A Prayer
Be careful where you point that thing
To what should I pray? To Power, begging for protection, or in its absence, mercy? To Jesus, asking to be a conscious person? To abstract intelligence, asking to move in the same direction as evolution?
When I pray to Power, I pray to top down authority, which I value more than democracy with its pantheon of familiar human characteristics. Naturally, to ascend the ladder involves aspiring toward a class above myself, as opposed to the bohemian attitude of identifying with the class just below. The concept of democracy and equality is fine on paper, but we are practical men.
When I pray to consciousness, I don’t choose power, because it is a field polarity, and if I occupy one polarity and repel the other I am not going to be conscious. One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing.
A conscious person is identified with the center and holding the field balance, not with one of the polarities.
Intelligence can see the entire field abstractly, so things aren’t personal. Being at the center means we don’t identify with the polarities and all the storms between them and across the landscape of ideas and imagination. We see from an objective place, which means having a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Not being identified with one-sided thinking doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do it. For example I can write two or more characters expressing opposing ideas, each polarized and identified with her or his position. Knowing the polarities without being identified with them allows an objective center, from where art can be created. Art creates esthetic arrest through balance of these seemingly opposing elements.
One of the best series of lectures on this is, “Wings of Art,” with Joseph Campbell. The problem is that it’s hard to get. I have it on cassette tape, but even that is hard to find now. I did find a clip on YouTube, but the actual lecture series is several hours.
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply skills, according to the dictionary. I think that describes a robot. It is too mechanistic a definition for my taste. Beyond that, intelligence is a portal through which connections are made with a collective, perhaps even universal, consciousness.
Evolution is intelligent, and drives changes which have a survival value. How fast these changes can occur depends on the intelligence and plasticity of the medium evolution has to work with, I imagine.
When the intention is to evolve into higher consciousness, there is only one way to do that: aligning with the direction, and thus, the intention, of evolution, to move in the same direction.
“Today’s easy passage may be tomorrow’s death trap.” (W. Burroughs, The Western Lands)
