Toltec on Safari: Getting at the Galactic Consciousness

In his annotations to Pound’s Cantos, Robert Anton Wilson writes that Ezra was privy to a “stoned perception” by an everyday practice of pranayama and “40 some years meditatin’ on Chinese ideograms like a cloud over falling rain over dancing shaman.” He writes this between these lines of Canto XX:

With noise of sea over shingle,
Striking with:
hah hah aha thmm thumb, ah
woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa.
And from the floating bodies, the incense
blue-pale, purple above them,
Shelf of the lotophagoi,
Aerial, cut in the aether.

Wilson writes that “Ez” wasn’t “stoned on dope” like “Baud”[elaire] but nonetheless knew of artificial paradises and their ensuing agony enough to produce lines like the above. Wilson suggests that, having achieved these levels of consciousness with his own poetic-meditative practice, Pound’s stoned consciousness comes off in the poems as a kind of spiritual sensibility — usually represented as a global syncretism of the arts. And this, Wilson argues, led to the consciousness of the “global village” in Pound’s poetry. But, of course, Wilson himself reached the global consciousness by the ways of “Baud.” So what did these thinkers share that transcended the means (drugs or no drugs) and got them likewise to an elevated understanding of global community?

Wilson called them “reality tunnels,” or outlook portals that people had for their world. He believed that “reality tunnels” were in constant expansion, not only over a person’s lifetime, but across lifetimes and human history. “Where there was only one Buddha 2,500 years ago,” he says, “now you meet 5 to 10 Buddhas in every city you go to.” It is not that the innate potential for perception is any greater today than it was 2,500 years ago — but that the access to resources of information on these subjects is rapidly expanding.

Stuck in the grisly traffic of Guatemala City with a polymath cousin of mine, our conversation turned to the devastating effects of globalization in Guatemala — the trouble, he said, he had had in finding a job and of keeping it when he’d found one was the result of an increasing de-professionalization and (therefore) saturation of the work force. There is, he griped, a total lack of safeguards for the worker in the global village.

The global village — I asked myself, what is it about the global that doesn’t carry with it the global consciousness? Ez’s “global village” has little, it seems, to do with global neighborliness, if the “global village” could be an attack upon the economic peace of the people of this planet. What’s the missing link? One could say that culture could bring people together — but does it? On this note, we read in George Crabbe’s poem, “The Village:”

O’ercome by labour, and bow’d down by time,
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread,
By winding myrtles round your ruin’d shed?

The answer is, of course, no — but yes. There is no recompense in the poem for the damage caused by the expansion of the global village, which has expanded without that which has mistakenly been called global consciousness. A village does not mean a mind — even when the possibility for the expansion of mind grown with the expansion of the village. Not every poem can get at that essential, elevated consciousness.

First view of Earth, from missile V-2 #13, October 24, 1946 (Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

That the consciousness should be elevated, already suggests that what has been called “global” was never that — but something higher, for which possibility is expanding in the digital outflow of the space age. The galactic consciousness, or the “reality tunnel” that views the universe as a quickening fire moving through all living things, is expanding in the networked mind, bridging synapses at a much faster speed and over a more extensive field.

We are on this planet and part of something much larger. At the shores of a cosmic ocean, we feel the riptide beneath our feet. What cultural values extending across the globe might link up, do so because they are universal. And with the italics I mean to suggest that equation is celestial. The galactic human being — homo galacticus — has always existed within us. Born of star stuff, we carry it with us. But as a cultural good, it has only occurred in infrequent bursts — often to the alienation of the galactic artist. In marginalizing the galactic human, humans act as if the galaxies were out there, when they are here and we within them.