Fragment 172, word count: 680.

tags: spirit, hive-mind, identity, sensibility, culture, self-possession, caring drama, dissent

It is not unusual for some individuals to recognize a personal discordance with mass identities, cemented into uniformity, as they are, by collectively sharing an orientation up toward a commanding height of metaphysics that denigrates human existence among ideas of disembodied demons, deities, and ever recurring cycles and circles of events and personal incarnations. It is widely recognized that shared stories and emotional triggers distributed on popular media, under the control of a few corporate owners responsible to certain investors and advertisers, contribute mightily to a shared sense of reality which is the human equivalent of hive-mind. In the individual’s quarrel with hive-mind dystopian regimes, the individual can’t do much about mechanisms of mass control except to shift focus onto the deepest level of politics: conceptions of creative power, freedom, and self-possession at the level of the individual.

Without recognizing the reality of actual creative agency, the enactment of spur-of-the-moment aspirations or intentions from conception at some moment through subsequent time, the idea of spirit is entirely unnecessary, but with such a recognition the idea is indispensable and profoundly important as a transcendence within reality. Creative agency is a drama of perfecting expectations and inventing intentions for effective self-declaration. To be experienced, reality must come within that caring drama of a personal life in the world. Expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations are states of ideality that occur only in clusters that have the dramatic structure of a personal “I”, a sensibility that is the living experience of some individually embodied personality. As well as coping with the falling away of all particular states of actuality with the passage of time (the ephemeral situation of bodies on planet Earth), the main drama for every spiritual being involves the value experienced from nurturing, caring for, and creating enduring relationships with others, sharing the drama of expectation and self-declaration, mutually reflecting the super-reality of living consciousness, collaborating as pilots of a searching, questioning, gaze.

Only the original drama of caring conceived by each individual confers a shape of relevance and importance on brute uncaring actuality, the envelopment of inertial and entropic nature. The specific caring of every person enchants the entirety of existence, makes it dramatic, makes it matter, certain parts more than others, crucially different for every individual. Every person has the same transcendent creativity in building a life’s drama within its enveloping world. However, there have typically been assertions that certain individual dramas must be disabled in order to enable others to play out more favourably. In that context the individual sensibility or orientation is the matrix of politics, the essential battlefield in the wars of hive minds.

To a considerable extent, our perceptions of things are culturallyimposed on our expectations. Given the fact that ideas (expectations, purposes, intentions, or aspirations) occur only in the living experience of some embodied personality, the history of ideality is the history of the interplay between cultural influences and personal inventiveness in forming ideas for the arc of orientation and bearing of lives, the mutating expectations that people suppose over generations about nature, culture, themselves, social interconnectedness, and sacred transcendence. The community master narrative over-represents the perspective of the most acquisitive and competitive stratum of the social order, glamourized to reinforce inequalities of wealth and power, often expressed in stories of apparently exceptional persons: kings, princes, aristocrats, military and police officers, the very beautiful or lucky.

Culture is not nature, and not divine intervention, but a human and political interpretation of experience, an expression of what mattered previously in the caring drama of certain people. Everyone’s personal state of orientation is culturally influenced, guided, and enriched, situated at some place in the historical and political evolution of a mutating culture. From recognizing that this culture is not the end but yet another in a string of badly flawed iterations, individuals can use the inherent creative power and freedom of spirit to recognize their self-possession and to own a measure of participation and control in conceiving the ongoing evolution of their society and culture.

Embedded links:

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

Fragment 101, December 18, 2016, Metaphysics Matters (word count: 1,550.)

Copyright © 2021 Sandy MacDonald.