We Travel in Spirals

All true evolutionary change occurs in the forms of spirals. Like the DNA patterns of our chromosomes, and the structures of spiral galaxies, the nature of the cosmos is cyclical and spiral in nature. What this means is that all true change involves both reverse, and forward motion.

We often travel forward by reconnecting with patterns of the past, but taking them to a new level. This notion of going “Back to the future” is an idea found within many mythic traditions. Psychedelic Shaman and philosopher Terrence McKenna uniquely framed this concept with his idea of the “Archaic Revival.” This was his attempt to synthesize the culture and practices of the ancient past, particularly the Paleolithic shamanic roots of humankind, with our emergent cutting edge technologies in virtual reality, the internet, and computer mediated communications.

McKenna envisioned a world of “TechnoTribal” reality that conjoined ancient nature based pagan life-ways, with the most cutting edge of digital technologies. He envisioned this hybrid fusion of the ancient and modern that would eventually point the way towards our emigration to the stars built on a deep connection to nature and technology.

Many of our modern day problems exist because of a deep fragmentation in both our social structures, as well as our language. The product of over 500 years of industrial and mechanized thinking, our modern world with its skyscrapers, freeways, isolated apartment dwellings, and separated consumer lifestyles is testimate to world view that has lost it’s rooting in what Heidegger called the sacred fourfold of “Earth, Sky, Divinities and Mortals.”

This alienation of language and its latent desacralized mechanism is a profound problem, for like fish swimming in water, we often are unaware of the nature of the language in which we swim and express our being. In his book the “Spell of the Sensuous,” David Abram’s shows us how our limited language usage and paradigms since the emergence of abstract, phonetic, and increasingly techno-centric language, have literally cut us off from the larger world of nature and cosmos around us, not to mention the intimate realm of our own interiority.

We no longer dwell in the “Spell of the Sensuous” that our ancestors did whose language and being was deeply woven into the fabric of the natural world. Instead we live in what Postmodern philosopher Braudillard calls a Simulacrum of reality. In this hype-real world of abstraction, ungrounded from our ancestors fundamental concerns of nature, community, meaning, and purpose, our lives take on a harried quality. In turn, the system preys upon us by feeding off our inherent instability and emptiness by driving us further down the path of unsustainable consumerism…Truly the machine mind mall culture, reinforced by a machine mind language, rules the day.

All that said, the key to winning is knowing your opponent and your self. The more we can reclaim our own enchanted relationships to the world and decolonize our hearts and minds from the machine, the more we can build a new world on new ground.

I intend to yoke the best of the ancient and modern, enchanting the world as I go and weaving new forms of life both for myself, and for the larger world. I call this effort the “Avalon Project” and I’m giving my every last drop of blood and breath into the Goddess’s cup in service of it’s realization, in this, my one wild life.