Preface
A Radical Departure
I
With my mind I believe.
And I believe in my beliefs.
But more honestly, and more humbly, than my believing -
is just my sense of it all:
II
a unified, dominant, global culture -
cut loose from the natural world, floating -
dreaming of being digital, mind, abstract information -
bodiless, cosmic, computer-people-beyond-people...
As if we could dream without bodies!
As if we could be bodies without hearts!
Here we are:
floating in dreams of superhuman freedom -
living in concrete,
metal and plastic, loud sound and bright lights -
sensational, glamorous, numb.
We´ve been had, my friend!
In our screen we´re in paradise,
but outside it´s a slum!
Fancy, rich man´s slum...
Filthy poor man´s slum...
No birds, no fish,
no dancing naked in the rain,
no muddy toes and children laughing:
slum, slum, slum!
I will say what I see in poetry and I will say what I see in prose...
In these two hundred pages I will probably repeat myself a hundred times:
the colllective consciousness, the human mind -
is being persuaded away...
I don´t blame the leaders.
I don´t blame the led.
We´re persuading ourselves away...
Once we worshipped gods.
Then we worshipped priests and kings.
Now we worship bureaucrats.
Let me be direct:
I can´t hear a word the politicans say -
their slick sincerity makes me sick!
III
So here´s my proposal:
we can say “fuck that” -
and walk off in the opposite direction!
It´s a radical departure,
I know.
Requiring clarity and commitment,
I know.
And requiring each other...
It´s a pilgrimage back to each other -
back to ourselves in each other...
Not just to naked-in-the-rain -
back to the naked heart.
Every insect has a will of its own.
Every tree makes decisions.
The air isn´t empty.
Everything is alive.
It´s a pilgrimage back to the present,
back to honesty, to not knowing -
it´s a pilgrimage to the joy that awaits
beyond definitions.
“Oh, so you´re anti-technology!”
“Oh, so you´d return us to the middle ages?”
“Oh, so you´d return us to the caves?”
No! But I feel we need to depend less and less
on technologies whose development and manufacture
rip the world apart,
and rip us out of the world,
and rip us apart from each other.
Nor am I promoting violent revolution.
As John Lennon sung before he was shot:
“when you talk about destruction - don´t you know that you can count me out”.
IV
And so...
The thesis of this book in a nutshell:
1. What we do depends on the quality of our consciousness.
2. The chaos and conflict being generated by the dominant, global culture is the natural
consequence of its quality of consciousness.
3. To co-create a new culture we need to cultivate an alternative quality of consciousness.
4. This cannot be done alone, so we need to form ´Conscious Tribes´ - groups of people who
are cultivating this alternative quality of consciousness together.
5. Conscious Relating needs to be their primary concern because these Conscious Tribes are
microcosms of the alternative culture (relational network) they seek to co-create.
6. Conscious Relating depends upon Radical Subjectvity (each person´s sense that “all I ever
have is my own, limited, subjective experience of reality”)
7. Conscious Relating needs to be expressed not only emotionally, but in local action.
8. Conscious Tribes link to form Conscious Communities. Conscious Communities link to
form Conscious Cultures.
V
Finally:
this is intended to be a very practical book.
So please...
I invite you to use it!
*
Mark Josephs, "Mark the Mystic Activist" Aragon, Spain,
Summer 2024 "A Radical Departure" is the preface to the third edition of "Love & Revolution" (the central text of the Conscious Tribes Project), due out later this year.
You'll be able to download it for free, listen to it for free, or buy it as a paperback (at cost of print and post).
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