As recent storms and quakes demonstrate, “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” (Will Durant, 1946).
That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
Our supply of ingenuity, I soon recognized, involves both the generation of good ideas and their implementation within society.
The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from practical activity, thus presents characteristics of both kinds. It is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world.
The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.
The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.
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