Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm by Luke Lafitte

Author:Luke Lafitte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Consciousness Studies
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2021-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind, or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds.61

Poole’s recognition of himself as a vital machine and not merely a machine or an organism connotes the recognition of an underlying spirit or energetic vitality that powers the conscious and the unconscious mind. This type of vitalistic propellant is different from steam, wind, electricity, or atomic energy. This type of energy is everywhere, and it is the invisible force that activates consciousness and spirit. Poole is in that strange twilight zone between consciousness and matter—the hyphenated domain between the imagination and the outer world of objective reality. The trickster motif in Poole’s actions, and Dick’s ideas, shows that these two worlds are not implacably separated, as people previously thought. Causality is destroyed when the boundary between the real and the fictive is purged. This blurring of consciousness and matter challenges everything that we have been taught about the material universe. Our task here is not to accumulate material things as they are; rather, the accumulation of levels of consciousness is the goal of the quest. We may view these levels of consciousness as a kind of Jacob’s Ladder leading us higher and higher so that we recognize better who we are in terms of service and spirit, or we may view them as merely an infinite array of subjective experiences—but how we view them makes no difference with respect to what is brought back from the quest. Staying stagnant and immobile on the horizontal or vertical planes of consciousness constitutes absolute refusal, absolute sin, and thus absolute hell—doing so is a Black Iron Prison (see here) where the fragment is eternally separated from the whole. In this hell there is no respite for the weary warrior. Conversely, heaven is the following:

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