We live beyond the scale of the possible, in the sense that what is being done, in actual terms, ends up denying the ultimate nature of reality. When you pay the ultimate price, everything has been taken from you; by everything I mean all and every single thing, the present as in the many and the future as in the one. The question that arises then is one that has meaning only retrospectively, working from the future towards the past: if you have paid the ultimate price (and here, it is not even necessary for this to become a fact at some not so distant future, the possibility of it being realized is entirely sufficient, like the fact of having a fat-tailed nuclear button encompasses the action of triggering it as totally unnecessary), then what other alternatives are the “good sense” alternatives, what other possible worlds are the “good sense” worlds? The answer is self-evident. Pretty much all of them, pretty much every single one of them.
That can be used, obviously, to embrace anything by comparison. But that is not the point, the point is to see in the realm of the possible what is sustainable and what is not, what is part of the fabric of reality and what is a negation of reality. This is not an easy task. It involves going back to the foundations of Westernized thinking to understand at which point, in which ecstatic moment of thought we slashed the veil that wraps subject and object as one. In the same way as cognitive determinism sometimes considers a point in time when an individual personality is fully formed and static for the rest of life, there might be a moment when we made that crucial step which negated the European mind from its ultimate destiny in Nature.
It is hard, if not impossible, to think in practical terms about a future until that point is clearly understood by everyone. All the usual antagonistic debates about “what can be done” and “how to do it” simply do not arise. There is no question of “how”, there is just a question of meaning, of “why”. Humans only have a moderately well-developed sense of retrospective rationality, of historical sensemaking. Once that is understood, once we stand under that big tree of facts one after the other, then the “how” will be presented volens noles, as naturally as breathing. When Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations”, he didn’t consider how to trade credit default swaps and sovereign bonds and put that down in clear writing, he had a simple idea, a way to understand reality that made certain sense for the things we valued at the time. History then filled the gaps. "Wholeness is not a place you can get to, wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach [a presence] to the whole of life. It is a way. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us".
It is part of the Zen tradition, as inherited from the Sutras, that the whole world fits into a blade of grass. Similarly, one tends to believe that the fundamental nature of reality lives just an inch behind our shoulders, next to our breathing space, but in that infinitesimal gap the entire balance of the world tilts. That gap is the whole difference, it cannot be any other way. We need to ask ourselves when was that gap breached and why. That is a question that can be clearly and unequivocally answered. Thankfully, it has already been extensively addressed in every field of human knowledge, from organizational theory to evolutionary psychology, from behavioural genetics to complexity theory, including those branches of the entirely inter-subjective, like physical science - "by removing a variety of contingent elements, they make their facts" said Nishitani, echoing the likes of Starbuck, Laing, Mohrhoff and many others. It is in those contingent elements that we want to be present, we want to recognize and assent (not indicate) the indignity of our monumental arrogance.
What is our place then, what is our starting point? It is certainly not any romanticized view of a remote and fragmented history (Diamond has already documented that clearly). It is a plane where there is only recognition, an activity of the possible that does not undermine the reality of the whole. Everything that is intimately important in human evolutionary terms, that we believe to have some value, has been always associated with religion. True religion stands for the shared context of a (new) meaning, that attitude that Csikszentmihalyi has spoken so much about. There is no alternative but to stand there, in that open, untrod space of the possible, and be. Becoming a thing maybe, something other inevitably.
Adrian Icazuriaga
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