Brief Foreword and Forewarning
I’m about to indulge in the most fantastical sort of speculation, partly in fun and partly in total seriousness.

Years ago Kurt Vonnegut removed much of the possible necessity of the idea I’m going to lay out. With typical Vonnegutian incisiveness he did so in one sentence:

Love may fail but simple courtesy will carry the day.

Understand—and act on—Mr. Vonnegut’s suggestion and a lot of cultural garbage that we go around thinking very important falls away, including possibly the little essay that follows.

1. The Nature of Fields: Toward a Meteorology
of Consciousness

We take for granted—and daily use—the reality of vast invisibilities, though we continue to occupy and perceive directly with the five senses only the tiniest portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. But our cleverness has opened other parts of it to us with a concomitant enrichment of our lives. I can’t see or hear touch this invisible ocean in which we exist but I happily accept its inferred reality when I turn on the TV or talk on my cellphone.

Of consciousness, the central invisibility of our experience—its topology, its geography, its physics, its ecology, its morphology—we know, very precisely, nothing.

In the present orthodoxy we learn very early that thoughts—those rambunctious mini-invisibilities that either inhabit us or that we inhabit—aren’t "real". Thoughts exist, my culture says, only in my head, often fluttering past willy-nilly, and are of lasting interest only when they lead to acts in the physical world, which of course are "real".

My own unorthodox experience across a number of decades, along of course with the experiences reported by countless mystics and visionaries through the ages, increasingly indicates that we inhabit a world congruent with the "real" world but mostly invisible to us. In this "other" world thoughts are in fact the only reality.

Kook-talk? Yes, but remember how many generations of humans occupied cultural realities that knew nothing of, say, the world of microscopic "animacules" or, say, the sea of electromagnetic radiation through which we unwitting swim (and which we have begun to manipulate to our own ends).

Even to try to talk about some larger, invisible--but nonetheless real--world of which thoughts may be only a small part is to immediately cause all sorts of "Warning: Crackpot at Work" flags to go up. That sentence, for example, was very carefully composed to avoid using any of the courant fringe-words that set off all sorts of knee-jerk reactions designed to defend and maintain the current orthodox reality.

(And should one remember that talk of such a thought-filled reality has a long history in both eastern and western philosophy? Awash now for centuries in the products of success of materialist-reductive science, such a reminder, to many, seems at best irrelevant and childish, at worst insane.)

2. Rules and Meta-rules
R.D. Laing, the late, controversial Scottish psychiatrist concluded that there are three sets of rules governing behavior in families: rules, meta-rules, and meta-meta-rules.

1. Rules are obvious. Some are taught overtly ("Watch out for cars before you cross the street") and some covertly ("Always wear clothes when you go outside").

2. Meta-rules are unstated and apply to certain extreme behaviors. A meta-rule denies that its associated rule even exists and is never talked about. For example, we all somehow learn that incest is bad, but how do we learn this? It is never taught or even implied. Obviously somewhere in us and in our culture there is a rule that says incest is bad. The incest meta-rule says there is no incest rule. So don’t even think about the problem.

3. Meta-meta-rules provided yet another level of "protection." The meta-meta-rule states very simply that meta-rules don’t exist. In other words, don’t even think about thinking about the problem.

Laing spent a good part of his life trying to sort through the mess which these sets of rules make externally (our behavior) and internally (our consciousness).

If alarm bells start going off when you try to think about some aspect of our lives, there are two possibilities. One is that you’re really getting off the track into pure kookiness.

The other is Laingian. It may be that you’re getting into territory that received culture perceives as so dangerous, so threatening that it has constructed rules, meta-rules, and meta-meta-rules to keep anybody from even thinking about thinking about it.

Incest—as I used it above—is a loaded example.

There are similarly—if not quite as incendiary—red-flag words relating to the area I’m trying to think about here.

Say "psychic" and there go the alarm bells and the red flags and immediately you lose the open attention of many, many very well-educated people. The fact—got that? "fact"—that a very large body of data exists that indicates the existence of phenomena completely outside the realm of the current orthdoxy known as science has no effect. Why? Because such data exists outside the current orthodoxy, therefore it cannot be "true" or "valid" or "relevant." Q.E.D.

Not only is such information irrelevant. It is also dangerous. Extremely intelligent, well-educated people, when forced to consider such data, speak in ominous terms of a coming age of "irrationality" and "superstition." In other words, allowing yourself—much less society—to try to think outside the box of orthodoxy is just one step short of witchcraft, necromancy, tarot readings, the I Ching, and music from Windham Hill.

Revealingly, these boxed-in thinkers come basically in two varieties. You have, on the one hand, your Nobel Laureate types who, from the highest pulpits of Science, preach Linear Rationality as not just the Way, but as The Only Way. At the same time, and equally rambunctious, you have your common, garden-variety religionists who, while comfortable neither with the divinations of quantum physics nor evolution, speak in similarly scarred-shitless terms concerning the dangers of ESP, fortune-tellers, and other "superstitious" strayings from their own One True Path.

A fine kettle of fish, Ollie.

3. Flibbertigibbetivity
I stand in a gale, worse I think than Hurricane Molly (that greatest of 20th-century storms, the one conjured by James Joyce, I mean). The daily winds—from breezes to zephyrs to strong blowings—of consciousness are nothing compared to these powerful, incessant whirlings that came up recently.

They don’t merely buffet. They pound relentlessly, throwing one first off-balance, then hurling one almost to the very ground of being where one is struck by all manner of flying debris ranging from mild, momentary irritation from passers-by to group-think thunderheads and tornadoes.

To say it right out: I’m talking about—for want of any proper terminology—what we might call "psychic weather." And lately I find a storm, a global storm, has been raging.

Insanity? Senility? How easily the boxed-in thinkers could dismiss this dreadful internal, infernal reality. How smugly they would confirm their diagnosis if I dared to further reveal to them that—watch out! he’s going over the edge—I sense, perceive evidence of similar storm damage in persons around me, and thus also in the societies which those persons inhabit, inform, define, and shape.

Intolerance, irrational top-of-the-lungs name-calling, bullying on the smallest to the largest scales (some call it patriotism, some call it religion)—it all adds up to a Force 5 storm that has brought down the once proud, sound house of comity, leaving in its stead the chaos of consciousness in ruins.

Like the Parthenon, a lovely comity of consciousness that stood for quite a long time has itself of late been beset by boorish, savage forces of destruction, some calling themselves Muslim, others calling themselves Christian, against which it has few defenses.

Some flee to the flimsy shelters of primitive ritual, praying to ostensibly all-powerful anthropomorphic deities. Others, with little but money and the acquisition of money in mind, surround themselves with goods, properties, and offices mightily secured, traveling from one to the other in enormous, tinted-windowed tanks. For still others greed takes a different form: the compulsive quest for power: financial, military, political, religious, esthetic, scientific, pedagogical. Meanwhile, deluded, diverted masses vote desperately for patriarchal poseurs who promise nothing more than to kick ass bigtime.

Vain efforts all, because the securities they seek are in the visible here and now, while the storm that rages, rages in a vast field of dreaming—or something—whose existence is acknowledged only by what are viewed as the kookiest fringe elements of society.

In my decades I have experienced only one similar storm.

As a child during World War II I was acutely, painfully aware that something—a lot—was wrong. Internally aware, I mean. Discomfited, discomforted, constantly unsettled. But of course as a child I neither knew what the problem might be, nor indeed knew anything different because I had been born into the world when the storm was already brewing.

It was only in 1945, when the fighting stopped, first in Europe, but more powerfully in Asia, that I—very suddenly and shockingly—experienced a world without storm.

Much of the seemingly alarmist stuff I have written in these Internet pages comes from a growing awareness of the similarity between the violently disrupted ecology of consciousness now and my uneasy childhood consciousness in the early 1940s.

Like the first people to peer through Leeuwenhoek’s first microscope at the strangest little animacules, we perceive effects of the fields of consciousness in which we move and have our being, but we do not know them, nor what they are, nor really what effects they may have on us, nor what effects our own willy-nilly fluctuations of individual- and group-consciousness may have on them.

Looking at history, we can infer storms and calms which, since we are ignorant of all that which we cannot see and which our present instrumentation cannot measure, we have sought to explain in countless theories of history, society, and civilization.

In the calm periods of fair weather, we thrive, oh how we thrive, existing fairly happily in the most comfortable of comities. Not everyone partakes, to be sure. Think of the 1960s, the last time such a remarkable comity reigned. Those who lived in it, who partook of relatively untroubled community and communality, were changed permanently and for the better. Some, many—for who knows what reasons—stood sourly on the outside, bitter at a happiness that they neither understood nor had access to. (As a fascinating aside, note that that very group, embittered still, is now in control of the American Empire, saying by deed and implying by word, "If we can’t have fun then by God nobody can have fun.")