Ascendant humans will have capacity to perceive more inputs than we do, they will formulate reactions, actions, and interactions differently than we do. Ascendant human beings will more quickly place themselves on the right side of history. They have moved cognition farther forward in the arc of time. We will be like AM radios to their full spectrum receivers.
On the road to evolution we should try as best we can to get on the right side of history, even those of with our radios turned off.
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