Integral Liberties

It comes up from time to time when I think of Sri Aurobindo. Like I wrote in the first essay on this blog, I cannot relate well to the man at all except for the fact that he was mightily overtaken by the Spirit while in prison and on trial for his life. It is a common syndrom, the jail house conversion. I recall he sat through his trial in something of an ecstatic, non-dual trance. I cannot say I knew personally anyone who could make the same claim. Michael, who’s story I tell below, sat through his in a trance but it was not of the sort where the consciousness is overwhelmed in the ineffable apprehension of cosmic wholeness. Michael’s was induced to overcome some of the side effects of his conversion and to set him up…but to all of that soon enough.

Killing The Beast, I believe, was the name of the thread that Jana started some months ago on one of the many forums that help civilians in Integral Province stay in touch. If I correctly recall I posted something and then was still drafting another, the one found below, when the direction of the thread changed; it went tangent or was jacked by chatters and dribbled out toward entropic stasis and the AADD diffusion that often characterizes the provisional forums. So I let this piece hibernate in some virtual closet. About two years ago I hauled it back out, shot it up with a little adrenaline, tidied the style and added a bit or two, found it suitable again for public consumption and hung it on the board at Integral Visioning. Now I’m nailing it to this page:

So we wonder at The Beast. I’ve been an artist too long so I tend to forget, I no longer remember to wonder each morning at The Beast. But today might be the time to be conscious again in this manner to see what we are trying to kill here and what we would be well advised to keep of The Beast. For 18 years, doing work as a p.i., I tried to keep people from going to jail, or to get them out of jail, or to keep them off the gurney that rolls down the concourse to the Needle. The Beast roams at large in that concourse and breathes in, breathes out through that slight steel tube. My client Michael was on his way there once.

Michael talked to the wall for a month, maybe more, after he turned himself in. He was a sweet young man, quiet and dutiful, with a wife and a baby a week away. He had a job and a car. The Beast rode in that car because he put the two young women in the trunk and took them out east of Albuquerque and killed one with his knife and the tire iron, but the other, with 17 stab wounds and two skull fractures got away. Michael’s wife helped him turn himself in and he didn’t talk to anyone except The Virgin who apparently finds a residence in the wall of many an institution. The Beast slept in the bunk while Michael no doubt spilled his life to Our Lady of the Psych Ward Wall and he probably talked of cars, his car, his mother’s car when he was young and Mom let her brother sodomize her son in the back seat on their way into town. Cars; it will be a long time until Michael rides in one for he will probably live out his life somewhere near the concourse where The Beast lives and breathes. The Beast breathed enormous doses of stelazine and thorazine into Michael while he was standing trial so that he wouldn’t get distracted into a chat with Our Lady of the Court House Floor because that would make him look insane and someone incompetent of committing a capital crime. And though he wasn’t competent and wasn’t guilty in the capital definition, the State liked The Beast’s breath because it made Michael look sane enough and sociopathic enough (Google “stelazine stare”) for a jury to want to kill him. And it worked. But we got him free of Death Row and his mother was touched with the work we did to save her baby, Michael, the good little boy she beat up on a few too many times.

There was another guy who was talking in those days to Our Lady of the Cell Block Wall. They called him Weepie. Weepie and a man with the last name Chavez killed Joe A. in the Cell Block 3 (Maximum Security) exercise yard where The Beast was working out while the two stabbed Joe A. 47 times before the guards got him free of his handcuffs. Weepie needed that kill for some inside credibility and I think that when Ricky issued the contract on Joe A. he picked Weepie as a favor. Ricky looked out after his people that way. Weepie needed someone like Ricky to front for him because Weepie was the skinniest guy in the joint, he had that wretched name because he still had his tear-drop tat from his juvie days, and worst of all he looked just like Olive Oyle. Chavez had wanted to kill Joe A. on his own and he didn’t want to be in trial with Weepie because Weepie was just Weepie and that was a bad drug on the Chavez image especially now that Weepie had religion and was enjoying long and fruitful exchanges with Our Lady of the Protective Custodial Wall. The Beast was all round that morning while Chavez was telling me this. I was working for the widow of Joe A. in her civil rights and wrongful death suit against the State of New Mexico. Chavez, whose business with the A. Family had been successfully concluded, hoped she could loot the State for all she could carry away. And, indeed, she made out alright because it wasn’t hard to prove that the Warden knew and the Captain of the Shift knew and the Lieutenant for Cell Block 3 knew, and the Assistant Warden for Security knew and even the New Mexico State Secretary of Corrections knew that Joe A. was going to be killed if he went into the exercise yard that morning and they did nothing at all, nothing, to stop it. The Beast had been busy all around.

Ricky was already on Death Row the morning they killed Joe A.; sent there for having killed that other Cell Block 3 prisoner from Las Cruces and the new guard with one week’s tenure, both at the same time, both of them in the middle of Cell Block 3 where no two prisoners were to be out of their segregated cells at the same time. (Ricky was a wizard.) At his sentencing to The Needle, Ricky looked the new guard’s mother in the eye and apologized for killing her son, but the kid had, in effect, committed suicide when he tried to stop Ricky from doing what he needed to do which was to kill the guy from Las Cruces.

Ricky laughed when he told me this, but then he said he meant it and he genuinely felt sorry for her, sitting there in court looking like just another sorry assed Anglo woman with the thinnest kind of blood and the weakest sort of will.

Quite often when I went into that prison to chase the facts around I would have them bring Ricky in from Death Row so the two of us could kick back in the legal interview room, Ricky would drink the Coca Cola I brought him while I told him why I was there and then he could pass the word on his way back to his cell that it was alright to talk with me. It was like a courtesy call.

Ricky and I were hanging there one morning when into the adjacent room the guards ushered a fat, middle aged, red faced White guy who was doing life for a couple of psychopathic motivated murders. He had spent almost his entire sentence in protective custody because he was “mental,” a freak, and as such wasn’t tolerated well in such close confines. But some months before, due to overcrowding, the administration had farmed him out to a county jail in an end- of-the-world kind of hamlet called Estancia. He behaved himself so well there the Sheriff made him the office dispatcher on the night shift. Three nights before we saw him there in the next room, the fat man had walked away from the dispatcher’s desk and caught a ride to Albuquerque . The night after that he hired a cab to take him to a restaurant and on their arrival had killed the cabby and had been hauled down by some bystanders and witnesses when he tried to run. He was back in custody within 10 minutes and back in prison almost as soon. When the guards brought him in to see his lawyer, Ricky’s blood went up. He forgot I was in the room, forgot perhaps how to talk. His focus froze on the Fat Man and we sat there for almost five minutes without words. I said nothing, just listened to Ricky breathe because the Fat psychopath was a loose cannon, loose on Ricky’s watch and he wanted the Fat Man dead because Ricky had more power in that prison than the warden and a responsibility to keep it orderly. Ricky was not a psychopath, he was a warrior from a cultural substrate with alternative values, and perspectives, and economies that generally ran totally counter to the norm. His sentence to The Needle was commuted to Life the same time Michael’s was, along with five others. We cleaned up that day; it was on a Thanksgiving.

The County Sheriff who used the Fat Man as a dispatcher lost his job the next election, it was no big surprise. A few months later he and I were sitting around a vacant jury room in the court house in a town called Los Lunes. It was a criminal trial. I was working for the defense and he was a witness for the prosecution. He asked if I had heard what had happened that morning in Santa Fe. No, I had not because I’d been away from home for a couple of days. So he told me the story of a man named Andy who had been charged with first degree murder. Andy’s lawyer, a few weeks prior, had pled him to the lesser charge of second degree, and the previous day the judge sentenced him to seven years in prison with the obligation to pay the former wife of the man he killed $100,000 restitution to make up for the child support she would no longer receive. Early that morning Andy went to the former wife’s mobile home and shot her dead. He then went to the court house to take the judge hostage while he made his break for god knows where. But the judge was late in coming to work and that screwed Andy’s plan. He tried to run and a deputy sheriff, a Santa Clara Pueblo Indian named Naranjo, brother of a friend of mine, shot him down. Naranjo put a pistol full of bullets into Andy in the lobby of the Santa Fe County Court House where The Beast was all around. I thought, as I listened to this story, of how I had less than six months before sat at Andy’s kitchen table and talked with his wife and son and him about how the man he killed, the uncle of his son’s wife, had been threatening his son, threatening Andy too. One day the word was out that the uncle-in-law and another family member were going to make good on the threat that night. The son went out looking for the pair. Andy, out of his mind with worry, went out to find the three of them. He confronted the uncle in the drive way of the mobile home where his former wife lived. Andy thought the man was reaching for a weapon that was said to be always close at hand. Andy pulled a pistol, shot twice, hit once and drove away. The Uncle walked across the driveway, sat down on the steps to the former wife’s front door and bled to death with The Beast lounging there beside him.

Andy was a shy, pleasant, worried, round little middle class lath and plaster contractor who had an acute brain disorder triggered by fermented barley. They found out about that one too late and the judge would not let it be admitted into evidence at the sentencing where The Beast was watching from the back row.

The next night I left Los Lunas and headed south to a mountain town with a cowboy dealer who had hired me to help his lawyer make 24 ounces of cocaine, thirteen pounds of marijuana, two and a half gallons of crystal meth, a couple blocks of hash, and 1,200 tabs of LSD legally disappear because to all involved the FBI had obviously lied on the sworn affidavit for the search warrant, an act that should make those pharmaceuticals inadmissible as evidence. After I had spent several days finding witnesses to the fed’s big lie, the cowboy came around and told me that the next day he had a meeting with Another Busted Dealer and they were going to be talking snitches and rats. But the two men didn’t know each other, or each others friends, or each others enemies, or anyone’s real name and neither knew where the other one stood on the issues of a high-rolling cattleman dealer who always got busted but never was charged, or the guy who got his product wholesale along the border in guns-for-drug deals and who had been busted a few weeks before and might have been the one who had rolled over on them. When the feds searched the house of the gun runner they found an original Yoko Ono piece hanging above the couch. It had once been stolen in a burglary at the Dakota Hotel and god knows The Beast hung there. The gun runner told the cowboy and me that he had always thought the piece was a copy. We’d had our meeting with this man on foot along a dirt road that ran through the hills, his call. And we had every reason to believe that he had a second who wasn’t all that far away with a rifle because things can turn funny-shaped suddenly when strangers are talking snitches and rats. That was why the cowboy asked me to be in place to take up his slack if the meeting went sour with the Other Busted Dealer.

I was the first one at the 7-11 parking lot, site of the rendezvous. The cowboy had rented for my driving pleasure and general transport a Lincoln Town Car and this was where I was topping off the tank. The Other Busted Dealer and his side-kick showed up next. I knew them for their Jeep CJ and their ski clothes, the two guys I was going to start shooting at, if and when… They went inside and I went in behind them. One bought a candy bar and the other one jerky. I paid for the gas and bought a newspaper to cover my pistol that lay between me and The Beast in the passenger seat. The Cowboy showed up last in his pickup and the Other Busted Dealer, quick like, climbed in beside him and off they drove. I slipped the Lincoln out onto the highway behind them just ahead of the sidekick in the Jeep. The trick was to stay three cars back and still make all the same lights. They drove into the hills on a winding road and pulled into the back lot of a time-share complex. I drove past, around a hairpin switchback and pulled to a stop on the wrong side of the road right above the pickup and watched the animated conversation through its rear window.

I had time then to take what seemed like a leisurely inventory of my life to that date and I found that I could not have been more pleased with where I had been, where I sat now and who I was. Robert Service once wrote: “The world’s a jolly good joke to him, and now is the time to laugh, ” so I did. And I found a familiar heat rising up my spine, radiating into the viscera, infusing my heart with delicious longing, doubling my lung capacity, forcing into my throat; if I had then anything to say it probably would have been spoken in a language that no one else had ever heard either. When it reached my ears all the white noise within miles became harmonized notes in the perfect overture to this highly localized little celebration. And then I saw all into eternity turn crisp and glowing, and despite the vividness of shape and color, eradicate all boundaries and all frontiers, and fuse with me into an indivisible totality; shipped straight back to the non-dual again…in a clumsy Lincoln Town Car with only a newspaper, a pistol, and The Beast.

Everything seemed straight between the Cowboy and the Other Busted Dealer who got out of the pickup and strolled across the lot to a time share. I drove down past the driveway just before the Cowboy pulled onto the road to show him I was still around and still on the clock. I don’t suppose given all the events that The Beast was too disappointed…there was after all a little commonality with the Sri.

She obviously was not Fox Mulder, but she did have two posters that read, “I Want to Believe.” The two were scrolled, tubed in cling wrap and tucked side-by-side into her large linen shopping tote. I could not see if they pictured hovering alien spacecraft but I doubt if they did. The background to the declaration of her desire was done in soft, sylvan, ethereal colors. There was nothing glaring, nothing to flaunt membership in a fringy sub-culture or devotion to a passe TV potboiler. There was another line in a language I did not recognize printed in soft gold ink above the English “I Want to Believe.” I figured is was a repetition of the phrase and assumed there were others in a list. Somewhere within the scroll would be the statement in Spanish “Yo Quiero Creer.” That would be the one that best expressed this woman’s wish that, if I had to guess, had nothing to do with chasing UFOs and aliens from far afar. She hardly looked the type—middle-aged, well-off, traveling with her husband in first-class. She joined us in the holding paddock that fronts Gate D40, Miami International, we were bound for Caracas Simon Bolivar. With carry-on items as she possessed, she might have just shown up from the Integral Mall.

I Want to Believe and I Want to Believe. One expression of need for her wall, the other for a friend’s or perhaps the wall of a daughter, or maybe both were gifts. Where the posters would eventually hang was incidental…the point was the woman identified with the desire and I wondered why. Is Belief the place Jeremiah called Gilead? Does its possession promise to heal or soothe? Is it the source of peace or the mint that coins the mantras that out-wear the mind? Or is it the admonition from the slightly mean spirited elder to remind us that in the end there has to be an end to the fun—believe for the sake of your doomed soul, or at least for the comfort of those who worry about it…take your place in the community of believers who are responsible for those who might not. Join the team, believe. “I want to Believe”…does it mean “I haven’t gotten there yet”? Are such posters unconscious (conscious?) pleas for some help in believing? Surely there are coaches in the Mall here who can help; spiritual coaches and therapists and philosophers who can advise one on how to devise a structural template, a conceptual kaleidescope of sorts, through which they can view the world and rest easier knowing they’ve bought tools from stores of their superiors.

Across the frontier from Integral Province, I understand that Daniel Dennet would have said the phrase should read, “I want to attribute agency.” I think that’s a little narrow, there are more needs out there than just that one, and it says more about the structure of his faith and his own necessity to tell the more fascinating story than it does about a sylvan colored, multi-lingual poster, listing phrases for…

The need to believe…

Marianthi posted this comment on one of the blog posts below.

“Steven,
Quoting here one of your ´contexts:

‘I have found in a few rather rare instances people whose autonomy of mind is as well developed as their level of self-awareness. They seem not to have any need for belief. They seem whole in both heart and mind.’

Would you tell me more about this WHOLENESS of heart and mind? Is that the instance when one is not divided against oneself but knows, feels, un hesitantly- but something else as well? Is it total conviction or fullness of instinct or all of the above?”

She has been urging me, with more insistence of late, toward an answer. She deserves the best…

No, it isn’t the instance when one is “not divided against oneself” or not divided against The Other for that matter if we want to take Wholeness into the illusive dominion of Nondualism. Unless one is seriously schizophrenic some internal division is advisable to provide the effective dynamism of consciousness that distinguishes the human psyche from that of a slug. By this I am not suggesting that the behavior of nondual practice should be equated with the behavior of a slug unless in a given situation such an equation is unavoidable. I suspect that possessing a nondual consciousness is not necessarily apart from a psyche possessed of a little internal division—how would one know if they were possessed of nondual awareness unless aware of another kind. I suspect that much because I suspect that nondual consciousness is a psyche-op and if one has the ability, for example, to visualize all sides of a Henry Moore sculpture or one of their own in the making without closing their eyes, one should be able to phase in and out of the nondual op at will whenever it suits the purpose at hand. Nondual is just one aspect of true, multi-faceted Wholeness and one that could illegitimately rub-out all other, often more mutually supportive facets, if it is promoted as a superior therapeutic or spiritualizing operation. Unfortunately nondualism is too often coupled with spirituality, which like the sciences, is reductionistic and ultimately anti-wholeness; thus it contains no reason to believe.

“Is it total conviction…?”

No. Conviction is belief. Somewhere I read a piece by Allan Watts in which he wrote that the original and still reigning significance of “belief” is more like a “fervent preference or hope” and less a profession of faith. I once spent almost an hour trying to follow-up on Watts’s entomology and got as far as learning that he might have been right given enough room for substantial equivocation. However if one pursues the history of “conviction” they will find a word that is actually stronger and more direct in its meaning…so a paraphrase: “They seem not to have any need for conviction.” (I considered at this point making a bad pun with the word “acquittal” but thought slightly better of it.)

“…or the fullness of instinct…”

I like that phrase and the fact that it is present in the question tells me that Marianthi knows a lot more about this Wholeness apprehension than she might be letting on and it makes me wonder if I am not a student in her class. Instincts are not high on the praise list for most folks from a culture with a background in the desert religions. Alternative journalists often make good use of the word if they are not the kind to take themselves too seriously. Human Behavioral Ecologists like it too and they seem to be such delightful subversives that I will gladly give them a plug whether or not they know of what they speak. More respectable civilians, those with spiritual inclinations or at least transcendental leanings prefer however a marginally near miss in the word “intuitive.” Butter would not melt in their mouths…but it appears that I digress.

Fullness of Instinct.

Instinct is informed by experience. This seems fairly obvious on watching the hunting strategy of an old cat…it appears to have what it needs to achieve its ends wu wei; seasoned but unconscious calculations of odds against exertion and factors of distance, terrain and cover, when to stalk, when to pounce, when to just sit back bemused and wash the face. Old cats have no need for beliefs for they have all it takes to live well without it. There is an age when they pass being needy. Marianthi and I have talked of the informing of instinct to make it full.

So how does one know there is no need to believe. “How do you know when,” she asked me last week and hinted she already knew.

It is without doubt when one catches themselves preening a little like an old cat, looking that way at the world, catching the taste of a sense that no matter how long the delicious free falls through the abyss that come the bottom, if it comes, one will land on their feet. Will it hurt? Who knows. But its safe until then.

The tourist brochures that are endlessly pumped on-line from Integral Province are clear that most of the natural charm of this map-generated territory is the willingness of the Provincials here to lend their spirits to the cosmic course of healing and evolution, they give the known universe an integrated voice in the repetition of Emil Coue’s mantra, “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and etc.” They take their texts for this teaching from a literary genre that can be called The Levels of Human Development Theory: works of Gebser, Maslow and his student Graves and Graves’s students Beck and Cowan, and Lawrence Kolhburg, Carol Gilligan, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson and on and on. Theirs is an all inclusive look at human psychophisiological to cultural processes that in its shortest form says “first you walk and then you run.” The theorists generally like to think that since running (for the short form example) is based on and grows out of walking that it is therefore “higher” and maybe even better. They’ve taken a lot of post-modern flack for their penchant to always order the ranks by gradation and quite often with more than just a slight hint of “to know an Alpha one must be an Alpha” sensibility showing; but it’s all part of the charm of this earnest little province where vanity has never been deemed a sin because: “Who knows? Maybe it has been earned.”

I don’t have any problem with the grades and gradations and the continual academic renaming and fine-turning of the obvious, for indeed—first you walk and then you run. To find another way of reaffirming that affirmation is always good work if you can get it—The Bright but Lazy Professor’s Fast Track to publications: cobble up a questionnaire for the undergrads, have the TA do the grades just like at mid-terms, and skew the definitions toward the politics of the journal to which one aspires. Nothing new or out of the ordinary there. Everything hinges on the definitions and if cleverly coined they can boost that one questionnaire and its subsequent reiterations into five or six articles, or a book, or a sub-school of the thought, or even a perpetual seat at the head table for every conference banquet from now to emeritus.

If I have a problem with the ever developing genre of Development, I find it rooted first of all in another charming and typically Provincial level of its own; a late adolescent, post-first-samadhi, arrière-goût among the Provincials that manifests in a deadly serious regard for Levels Literature, which in turn makes the lit itself not only humorless, fusty and over-precious but partial to the point of trifling, especially as other synthesizing litterateurs in the province are attempting to bootstrap Developmental Studies and Theory past the Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Fallacy, through higher orders of Spiritual Darwinism into a self-prophesying new Kosmic order. It ironic because the entire effort seems to leave out half of the final equation and so I must wonder why as much effort hasn’t been put into Degeneration Studies and Theory, Death Studies and Theory, Decomposition Studies and Theory, or Dissipation Studies and Theory; thus:

Integral Dissipation Theory

About 30 years ago two men boarded a plane in Washington, D. C. Each was unknown to the other at departure, but they had two things in common beside their destination: 1) Knowledge of which row of seats in that generation of 727s had the most leg room, and 2) A close acquaintance with a well respected physicist named Dr. Charles Hyder, the now late crusading environmentalist and conservationist who at that time was in the middle of a 217-day public fast in an alley off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He was calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide before he broke the fast or died. The first of the two men’s commonalities put them in the last row of seats on the plane’s left side and the second sparked the conversation that is the basis of this essay.

I was one of the two, a young radical investigative journalist working out of Albuquerque, NM, USA, and D.C. The other was Dr. Stirling Colgate, an internationally known nuclear physicist, astrophysicist and later one of the several co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute. It was not long into the flight before we learned that Hyder was a mutual acquaintance, and on that point Colgate began a disquisition. He told me that he and Hyder had discussed Hyder’s environmental/conservational missions at great length—particularly his efforts to close down the coal burning power plants and gigantic strip mines in the Four Corners region. Colgate had given up on the man who would not be convinced that his scientifically based crusades to preserve the planet were not only bad science, but flew in the face of over-all evolutionary process and one of the few natural laws on which every scientist in the world could hang their hat: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I never had much interest in science—it was school work and I generally found it boring and void of good stories, but Colgate gave The Thermodynamics Story a compelling spin. What he laid out was essentially Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 “What is Life?” lecture series and book which coupled the Second Law with evolution by proposing that open, self-organizing, ordered systems (including living ones) created gradient equilibrium, not by falling into disorder themselves (as would be the case in a closed system like a steam engine) but by generating disorder (entropy) through feeding off the negative entropy (free energy) available in their environments. (In this study Schrödinger also proposed the existence of a living complex cell with a genetic code for replication, a proposal that inspired the research that led to the discovery of DNA.)

Based on that background, Colgate stated his argument against Hyder’s position: Every since it came into existence the Earth, everything on it, and its every process from the core to the outer edge of the atmosphere has been undergoing a metabolic dissolution in the re-cycling flow of energy from the sun’s heat to the chill of deep space, a dissolution absolutely enhanced with the inception and advance of ever increasingly complex forms of life. He said that from the replication of the first living cell to the highest levels of humanity’s technology and culture one thing about evolution has remained constant: with each higher level of evolved complexity there has been a concomitant increase in the earth’s overall efficiency in generating entropy. In fact it is the only consistantly directional activity that can be observed not only in the local solar system, but the entire known universe. Or, in other words, everything in the Kosmos is working to burn itself out; it is The Law—from the smallest known, shortest lived particle to the largest ongoing process. (Colgate was in a position to know because his proposal to the U.S. State Department (circa 1960) to monitor the ban on nuclear tests in space through the use of gamma ray detecting spy satellites led to his pioneering research into the mechanisms of supernovas and hypernova phenomena.)

Point: The supreme function of nature is nihilistic and all its life, all of Earth’s living systems, all of our humanity, every breath we take, is an integral part of that function.

The essence of Colgate’s argument to Hyder was that any well organized effort to save the planet would be accompanied by an equally efficient degradation of energy feeding the organization. Hyder’s public fast proved a micro-case in point. During the 217 days, he degraded away over half of the 300 plus pounds he weighed going into the fast. Additionally he caught the attention of thousands of people around the globe (the fewest of whom were in the USA) who sent him hundreds of pounds of mail which came into existence and organization through the degradation of energy from the fuel for chain saws, bull dozers, logging trucks, pulp mills; diesel, gasoline and jet fueled transports, electrical lighting systems, printing presses, broadcast facilities, not to mention the nutritional energy spent by the manpower that went into making all those things work. It was an equation that equals the nihilistic irony of the Universe. If one wanted to ascribe consciousness to the Kosmos one could imagine that it had structurally guided Hyder into his fast not to end nuclear proliferation (which a conscious Kosmos would resist since nuclear is its energy of choice and which Hyder’s fast failed to do) but to speed the rate of its own degeneration—which it did.

I should point out that open system thermodynamics are much more complex than what I am sketching here. In any given system, such as eco-systems found and studied in national parks from border to border, free energy circulates and recirculates throughout, like cash in a micro-economy, generating complexity and new organization. But nothing is free. Each time through the organizing energy generates the equalizing disorder in the system’s supporting environment until that environment is dissipated into weakness and general death.

It seems that this scenario tends to create certain levels of depression and denial throughout the citizenry. Inspired from Schrödinger’s seminal lectures, far more people have taken up careers in genetics than in biochemical thermodynamics. Research funding has followed the same trend. There is only one generally available book semi-geared to the layman on the thermodynamic side of the coin: Into the Cool by Schneider and Segan and one fairly comprehensive web site maintained by Rod Swenson. Evidently people don’t like to be reminded of death and decomposition on such a macroscopic scale, so I will try not to dwell on it further, besides, the end result—total entropic stasis and the literal Death of Time—is not so much the subject of this essay as the getting there, the process.

This is a “process theory” though certainly nothing like that of Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of field, in that he was a god-fearing fellow who took these things earnestly and seriously and I’m not and I don’t. So for my requisite philosophic grounding as to process theory I’ll backtrack past Whitehead to Nietzsche’s revelation of the obvious that all perceptions pivot on perspective. All writers have to follow this advice if they want credibility here in the death watch for Modernity. Bennitta Roy was careful to do so in a recent Process Theory article that appeared in the on-line Integral Journal published by ARINA, one of the many management consulting groups that are headquartered in Integral Mall. The article put forth a process theory of integral for consideration by academia and if it had any solid human relevance beyond that, or at least a good story it might have been worth recounting at length, but I found it had neither, so I won’t. However, the article does start off on more or less the right foot:

“I hope to tease you, the reader, into a pure process orientation. This requires adopting a certain attitude—allowing one’s mental framework to release its grip on thinking in terms of things, and following me into a world of process or flow in a field of dynamic forces. It requires you to suspend structurally based perceptions to allow for new ways of orienting perceptions.”

What Roy failed to point out or follow up on, was since perceptions are perspective dependent, a process perception is almost impossible from the habitual perspective of a well educated, post-1945, American point of view in as much as most of the pilgrims treking through that category (those who would be reading articles such as hers) are not used to observing large-scale energetic and creative movements, day in, day out, or being in highly energized environments. By these I don’t mean simply frenetic places like PR firms that are pimping presidential candidates this Spring, but the ones that really count for the benefit of entropy—like the turbine galleries in Grand Coulee Dam or the raving chaos of a 20–man, steel fabrication shop anywhere in the third world, or huge railroad salvage yards where cutting torches are seven-feet long, crushers never slow down and neither do the magnetized front-end loaders that are three stories tall and careen through the waste to the peril of everything shorter. These aspects of existence have to a large degree been mediated for the sake of comfort out of the lives of Integral Journal readers. Theirs is not a world of high voltage flow or industrial strength fire, or bedlamized heat—entropy on demand—but of static structures that aim to render low energy, mediated calm. Roy’s readers had no point of reference from which to suspend habitual perceptions simply on the abstracted suggestion that it might promote understanding; so, because media brought the reader to this point, I will turn to it as a source for a few pointers toward generating those “orienting” perceptions.

A few months ago there was a TV commercial for Subaru Automobiles choreographed to the tune of the old folk-rock song “Dust in the Wind.” One sequence showed a semi-truck load of competitor cars literally decomposing and evaporating into the trailing draft; the air pressure gradient field created by the motion and heat of the carrier. That is the perceptual analogy and the perspective is from a Hubble-like telescope adrift in the Andromeda Galaxy and zeroed in on the Milky Way. Got it? Cue the time-lapse photography and there go Earth, the Sun and the rest of its little system and then the galactic mass itself dissolving into the mega-gradients of temperature, gravity, velocity and who knows what other forces. And there are no celestial Subaru plants out there minting new alternatives, just smaller and smaller models as the free entropy cycles through in ever weaker waves. Things will never be the same…again.

An optional media perspective is from the audience point of view on a sci-fi cliche confection wherein the curse of immortality is lifted from the support cast starlet who transmutes (transcends?) through the miracle of energy hungry Special FX from maid to middle age to crone to corpse to skeleton to calcium lace to dust to dust in the gradient draft. And like the well-deserved release of that world-weary, fictional form we, everything within us, everything around us is on the move, flowing outward, changing, disappearing. Everything is in the flux, even the illusion of structure. Everything is caught within a gradient, all the mythical turtles that go down, go up or go across flow in the currents. All the holons that the Holonic Nothing Butters say the Kosmos is nothing but are to open system gradients what Fun with Dick and Jane is to Of Time and the River; an analogy chosen not only for its disparate levels of complexity, but the words in the title.

Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It’s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.

Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole deengergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn’t actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.

Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat’s ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.