The Bigger Picture by Alexander Beiner

Author:Alexander Beiner [Alexander Beiner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2023-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Flipping, Blending, Grounding, Twisting

Taking seriously the idea that the Internet acts as a kind of collective unconscious means recognizing that our politics and culture are increasingly influenced by non-rational motivations. It means recognizing that in many ways, we live in religious times, and that religious times utilize a different language. It’s the language we learn in the psychedelic experience – a language of the transrational, meaning something that includes reason but goes beyond it.

The rise of new Internet religions is a topic I’ve covered journalistically for a number of years, interviewing psychologists, occultists, philosophers, and religious-studies scholars. In the process, I came up with a model I call psychedelic sense-making, which contains four principles I’ve found useful in navigating the online realm and psychedelic experiences. They are flipping, grounding, blending, and twisting.

Flipping means becoming adept at jumping between the imaginal realm of the Internet and physical reality, and among radically different possibilities. It involves simultaneously holding cognitive and emotional operating systems at once without collapsing one into the other, something Terence McKenna argued for as a way to simultaneously hold both a Western rational mindset and a shamanic view. Flipping is something we can do in our daily lives to help us think with more flexibility. Flipping has a shapeshifting quality that allows us to explore different ways of being without losing our own sovereignty.

The next principle is grounding. This means staying aware of our bodies and using them as an anchor into the present moment. It is a remedy to the ‘luxury Gnosticism’ Mary Harrington has pointed to, or the disconnection that is demonstrated in Sherry Turkle’s research. It brings us back into the lived reality of our bodies to counter the increasingly disconnected, disembodied virtual world. This could be as simple as getting up and going outside, or taking breaks from the Internet to become aware of our physical sensations. What it shows is that even though it feels like the online world is a space of disembodied minds, there’s really no such thing; being online is an embodied process. Embodiment can help us to get better at decentering, or taking a step back from the content of our sensory experience by becoming consciously aware of ourselves right here, right now, in the present moment. The trick is to breathe and learn how to pay attention to our physical sensations. We can also slow down so we don’t spin out and attempt to make meaning too quickly, or jump to unhelpful conclusions.

The next principle is blending. Blending means recognizing that seemingly different worlds blend into one another to create something new. It can be as simple as when your work friends meet your school friends, or experiencing intense synchronicities after a psychedelic journey. Instead of fighting or resisting, blending helps us relax into the perfume of the imaginal as it suffuses the world around us. We allow the two realms to blend together rather than burst into one another in opposition. We’re living in an era in which

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.