Medusa and the Post-Modern World
by Elinor Dickson
In 1758, we proclaimed ourselves Homo Sapiens, The Wise Species, and 265 years later we are facing possible extinction. What happened to bring about this drastic change of fortune?
Following the Great Plague in the 14th century, humanity slowly lost its connection to the dynamic pulse of creation. It seems we wandered into the cave of Medusa with her crown of writhing snakes, and she turned us into stone. Physicians like Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey dissected corpses leading to the view of humans as machines with pumping hearts and miles of blood vessels along with miles of “wiring” that governed our reflexes and all movement. Isaac Newton proposed a universe designed like a giant clock, that once set in motion would operate on its own. Inevitably the Machine Age blossomed into the Industrial Revolution and a worldview rooted in scientific materialism and dogmatic ideologies. Our limited consciousness performed with great efficiency within the parameters of a defined and literal world. In search of equilibrium, the Industrial Revolution constellated the Romantic Movement and a return to nature, but from stone axes to quantum computers, to a small machine that in 2023 created a star, our prevailing role as toolmakers has prevailed.
Influenced by the brutality of two World Wars, during 1960-1970 French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote three books that would establish him as a pillar of postmodernism. Foucault recognized that we had lost our connection to the natural, timeless world and that human beings needed to be liberated. In a recent essay in The Atlantic, January/February 2023, poet, and literary critic Adam Kirsch links “liberation” in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) to two current movements on the future of the human species who see liberation as extinction.
Today, the Wise Species, is looking more like an aspirational term than a reality. Underneath all our achievements, a hidden pathology has been constellating a trajectory towards death. Images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain locked in our memory and leave us anxious when impotent leaders like Putin, and Kim Jong Un threaten the world with their phallic missiles.
Beyond the looming shadow of nuclearism, another apocalyptic scenario is already upon us: the collapse of earth’s ecological systems upon which we depend. While many people have dedicated themselves to reversing this course, for others it looks more and more hopeless. One response to this deep, pervasive crisis gave rise to the Anthropocene anti-humanism movement. Such a movement, in the words of Kirsch, concludes “that our self-destruction is now inevitable and that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves.” Even if some people survive, human civilization on this earth is justly doomed.
A second movement, transhumanism, champions our separation from nature, our reasoning ability, and our technological progress. Nanotechnology and molecular engineering hold out the promise of a new “species” in the face of humanity’s demise. Molecular biologist, Dr. Alan Goldstein and his colleagues point out that by integrating living material and non-living materials at a molecular level, non-material substances are already able to talk to cells in a language they understand. Goldstein writes, “After 4 billion years of evolution, carbon-based life on Earth has learnt to make use of only a few dozen chemical reactions. But Homo technicus, with the whole periodic table of elements and an array of biological molecules at his disposal for nanofabrication, would be able to exploit trillions of chemical reactions to produce the desired result.” At this point, Goldstein feels justified in stating that human evolution will come to an end and this possibility should be part of our public discourse. The Transhumanists and the Anthropocene anti-humanists agree that humanity’s disappearance is to be welcomed. The transhumanists worry that we won’t have the technology in place before our extinction happens.
A hundred years ago a new Copernican Revolution took place, but only now are we beginning to grasp its power to change our worldview. Between 1903-1913 an image of two young men of genius in deep discussion, Carl Jung and Albert Einstein, symbolizes the discovery of an unknown portal to our future. By the 1930’s psychology and physics would lead us into strange new landscapes both within and without. Physics revealed a world of complementarity, entanglement, non-local causality, and the Zero Point Field. Psychology revealed the complementary world of the psychoid archetype, of matter and spirit, of acausality, and a collective unconscious field comprising the totality of the psyche, the sine qua non of all knowledge.
Having uncovered this portal to our future potential, it became evident that humanity had barely reached the midpoint of its evolutionary journey. Although we are slow to recognize it, scientific materialism, and indeed, the hierarchical paradigm of a patriarchy based on power was laid to rest with the discovery of an inner/outer, time and timeless world beyond our current reality. The great revolution of our age rests, not on our limited, illusory ego-consciousness, but on the unknown, unexplored depths both within humanity and the cosmos. Overwhelmed by our recent inventions, we are only beginning to realize that we can invent quantum computers because, like Nature itself, we are quantum beings.
A Buddhist sutra tells of the dancing god Indra and the fabulous net that spreads endlessly over the cosmos in every direction—a net that has a jewel at every knot so brilliant and polished that it reflects all the others. Or the ancient Anglo-Saxon Web of Wyrd in which everything is connected beyond space and time. Quantum physics from the Bell Theory to the work of Alain Aspect speaks to an invisible cosmic web in which one event can affect another across the universe at the speed of light. Psychology re-discovered this non-causal world as part of our everyday reality and labelled it synchronicity. The World Wide Web has always been a pattern within our psyche, but under the influence of Medusa it is no longer an organic reality in which we participate. Our computer-generated world wide web processes incredible amounts of information and knowledge derived from the synthesis of facts at a speed our brains cannot achieve, but locked in the duality of our psyche, the web we create serves to throw a spotlight on humanity’s unredeemed battle between good and evil.
Instead of entering the paradoxical world of wisdom, we turned our disembodied intellect to design supercomputers. If we could transform all the matter and energy in the accessible universe into a computronium the flow of data would be everywhere, and we would merge into it. The Grail search to transform the wasteland now rests on the construction of a computer capable of replicating itself. Each replication would increase its ability to think faster and deeper and each version would improve itself until it becomes a “singularity” more capable than all human beings put together. The goal behind the transhuman movement is to arrive at a world guided by a superior intelligence rendering the role of homo sapiens redundant. The consolation prize: humanity could achieve immortality through nanotechnology and/or silicon-based transistors.
Both the anti-human and transhuman movements speak of human inferiority yet, rely on unevolved humans to design computers that will make the effort to grow exponentially into better and better versions of themselves. Meanwhile, we abandon our own evolution. Do we risk the folly of Dr. Frankenstein who had the intention of giving humanity immortality but in putting the pieces together, unconsciously gave birth to an imperfect version of himself? The result was an ambivalent monster.
Despondent about our collective future, my exploration went deeper into the evolutionary structures of consciousness. Diving into the deep instinctual patterns of nature, I realized that psyche and matter are one. Embodiment is not the enemy; the enemy of our continuing evolution is our failure to understand what embodiment means. Where once we worked on dead bodies and saw them as machines, science has now penetrated matter to its quantum reality. Einstein discovered that “matter is energy and energy is light” and this was brought home when biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp found biophotons (light) emissions stored in our DNA. Given that 100,000 chemical reactions occur in a single cell every second and this repeats itself billions of times simultaneously across every cell in the body, Popp concluded that DNA must be like a master tuning fork in the body.
This research was enhanced by Herbert Frohlich who found that a liquid crystalline substance [phospholipids] just below the cell membrane vibrates at certain frequencies and at certain energy thresholds. When they vibrate in unison, they reach a high level of coherence and take on certain qualities of quantum mechanics including non-local causality with its instantaneous communication throughout the body and beyond. Further research has found that every organ of our body is encased within a connective tissue system which also functions as a liquid crystal semi-conductive network capable of operating at 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light. In a very real sense, we are beings of light in which everything within the body—cells, tissue and organs—are connected. The web of life to which we belong is far greater than we have imagined.
In holding the tension between matter and energy physicist David Bohm discovered the transformational third—active information—information that gives form to energy. In neurobiology Candace Pert discovered that emotions are “cellular signals involved in the process of translating information into physical reality, literally transforming mind into matter” and vice versa. In psychology, Carl Jung talked of two cones that meet and do not meet allowing the free flow of energy between mind and body. In this gap consciousness operates and grows. If the mind becomes disembodied, or the body traumatized, the gap becomes an abyss and madness ensues. If we wonder why the much-vaulted age of reason devolved into a nihilistic nightmare, we need only look to the split between matter and energy that underlies the dualism of our current worldview.
Researchers such as Bohm, Pert, and Jung recognized that their descriptions of the transforming power between matter and energy was, until the 17th century, called soul. In our current period of darkness, the metaphysical background of the world is becoming visible once more. In physics, the microscopic vibrations in the space between things was seen as background noise. Perceived as a constant, these vibrations were subtracted from calculations until thirty plus years ago when it was discovered that this noise was really a quantum sea of light called the zero-point-field. In explaining this sea of light, astrophysicist Bernard Haisch writes, “We see things by way of contrast. The eye works by letting light fall on the otherwise dark retina. But if the eye was filled with light, there would be no darkness to afford a contrast. The zero-point-field is such a blinding light. Since it is everywhere, inside and outside of us, permeating every atom in our bodies, we are effectively blind to it … It blinds us to its presence. The world of light that we do not see is all the rest over and above the zero-point-field.”
Or, in the Old Testament, “Wisdom is more mobile than any motion because of her pureness, she pervades and penetrates all things … a refulgence of eternal light … and while remaining in herself she renews and pervades all things.” (Wisdom 7:24-27) Scripture and science appear to agree that Wisdom, as the creative matrix of the universe, is not just a concept. She is everywhere, within and without, permeating every atom in our bodies and in all creation.
In the late 20th century, we began to understand the body as a quantum system intimately connected to the world around it. On the cusp of the 21st century, Tor Norretranders internationally best-selling book, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, envisions a new humanity. “Inside us, in the person who carries consciousness around, cognitive and mental processes take place that are far richer than consciousness can know or describe. Our bodies contain a fellowship with the surrounding world that passes right through us but is hidden from our consciousness. The body is part of a mighty living system, which totally forms and manages a planet that has caught fire.”
In our carbon-based world research at the quantum level shows interfering vacuum torsion waves recording and carrying information on atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, even organisms and populations and ecologies of organisms, in fact, on the whole state of the universe. As we bring to consciousness the metaphysical background of the world of our ancestors, we realize that our destiny is to stand at the still point where time and the timeless intersect. The limited bandwidth of our ego consciousness must learn to surrender to a greater circumference of consciousness. Learning to access this knowledge, new leadership, educational, and economic systems are being proposed based on tapping into this hidden reality.
Whether we envision a silicon-based future or a carbon-based future the crucial factor may truly be one of time. Do we have time to invent a new species called homo technicus or do we break the bonds of Medusa and mature beyond our current level of consciousness? Do we have time to explore inner space; to develop our empathy and authenticity as the basis for community and justice. Do we have time to leave behind our need to establish conformity and bring our diversity into unity. Do we have time to become the Wise Species?