E7

E was not an old man, but a man in the fire of the onset of middle age. An autodidact, he had chosen primarily technological vocations in terms of his relationships with formal work. Privately, however, he was fascinated with an area of concern I have never elsewhere encountered.

“I will say these things simply and briefly, though I am well-aware they will attract either derision, indictment, or servile fantasy.

  All of the stars and worlds in time and space are not merely connected, they spontaneously co-emerge. Their body of unity forms a coherent transentient context. The closest cultural analogy is the superposition of our cultural concept of a university, however its nature is beyond the capabilities of language or category to express or convey. The ‘network’ is always and everywhere accessible. Its organs and doorways are what we call ecologies and organisms. This network is the source of our minds, and is directly accessible to them in a fashion that is entirely innate, yet can be easily inhibited or re-directed by representational paradigms.

  This network is available to conscious human access, in fact, our minds are ‘native’ to its purposive and expressive natures. A moment of conscious contact with it is nearly unsurvivably ecstatic. There is an intelligence of such beauty, significance and purity that the mere suggestion of our true relationship as originators and participants elicits feelings that explosively surpass those we can imagine or have elsewhere encountered. The force is so overwhelming that, at least for adults, direct exposure must be carefully mediated because the experience of the living intelligences that underlie our minds and biologies is explosively self-exceeding. Neither our minds nor our hearts are accustomed to relation with and as anything like this, except, perhaps, in our direct encounters with the tremendous force and beauty of ‘nature’. Direct exposure is terrifying.

  Animals, infants and children possess the uncircumscribed faculties of contact and membership in this body of unity, and that these faculties comprise the originary potentials that are co-opted and reshaped by exposure to language, culture and knowledge. We use the originary intelligences to assist us in the acquisition of language, and, as children, recapitulate a ‘local version’ of the evolution of human consciousness. For most, the effective result is a permanent circumcision of the organs of the mind and their relations with their originary natures, purposes and relationships. Human children represent one of the most direct and profound examples of the local instancing and re-embodiment of this intelligence and its living ‘access points’.

  The promise of this premise is simple: the sources of insight and intelligence are actually alive, as the world we have learned to misconceptualize in language and concept. Religion has proven as inept at resolving this matter as science, for both are concerned, primarily, with representation… rather than relation. Yet the purposive and originary natures of intelligence are fundamentally and irrevocably relational. What we have managed to acquire of the possibilities of our human intelligence has been acquired precisely from these sources, and most of their promise has been corrupted, excluded, or reframed for representation.

  Living beings comprise doorways to the intelligence-body of timespace. Contact with this body is the source of our minds, and perhaps our souls. It is impossible to represent its true natures or characters, its actual potentials and faculties, except as living minds in relational hyperstructures. We are born to rediscover and retrieve the birthrights and promise of our human nature, together with the living ecologies of our world. They are the actual transport from which our intelligence derives its character and potentials. A radio, of sorts, that is ‘always on’ and ‘always connected to the entire body of organismal reality’… every moment of every organism… everywhen.

  This intelligence cannot be represented. It must be encountered, and the relational integrity of the purposes and contexts for and in which this is accomplished produces minds whose features will reflect them. The purpose of producing representations is an effective opposite to those of true mutuality in relation. It is this purpose that unlocks the door, and the door leads entirely beyond the entire array of the fictions produced by our cultures in its stead. It is alive, it is our birthplace, and we must again stand together at the doorway and remember something we are terrified of: the sources of our minds, hearts and souls.

  I imagine a sophisticated jailbreak, the results of which could beget a conflagration of prodigy whose echoes would redefine human history and open upon futures that our present mechanical cultures have little interest in imagining. They are cultures whose intelligence, purposes and characters are authentic, human, relationally insightful… and beyond anything we have yet been capable of establishing or sustaining. I am hopeful in this for a simple reason: we did it all the time as children.”

— He Said Seven Things