“If we can distill that, there are innumerable ways in which each of us are the collective, as well as the individual. And there are numerous ways in which the collectives into which we have organized operate and function and should probably well be considered as individual entities, as discrete beings. And as we become woven evermore intimately with our electronic technologies and our emergent or rediscovered psychic capacities (however you believe that those two things are going to articulate in the next several decades), we’re very literally weaving ourselves into a collective human consciousness, and our notion of self is geared for a radical renovation. These are all things to bear in mind as we address this crisis of alienation that most people are feeling now, this sense that we arenot part of “It,” that we are not participating, that somehow there is a distinction, there’s a division between over here and over there in some sort of fundamental and absolute way. Well that’s just not true. And nobody, none of these sciences, none of these human disciplines, believe that anymore. So it’s time for us to re-evaluate our sense of self and its relationship and its place and its participation in these greater wholes.”

This is the second part of Michael Garfield’s Burning Man lecture, which also appeared in full in Reality Sandwich.

Really worth reading for insights into P2P Relationality.

Michael Garfield:

“In one sense this is very mundane. We can say, “Oh well yes, everything we do, every artifact that we create, is a performance of our culture,” that all of our architecture is an expression of the consciousness, that it’s a communication. It’s an attempt to express something, and ultimately therefore, in the words of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, it’s an extension of our phenotype, our physical form. Our cities are, in some sense — as well as all of our technology — an extension of our behavior and our anatomy. It can be regarded as a part of our body. And in fact there has been a lot of research into human tool use and its effect on the brain that indicates that if you are holding a hammer, your brain automatically adjusts the map of your body to include the hammer. And so in a very real and psychological way, the tools that we use and the spaces that we inhabit are a felt extension of our physical form and also our mind and our thoughts – insofar as speaking or writing is thinking out loud, dancing is thinking out loud.

But again in that sense, if this is an extension of my physical form, it’s also an extension of your physical form, and then we are, in that sense, conjoined. We are joined at the metropolis; we are woven together at that level, in that dimension, through our collaborative projects. And then also of course the spaces that we inhabit are opportunities for the culture to engineer our state of consciousness — so even as our cities are a performance of our culture, they operate upon us, they program the culture into us. A really fabulous example of this is that they’ve done some research into ceiling height; you think about cathedrals and temple spaces, and most of them have very tall ceilings. And what they’ve found is that ceiling height has a direct effect on the spaciousness perceived. So if you really want people to focus on the transcendental, then you create a cathedral ceiling. Also, work from physicists like Dan Winter has popularized that temples obey certain geometries that create resonant magnetic fields that are actually supportive to the growth and development of living systems. They focus basically as capacitors of electromagnetic and subtler energies. The shape and constitution of our buildings actually affects the human organism; it’s actually affecting the ways that our genes are turning on and off, the hormones that we express, the state of mind that is magnetically entrained by the resonances of our surroundings.

There’s another sense in which cities can be regarded specifically as individuals. I like to use as one of my simplest orienting generalizations: that there is a hard correlation, a reliable correlation of body and mind that these are two different dimensions, two different perspectives on the same thing. That we don’t really need to worry about the relationship or whether one is causing the other. At least historically, we can’t seem to determine that; and it seems that the most likely reason is that it’s one thing so you can’t say that one thing is actually causing itself; that’s a logical boner. But in that sense then the complexity of one equals the complexity of the other, so we each have a human form that has a neural net that’s far more sophisticated than the neural net of some flatworm, and therefore we can predict certain things from that. We can predict that we are going to have certain types of experiences that the worm is not.

But something that has been largely ignored by people who adhere to this assumption of correlation of mind and body is that we only recently launched up a solar observer that is capable of looking at the magnetic patterns of the Sun at a resolution of 360 kilometers. I mean, that’s huge, but it’s still on the surface of the Sun it’s very small, and we’re realizing now that the magnetic patterns of our star are far, far, far more intricate than we thought they were…and likewise, our own planet. And it seems to me that it would be foolish to believe that these patterns, which are millions, billions, trillions of times more sophisticated than the electrochemical energetic description of a single human body, would not also correspondingly have the correlative experience that’s millions, billions, trillions of times more intricate, and that there is a way in which we can actually start thinking of these larger units of a city, or a nation, or a planet, or a solar system, or a galaxy, as ever larger and more inclusive bodies with ever larger and ever more inclusive minds.

So I’m not the kind of person who wants to end my worship at Gaia, and draw the line there and say,”My god: the planet.” Because it seems to me that even the planet and its transcendental awareness it possesses is transcended itself, and that as far as we look in either direction this goes on for as far as we can see. To me it seems that science is bringing us back to this alchemical understanding of “as above so below,” this endless fractal self-similar organization, minds and bodies enfolded inside minds and bodies as far as we can perceive in either way.

And so we can start talking about the character, the dynamic, the nature, the personality of a specific city — because after all, historically, cities emerged as not only ways for people to socially organize and to capitalize on a surplus of agricultural yield (and then specialize in a number of professions like organelles within a single cellular body), but that there was a religious purpose to the early cities, that early cities all came into being (or many came into being) in order to honor a specific deity. Like Athens, Greece, these cities were erected in honor of a specific being, and I’m of the mind that if you were to zoom out and do the Google Maps neuron-brain-scan-view of everyone in a particular population, and you were to say, “Let me look at the cross section of that population that’s all thinking about money right now, or that’s all thinking about sex” (You know, there is that scene in Dazed & Confused where they areall on the moon tower and they’re like “Man, look out at that, how many peopleare doing it out there?”), well pretty soon we are going to be able to actually do that. We are going to be able to pull out to satellite-level views and observe these thought forms as they appear in some sort of material pattern in millions or billions of people…and what is that pattern if not the discrete embodiment of an idea? What is that, if not the body of spirit or a God? The way that people go to church and they honor their creator, the way people go to stock market and they devote their energies and attentions to the playing of a specific set of forces; that these are religious impulses and they unify us as individual human beings into the very real living body of a larger and likely a sentient pattern.

Then there is also the notion — while we are getting into super organisms — that each of us are in fact the reflection of the city, that the ego is an intelligent response to the environment. In fact at the Lindesfarne Foundation William Irwin Thompson and his people — Stuart Kauffman in the Santa Fe Institute and others — has talked about how the ego functions as a delay space. The ego itself is a place for the various sensory impulses; they all travel at different speeds, so in order for them to be integrated, you need a nexus, and that nexus is the self. Our selfhood, from a cybernetic definition, is where all of the relevant environmental forces, all of those dimensions of our ecological surround that are important to our survival, come into communion with one another.

And, as the ego develops, it becomes able to take as object its earlier forms and identify as larger and larger wholes that were once the ecological surround of the earlier version ofthat ego. So the example here would be that in mythological rule-and-role-based conventional communities — a great example would be a Christian fundamentalist church, where everyone has imported this specific system of values and ethics and is identifying with their place in that system, and whether or not they are well executing their God-given responsibilities — when you move from that kind of thinking to the more modern kind of thinking of self-authorship, where “I’m the one generating a system of values, and I therefore choose specific roles and I move fluidly role to role for different situations,” I may look like the good son when I go visit my parents and go to church with them, but then I come out to Burning Man and I put on my bondage gear and there is no conflict in that
because all of them are unified within a coherent system of meaning that I have authored. What has happened there is I have become the generator-of-roles that was once the divided collective intelligence of my entire community. So naturally there is conflict between mythical consciousness and modern consciousness, because it looks to the mythical mind that a self-authoring, value-selecting individual is disobeying the will of God, is blasphemous. They’re incapable of understanding how that can occur.

At any rate, as we grow and we develop we internalize the city to a greater and greater degree and what was once a distributed intelligence becomes more and more located in the individual; whereas simultaneously the more intricate our cities become, the more we end up specializing, the more we end up becoming super-specialists with limited skill sets and very limited (although deep) knowledge bases.”