Positive Subversion

Principles for the Swift Transformation of Systems

That Are Out of Time

 

Part One:  The Need for Positive Subversion

There are presently abroad in the world forces of negative subversion, of creeping nihilism, that recognize no concern as legitimate, unless it be one of business; that keep no trust, unless it has a large enough lobby; that honor no profit, unless it is larger this quarter; whose surety is the submissive individual, and whose unshakeable faith lies in the manipulation of global markets and the current fads of econopolitical crisis management.

 

We live in a society of institutions, which, having replaced individual responsibility, assume the individual irresponsible, and so, by means of fear, seek to repress the depravity that fear itself creates.

 

Neurotic fear is the subconscious result of insufficient self-realization.  Self-realization is the responsibility of each person, and negative subversion is the result of many persons shirking their responsibility, by identifying the self with the society, rather than identifying the society with the self.

 

The neurotic fear which allows the individual to relinquish his or her responsibility to institutions is that which allows him or her to defend them with blind ferocity, despite their increasing abuse of his or her individual rights.  We live in a society fractioned by special interests, together playing a zero sum shell game, which serves the purposes of preserving the status quo and the illusion of individual freedom at the same time.

 

The economy is the basic institution of a society whose basic drive is material possession, for people strive to possess matter when they do not possess what matters; material possession is the impoverished surrogate for self-possession.  Our economy is based on the premise that humanity’s resources are limited, while their desires are unlimited, and that this situation, by manipulation, can be kept this way.

 

The most profitable manufacture of our economy and its media are the illusions that more is better, that novelty is progress, that competition is the best means of survival, and that the individual is powerless in the face of institutions.  We are thereby conditioned to be so chronically discouraged and distracted, that we fail to work for desperately needed social change.

 

We have become a society of neurotic, materialistic monads, who believe that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and that eternal vigilance means always looking out for Number One; who believe that freedom is the ability to choose between thirty brands of toothpaste, rather that the ability to self-determine and fulfill one’s own obligations in harmony with the greater whole.

 

Technology, the mere replication and amplification of human faculties, threatens us by its possibly exceeding and replacing them and us.  We then, having fear of our own higher faculties that mere technology cannot readily replicate, feel further threatened by the sudden need to use them in resolving the global crisis that technology itself helps to create, then distracting ourselves with technological toys.

 

For the first time in recorded history, human society, through the agency of technology, is dominated by one international complex of institutions:  the global governmental/military/industial complex.  This international cartel, in trespassing beyond the boundaries of nations, has also trespassed beyond the boundaries of manageability and morality.

 

We are lulled dull by goods and services, until more goods’ production is no service, and services provided are no good.  We have equated quality of life with quantity of what we can possess.  We do not value what we have — we now consume it, consumed by greed that feeds on gripping fear.

 

Well we should fear, when we, the earth’s “elite”, feed on the stark starvation of humanity, both in the poorer nations and within ourselves.  Perverted by our ruthless lust for power, we in blind arrogance have raped the earth, and she now brings forth evil prodigies, gross national products of our false economy.

 

When one person slays another person, it is called murder and punished; if many people kill many other people, it is called “war” and honored.  If one race exterminates another race, it is called “genocide”: if an international arms race destroys the human race, it is called “national defense” and condoned. 

 

There is strength in numbers, whenever humanity does not count.  We, in our ignorant knowledge of nature, have become so separated from our own as to forget that all of the power and wealth of the world is not worth the price of one human life.  We, who of truth have made trite travesty, have thereby made of miracles a myth.  Such miracles are what we greatly need, if those of our own making are not to destroy us:  not those that shake the earth, but shake our hearts; not those that create wonder, but are wonder.

 

We have taken everything on the earth, but the responsibility for destroying it.  We, who have created this evil, must with divine help destroy it, before it destroys us.  The evil must end where it began:  within each of us.  And our acknowledgement of the negative within is useless, unless followed by positive action withal.  There is no difference between those who do evil and those who do nothing, assuming that good will take care of itself.  Good will take care of itself, if evil does not take care of it first. 

 

We, who have in alienation planned the obsolescence of goods, must together plan the obsolescence of evils, or suffer soon an obsolescence that was never planned.

 

 

Part Two:  Principles of Positive Subversion

 

To stand under law is to understand law; to understand law is to stand above law.

 

Exceptions to known natural laws are the intimation of greater natural laws at yet unknown.  The most common way for truth to enter the edifice of human knowledge is through its cracks.  Here are two of them.

 

Exception No. 1:

 

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, glycerine, distilled from natural fats, was thought to exist only in liquid form.  Then, in 1922, a barrel of glycerine, in transit from a manufacturer in Vienna to a regular client in London, was found upon arrival to have crystallized, apparently from an unusual pattern of vibration of the train on which it was shipped.

 

When word of this phenomenon got out to the scientific community, many researchers began ordering sample glycerine crystals from the original barrel to grow other glycerine crystals from seed crystals placed in liquid glycerine at eighteen degrees centrigrade.  This technique had been found to replicate the effect of the train’s vibratory pattern on the original barrel of glycerine in transit.

 

Two of the first scientists to order the seed crystals obseved that, after they had successfully seeded one experiment, all of the liquid glycerine in their laboratory began to crystallize spontaneously, including what was sealed in airtight jars.  Ever since, glycerine has been found in spontaneous crystallization worldwide.

 

Exception No. 2:

 

The behavior of the macaque monkey (macaca fuscata) has been extensively studied on the smaller islands off the Japanese coast since immediately after World War II.

 

In one experiment on the island of Koshima in 1952, scientists began providing the monkeys with raw sweet potatoes buried in the sand, to see if they could successfully adapt their eating habits to include this unfamiliar, tasty, but gritty fare.

 

After the local macaque community struggled with this new problem for awhile, an eighteen-year-old female named Imo, in a burst of simian genius, solved their dilemma by taking the gritty sweet pototoes into the sea and washing them.  Soon after, she further discovered that seawater not only cleaned the sweet potatoes, but its salt enhanced their taste as well.

 

Imo taught his new potato-cleaning technique to her mother and playmates.  Then, in a reversal of normal generational roles, the younger monkeys began teaching it to their elders.  Between 1952 and 1958, this food-washing behavior became common in the macaque colony on Koshima.

 

Suddenly, within a period of days in the autumn of 1958, the researchers observed that, not only had the potato-washing behavior become dominant with the macaque colony on Koshima — it had spontaneously spread to every macaque community on every island off the Japanese coast, and on the mainland as well. It appears as if, at a given moment, ninety-nine monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes, and the addition of the hundredth monkey had created a synchronous critical mass mind of the macaque species that instantaneously and irreversibly evolved it further.  This resonance-related phenomenon has since been replicated in laboratory experiments with rats and plants, giving rise to the theory of accelerated evolution through quantum leaps — in human cultures seen as sudden paradigm shifts.

 

This phenomenon is also known as the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon, or morphogenesis.  Its parallels in human culture include the breaking of a record or precedent in an area of human endeavor suddenly making a higher level of achivement more accessible to more persons in that area of endeavor; the unexplained persistence of miracles, coincidences and paranormal phenomena throughout recorded history, and numerous, verified simultaneous discoveries, innovations and inventions by spatially separated persons.

 

Morphogenesis also indicates that self-conscious intelligence is not limited to human beings, but permeates all things, from the subatomic quantum level to the human level and beyond, to an ever-increasing degree.  It is the manifestation of a higher law that reverses Newton’s Third Law of Motion, that of action and reaction, transcends entropy, and collapses time cycles synchronistically.

 

The formulation of this principle, that of Accelerated Evolution and its corollaries, the Principles of Transformative Progression, Complex Simplicity, Compression and Synchronicity are herein set forth as coordinated statements of the way in which self-conscious intelligence programs and directs energy in the universe.

 

The Principle of Accelerated Evolution

 

In contrast to the Newton’s Third Law, that of action and reaction, which states,

To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, the Principle of Accelerated Evolution states,

 

To every reaction, there is a greater and unitive action, when the force employed is self-conscious intelligence.

 

The effects of evolution are attained and sustained by reflection rather than by reaction, as one mirror facing another creates an infinity between them — a dynamic open system generating an ever-higher order, thus transcending the phenomenon of entropy.

 

When self-conscious intelligence first encounters matter, it initially conforms to the mechanical law of action and reaction, whose operation, however, it is capable of transcending, observing and then reversing at will to create new effects:

 

First the barn burns down and roasts the pigs, whose unfamiliar but pleasant aroma the swineherd finds irresistible and tastes.  Second, the swineherd kills the pigs and roasts them to recreate that delightful aroma and taste.

 

To invert cause and effect is to invert time and space; an event is not what happens in time and space — an event is what makes time and space happen.  Typical timespace can be perceived as progressing from the past through the present to the future in linear progression, marked by its length.  Inverse timespace can be perceived as progressing ever-deeper into the present, marked by its extreme brevity. 

 

Time is the rhythm in the dance of eternity; time stands still as eternity moves, as light passing through a tunnel.  Time is the psychic construct that keeps everything from happening all at once; time is entropy, the one-way switch for the irreversible flow of evolution.

 

When the force of an accelerated evolutionary event impacts a typical action/reaction timespace cycle, its momentum momentarily collapses this timespace cycle into an inwardly spiralling cycle of inverse time.  Within this inwardly spiralling cycle of inverse time, all events, as reflections of the accelerated evolutionary event, will tend to simultaneous, or sychronous.

 

Synchronicity is a contingent property of the purposeful inversion of cause and effect; therefore, the Principle of Synchronicity can be expressed as a corollary to the Principle of Accelerated Evolution: 

 

Timespace is determined by event frequency, frequency being both of vibration and occurrence.

 

Evolution is the principle by which mind develops forms for expressing itself in matter.  Synchronicity is the principle by which mind-evolved forms are propagated, first throughout the noosphere of the planet as ideas, symbols and archetypes, and finally within the biosphere as a causal, coincident, but commonly perceivable forms and events.  The greater the consciousness, the less the time.

 

The finite, complex outward spiral of the physical evolution of forms outwardly reflects the simple, infinite, inward psychic spiral of inverted timespace.  Accordingly from this concept, the second corollary to the Principle of Accelerated Evolution, that of Transformative Progression, can be deduced:

 

Transformation proceeds from the simplest to the most complex parts of a system.

 

Systems transformation proceeds from the psychic to the physical, from the cell to the bodily system to the entire physical body; from the individual to the society, from the smaller to the larger, from within outward and from the bottom up — not by diffusion, but by infusion.

 

This leads to the principle that enunciates the relationship between simplicity and complexity in the process of transformation, the Principle of Complex Simplicity:

 

The greater the diversity of elements integrated within a given system, the greater is that system’s transformative power.

 

The Principle of Complex Simplicity explains why in biological systems, hybrids tend to be stronger than purebreds, why diversity is preferable to monoculture and why integration is crucial to balance-based health in all systems.

 

A stone thrown into a pond creates ripples only insofar as it becomes part of the system of the pond.  The ripples proceed from the interior of the pond outward at right angles to the direction in which the stone was thrown and lands.

 

From this analogy, which proceeds from the previous three principles, can be induced the fourth corollary to the Principle of Accelerated Evolution, the Principle of Compression:

 

The most significant effects of an applied force occur at a right angle to the direction of its application, right angle being both physical vector and appropriate intention. 

 

The Principle of Compression operates in the behavior of all living beings, from the cross-pollination of flowers by bees seeking honey, to the discovery of the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon by scientists studying the feeding habits of monkeys, to the attainment of security and happiness being a byproduct of human beings living in accordance with natural law.

 

We must break the deadlock of the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm, to pass through the door to global consciousness.  The human brain’s illuminative integration of the logical, linear sensate left hemisphere of the brain with its intuitive, cyclical, feeling-oriented right hemisphere is what comprises global consciousness, first in the individual mind/brain, then throughout the noosphere of the earth, to create a planetary Pentecost.  It is only this higher, more inclusive consciouslness that will allow the regeneration of older institutions, and the generation of new ones, so imperative to our survival on this earth.

 

Both the inner and outer frontiers of our own science and technology challenge our obsession with supposed objectivity, which is yet another dogma.  Recent discoveries in quantum physics, astrophysics, biophysics, ecology, healthcare, cybernetics and psychology are forcing their advanced practitioners to redefine the scientific method in these fields.

 

Reason is the passive voice of verity, merely relating what its active voice, intuition, reveals:  that the universe was not made to be analyzed but to be appreciated; that the measure of our humanity is not reason, but a reason; and that we, to have a measure of reality, must realize that reality has no measure.

 

Science without faith is intellectualized superstition.  The deepest truth about any subject emerges through a process of subjective revelation, wherein the discoverer identifies strongly with the subject, accepts him or herself as a participant, and him/herself as a legitimate laboratory for its testing.  This is how every major creative insight in every major field has occurred throughout recorded history.  Every field of human endeavor must thus become the proving ground for creative evoltion.

 

The metaphysical formulation of the Principle of Accelerated Evolution,

 

To every reaction, there is a greater and unitive action, when the force employed is self-conscious intelligence,

 

is merely a more scientific restatement of humanity’s highest and most universal striving, common to all of our spiritual paths:  the Golden Rule, which counsels

 

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

 

The individual, through the creative action of love, frees his or herself from the closed, mechanical cycle of action of action and reaction.  From the reactionary law of genesis, the the new will — the new covenant — of accelerated creative evolution consciously spins the spiral of epigenesis, the ability to generate upon.  Genesis is the creation of form; epigenesis is the perfection of form.  We as creators can only determine what, but not how or when; the creator creates the creation, then the creation recreates the creator.

 

Grace is the divine present in the creation — the omnipresent light locked within the eternal now — released by the action of creative evolution from out of the cycle of time.  Omnipresence in the infinite is being everywhere at once; omnipresence in the finite is being in the right place at the right time.

 

The conscious, creative evolution of love is the process by which each person can experience grace in all of its heretofore seen yet unforeseen forms:  synchronicity, transformative progression, complex simplicity and compression.  A state of grace cannot be willed; it can only be accepted.  Love is what makes us able both to accept grace and extend it to others.

 

Conscious understanding and use of the Principle of Accelerated Evolution and its corollaries can create an essential psychic support system for those who, having seen our dysfunctional global system for what it is, will certainly receive little initial support from that system as they seek to change it through creative evolution.

 

Grace, because of love willed and enacted by individuals, can, by such positive subversion, have a transformative effect on all human institutions.

 

 

Part Three:  The Practical Application of Positive Subversion

 

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of belief in institutions has led to a decline of belief of the individual in him or herself.  We have been led to believe that we are powerless to change institutions once they cease to serve us, because change must supposedly come from the top down.  An institution has ceased to serve when it promotes no cause but it own perpetuation; when it demands everything of us and gives little or nothing in return. 

 

The main thing that an entropic institution demands of the individual is conformity, with the threat of severe consequences if this is not forthcoming.  This generally engenders a neurotic fear within the individual.  Yet if the institution were as formidable as it appears, it would not be so afraid of the precedent that an individual could create by his or her independent action.  That which is reactionary is incapable of creative action, and is mightily threatened by that which is. 

 

The institutions of our society are pyramid schemes, designed to steadily narrow the perception and heartspace of those who rise to their apexes, to the point that they can treat as contemptible objects those who form their foundation.

 

Information, once the perquisite of power, is now its prerequisite.  The greater the centrally controlled hierarchical delineation and separation of functions, the greater the control of information by those in power.  The less the people in one sector of a system know that they have common cause with those in other sectors, the less courage they will have to take a stand against the injustices of that system.  The more layers of authority there are, the greater the insulation of that authority from human considerations; it is much easier to stab in the back those whose face you do not know.

 

Today, with the higher general level of consciousness, the authoritarian hoarding of information within a system is arbitrary, inappropriate and ultimately self-destructive.  Our present institutions, in their present state of corruption and chaos, need all the help they can get.  This can only be achieve if all parties involved in a system have some process of effective input into that system.  Built as it is from blocks, the pyramid structure impedes the process of effective, broadly-based, democratic input into a system. 

 

In aerodynamics, it has long been known that the shape of a body determines the vector of its motion through a medium.  Recent research also indicates that any pyramid built to the scale of the Great Pyramid of Giza and exactly aligned to magnetic north, has the properties of preserving once-living tissue, including food, and of realigning metal molecules such as those in razor blades, to realign and resharpen them.  The function of pyramid structures, therefore, even when properly aligned, would appear to be preservative rather than regenerative.  Futher, their origin in military crisis management ensures that they will continue to create crises to justify their existence.  Yet this is the deeply embedded archetypal pattern to which we adhere in a time when accelerated paradigm shifts in global social structures is urgently imperative.

 

The pyramid organizational structure needs to be transformed into that of a circle or a sphere, like the Earthrise that is the paradigm of this new age.  Such alternative forms of organization allow freer yet directed flow for the spiral of evolutionary energy.  Form should follow function, sometimes to the point of preceding it, to create accelerated paradigm shifts throughout the earth.  To creatively alter the shape of our social structures would be to alter the sad shape that our planetary culture is presently in, thus altering the as-yet ominous shape of things to come.

 

There is no limit to the power of the individual, for he or she has the power to inspire others.  It was the initial action of one individual that began the foundation of an institution; it is the initial action of an individual that could begin its dissolution or transformation.

 

Our institutions are either our reflection, or lack of same.  If we as individuals take no responsibility for the quality of our institutions, then we must take responsibility for their decline.  Entropy prevails when creative intelligence does not, but entropy can only prevail within a closed system.

 

Change will not come from the top down; those who have the power to change things usually will not.  The corridors of power have no windows; they are but the dim tunnels in the towers that the powerful have erected to raise themselves above the suffering of those below.

 

Any apparent change coming from the top down will be the result of a single, or a number of extraordinary servant leaders, who have realized that their true power and information source are both within and below, and who have not forgotten that the word master simply means greater servant.  Even then, any apparent change from the top down that is not met halfway by those below will have no lasting effect.

 

Real transformation comes from the bottom up — when those suffering below finally realize that they are the power base, and can therefore become conductors and transformers of power — power to build, from the bottom up, self-transcending structures that can raise humanity to new heights.  More fundamentally than we have ever considered, self-organizing decentralized direct democracy is the only enduringly effective form of governance.

 

Leaders in a movement for positive subversion of authoritarian systems need not — indeed, should not — start at the top.  They should start wherever they are.  Those who know where they stand have the power to move anything. 

 

Using the intuition and foresight developed from daily spiritual practice and self-reflection, these leaders must together locate the cracks in the seemingly monolithic system and begin to plant seeds within them.  As they do this, consciously returning any resistance that they meet with compassion, they will naturally attract those from all parts of the system who will form their growing circles of transformation. 

 

Those dedicated to the positive subversion of creating accelerated paradigm shifts away from the hierarchical form of society must, in genuine compassion and its communication, begin to deliberately crosscut its designated lines of authority, carefully coordinating this in informally-linked, circular networks of mutual support based, not on formal function and authority, but on the affinity of shared values and mission.

 

By acting in concert, and in contrast to the reactionary pattern of the pyramid, these circular networks will not only be outstanding, appealing examples of effectiveness, but through their momentum, will become spirals of purposeful energy; at an as-yet indeterminate point of critical mass, these energy spirals will collapse a timespace cycle, instantaneously transforming the consciousness of the entire system.

 

Positive subversion is a practical alternative to conventional methods of social reform for these reasons:

 

o  Positive subversion makes realistic demands for individual excellence. Practitioners

need not be credentialed or perfect, but simply striving to the best of their ability.

 

o  Because positive subversion is inherently collaborative, no one individual bears the crushing burden of responsibility.  Responsibility, though great, can be reasonably delegated on a network task force basis, coordinated by firsts-among-equals.

 

o  To effect positive subversion of a system, not everyone needs to be converted — just enough.  Recent research into whole systems transformation indicates that this may be as little as two percent — the creative minority throughout the centuries.

 

o  The negative subversion of an accelerated paradigm shift by negative elements is unlikely, because its requirements of long-term commitment and cooperation demand of evil that of which it is least capable — altruism.  Positive subversion, unlike negative subversion, occurs without coercion or physical proximity, and, after it occurs, is irreversible in its elevation of mass consciousness.  In this, it is easily distinguishable from negative subversion, such as that which occurs in authoritarian social systems.

 

o  Positive subversion, a human variety of morphogenesis, is capable, through conscious evolution, of quickly altering dysfunctional planetary systems, the transformation of which was once thought to take more time — which humanity no longer has.

 

Part Four:  Epilogue

 

Why?  is the ultimate question of being in the cosmos, to which

 

Because! is often the facile and ironic response.

 

Divide the word Because into two syllables, and you have the cosmic order,

 

Be Cause!

 

I AM is the name of our Creator, and we, the legitimate heirs of our Universal Parent, in order to bear true witness in claiming our rightful inheritance, must also bear His/Her awful name.

 

If one of the simplest of elements yields the atomic bomb, then how much power must lie in the relatively infinite atoms of the human body’s universe?

 

Though most of us spend most of our lives believing that we are merely the effects of causes beyond our control, we have the capacity to be cause, transcending the role of mere affected victims of effects.

 

If it seems otherwise, it is because we, like the prophet Jonah, have fled our destiny, which is to counter with compassion, constantly and courageously, the negative reaction of this world with greater and unitive action.

 

In this lies the state of grace that governs the inner kingdom of God — the only system worthy of our ultimate allegiance; in this lies also our salvation, and that of this world commended to our care, for the sign of Jonah repentant is the resurrection.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Lamb, Charles, DISSERTAION ON A ROAST PIG.

 

Lao Tsu, TAO TE CHING, Chapters 22, 54, 60, 64, 73, 79.

 

Murchie, Guy  THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.

 

Ostrander, Sheila and Lynn Schroeder, PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN.

 

Peck, M. Scott,   THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED.

                           THE PEOPLE OF THE LIE.

 

Saul of Tarsus,   THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, Chapters 8:29 and 10

 

Smith, Cyril Stanley, A SEARCH FOR STRUCTURE:  SELECTED ESSAYS ON SCIENCE, ART AND HISTORY.

 

Von Meerloo, Joost, THAT DIFFICULT PEACE.

 

Watson, Lyle  LIFETIDE.

 

Wolf, Fred Alan, TAKING THE QUANTUM LEAP

 

Young, Arthur M., THE GEOMETRY OF MEANING

 

 

Further Confirmatory Reading:

 

Capra, Fritjof,  THE TAO OF PHYSICS.

 

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss,  THE CHANGE MASTERS.

 

Prigogene, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers, ORDER OUT OF CHAOS.

 

Sheldrake, Rupert, A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE.

 

Shinoda-Bolen, Jean,  THE TAO OF PSYCHOLOGY.

 

Wolf, Fred Alan, STAR WAVE.

 

Part One of Positive Subversion: Principles for the Swift Transformation of Systems That Are Out of Time was written in October 1970 at the age of nineteen; the conscious transmission of the rest resumed in March,1984 at age thirty-three.   It was sent to seventy-five of the most renowned systemic thinkers of the late twentieth century with a seveny-five percent return of reply — all of it favorable.  It was published several times in academic journals and presented at several academic conferences; now is the time for it to be sent out to the world.  — REC