O stars,
isn’t it from
you that the lover’s desire for the face
of his beloved
arises? Doesn’t his secret insight
into her pure
features come from the pure constellations?
~ Rainer Maria
Rilke, “The Third Duino Elegy”.
From The Selected
Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,
(transl. Stephen
Mitchell).
Boiling frogs
It’s said in fable
that if you take a frog and plunge it into boiling water, it will
experience shock and immediately jump out. But if you place a frog in
tepid water and slowly heat it, the frog will not sense the change,
will not see the danger, and will be slowly and inexorably boiled to
death. More than a fable, this is a metaphor for where we are right
now, as individuals, as group members, as a culture, and as a
planetary collective – some materialists, illusionists and sceptics
might say a slime mould on Earth’s surface, a cancerous growth, or
a plague. The mystic and philosopher Gurdjieff would say that we are
asleep; his student P. D. Ouspensky, that we are automatons.
Squadron of Simpletons
As psychologist
Robert Ornstein pointed out, we are not one single, unified “I”
but are largely governed by a “squadron of simpletons” or idiots,
between which we frequently shape-shift, each running his or her own
sub-program, with an outlook that is often myopic and blinkered, and
with little effective central command or coordination. Many of these
psychic simpletons were acquired in more primitive times when we were
daily faced with dangers that demanded a swift reaction – “fight,
flight or freeze” – and which are simply not geared-up to
noticing or thoughtfully responding to the sort of slow-moving creep
of trends such as nuclear proliferation; global warming – which has
at long last been recognized by some as a climate crisis, though of
course disparaged by denialists, contrarians and conspiracy theorists
who dub themselves “climate realists” – biodiversity loss; and
sham-materialism – Shammat, which is documented in Doris Lessing’s
Canopus in Argos series of sci-fi novels.
