Member-only story
Before ‘Religions’ — Our ‘Minds’ Were Transentient Radios
Throughout the development of what we presently mistake for human consciousness, ‘the gods’ or ‘spirit beings’ were not ghosts or fantasies, though unminds breed these like newspapers make language. No. They were the result of the use of living interfaces to other modes, forms and embodied intelligences. These forms have nothing to do with our ideas, which are, indeed, caricatures of their absences. Explicitly: their opposites as representations.
And that was and remains a most lethal danger.
But what was happening as we developed, relationally and cognitively, was a process of recursive re-internalization of the results of contact with other intelligences. Indeed, this is, today, precisely how we ‘form and instruct’ what we are presently calling ‘minds’. These, again, are (most often) not minds, but their absences on parade as their opposites. And the reason is simple: at one point in this process, we invented the possibility of pure abstraction. Of the appearance of knowledge without any specific or actual being ‘doing the knowing’. This created ‘a new external form of intelligence’ that »was not an intelligence.
[ All of my articles are free to read on Medium. If you do not have a Medium subscription, simply click this link to read this article. ]
