{"id":29,"date":"2016-03-12T22:28:43","date_gmt":"2016-03-12T22:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/?p=29"},"modified":"2020-05-02T00:06:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T00:06:58","slug":"from-cosmopolitan-to-sylvapolitan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/2016\/03\/12\/from-cosmopolitan-to-sylvapolitan\/","title":{"rendered":"From Cosmopolitan to Sylvapolitan"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Cosmopolitan to Sylvapolitan<\/strong><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Modernity and its Discontents<\/em><\/strong>
\nModernity is rooted in an assumed split between Nature and culture, and beneath that, between the spiritual (often assumed not to exist at all) and the material worlds.\u00a0 This rift first appeared eons back with the emergence of human self-reflective consciousness, but only within the last 500 years has it widened to a chasm.\u00a0 This latter period began when a great faction of the human collective decided to stop passing the \u2018talking stick\u2019 that circulates thru the tribes of creation, and simply . . . walked away with it.\u00a0 It coincides with the decline of the church, the rise of materialist science and mercantilism, and the popularization of the Faustian myth warning of the dangers of knowledge stripped of ethics, of taking power without responsibility for outcomes.<\/p>\n

This chasm, a self-preserving, self-glorifying egoic contraction away from the other tribes of creation, has since normalized itself in human cultural forms. Examples include the tenacious medieval view that nature is a tempter, leading the devotional away from God, or the Reformation view of nature as a feminine force to be raped of her secrets by the minions of science, or the \u2018Enlightenment\u2019 understanding of Nature as great mechanism made by a divine craftsman who had long since departed from his handiwork.<\/p>\n

In the last 200 years the industrial revolution has brought with it the perception of nature as a great toy chest to be ripped apart with impunity.\u00a0 Ideas sourced in Darwinian notions of evolution (though note here that Darwin often has as little in common with Darwinians as Jesus has with Christians), popularized the view that there is no guiding intelligence to nature, that it evolves by a series of blind accidents, and can therefore be tinkered with at will.\u00a0 The legacy of such attitudes has created a rapacious social machinery of domination and consumption.\u00a0 Wrought of scientific, industrial, military, government, and popular cultural forces, it carries the momentum of the centuries, and like a runaway train, is hurtling itself full speed into the 21st century.\u00a0 As a collective, we are all passengers.<\/p>\n

The trajectory of this train is invisible to many people.\u00a0 They are often busy gazing out the window at the consumer wonderland on the billboards.\u00a0 Others flip thru magazines that tell how to get ahead in the modern (i.e., suicidal) economy.\u00a0 Many are simply satisfied to eat breadrolls and discuss sporting events with their neighbors.\u00a0 Their denial of where the train is heading cushions the ride, their unwillingness to hear those warning of a coming precipice allows them to sit undisturbed.\u00a0 Yet deep down, wired as we all are into the human (and planetary) collective, their remains a distant, yet persistent, foreboding.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Modernity and Ideologies of Separation<\/em><\/strong>
\nTo understand this lack of awareness, one can begin with the ideologies of separation that inform it.\u00a0 These can be essentialized into dualism and reductionism.<\/p>\n

Dualism<\/em><\/strong>
\nDualism is a materialist view that considers the limits of reality to be set by the apparent opposites that construct the \u2018horizontal\u2019 world, the hot and cold, the light and dark, past and future, left and right.\u00a0 These opposites are thought to be mutually exclusive, polar and apart, and in no way containing the seed potential of the other.\u00a0 Dualism justifies the much vaunted \u2018real world\u2019, the surface world, reality as it appears, not actuality as it exists.<\/p>\n

Despite appearances, with a little proactive awareness (deeper inquiry), one can see that opposites only exist as permanent and irreconcilable by way of a narrow perspective (e.g., left and right depends on which way you are facing, and where are up and down located in outer space?).\u00a0 Exclusive attachment to polar opposites results in stunted perceptions.\u00a0 These normalize themselves in a dualistically framed mind, which\u00a0 has no provision for the underlying, unifying actuality of spirit;\u00a0 it cannot understand that all opposites rise from common roots.<\/p>\n

The spiritual \/ material and nature \/ culture oppositions are primordial dualisms of modernity.\u00a0 Like parent plants, they have seeded further dualisms, including the separation of within \/ without, above \/ below, mind \/ body, individual \/ society, passion \/ reason.\u00a0 These assumptions and the conundrums they create have given work to such influential thinkers as Descarte, Rousseau, Marx, Pasteur, Durkheim, and Freud.\u00a0 Their analyses of dualistic conflict have founded academic industries, keeping generations of scholars busy hammering out the intricacies of a problem-based reality.<\/p>\n

What those adhering to dualism cannot reconcile they often exclude.\u00a0 This invariably sets up a conflict between the excluder and the excluded.\u00a0 This is convenient for valuing one thing as superior to another, for justifying all manner of domination.\u00a0 It is a core principle behind racism, sexism, and specieism.\u00a0 It separates the dominating group as the \u2018real\u2019, \u2018civilized\u2019, or \u2018normal\u2019, from the Other as \u2018primitive\u2019, \u2018less able\u2019, or \u2018deficient\u2019.<\/p>\n

Reductionism<\/em><\/strong>
\nReductionism is the divide and conquer approach to understanding reality.\u00a0 Its reduces a system (a galaxy, a car, a pile of sand) into its components (at whatever scale) and then adds them back up as a way of understanding the system.\u00a0 It deals with the interactions or relationships of these components secondarily, or ignores them altogether.<\/p>\n

The rapid progress of science and technology owes itself to reductionism.\u00a0\u00a0 It gives us great detail about the material design of things \u2013 their \u2018machinery\u2019 – and how they may be altered to serve our purposes.\u00a0 While it has told us how to take the world apart, it tells us little on how to put it back together again.\u00a0 This is because nature does not assemble things, it grows them.\u00a0 Growth is the province of synergy, which understands systems in terms of the relationships that form them.\u00a0 For example, synergy creates a forest, while reductionism seeks to know the forest by focusing on the trees.<\/p>\n

Rationalist Knowledge<\/em><\/strong>
\nDualism and reductionism have been validated by the apparent successes of the societies built upon them.\u00a0 For example, production strategies based on the systematic and institutionalized domination of nature have ushered in an era of unprecedented human inventiveness and material well-being.\u00a0 It has been hard to imagine any domain in which these principles could not be put to good use.\u00a0 Simply, they appear to work.<\/p>\n

These principles (ideologies of separation) are the foundations of a larger, rationalist knowledge structure.\u00a0 This knowledge is constructed as something outside of us (we\u2019re the blank slate) that we then internalize, or possess.\u00a0 The knower is active, the thing known is passive.\u00a0 Nature is seen as something outside of us, as passive, to be possessed.\u00a0 A dog, e.g., is no longer a member of a tribe of creation that we live with co-creatively, but a pet, that we \u2018own\u2019.\u00a0 Civilizations are built on plundering, on the concept that things of the world are to be owned, possessed.\u00a0 Capitalism is built on this.\u00a0 \u2018Time\u2019 is another example.\u00a0 We have time, but we can spend it like money.<\/p>\n

This knowledge is enshrined in universities, where it informs the priests and guardians of conscensus reality, aka \u2018professors\u2019, in their pronouncements of truth or falsehood upon the world.\u00a0 It is the variety of knowledge that structures scientific investigations.\u00a0 The act of knowing thereby becomes a distillation of \u2018facts\u2019 by excluding all that is not measurable and repeatable.\u00a0 This knowledge is very specific and made potent by its focus.\u00a0 It is not meant to address the ecologies in and by which humans live, nor to include every aspect of existence.\u00a0 Nevertheless, science has been so crucial to modern economic expansionism and consequent cultural identity, that its knowledge has been made into a world view.\u00a0 In other words, a small cult of rationalists (which can be largely traced to the 17th century Baconian Puritans that founded the London Royal Society) have come to rule the Western mind.\u00a0 The various phenomena excluded from science for methodological reasons have become excluded from the dominant modern perspective.<\/p>\n

What happens when you create a society out of a research method?\u00a0 Principles of exclusion and reduction applied to social forms is most telling in the long lineage of monocultural forces native to modern society.\u00a0 These include:\u00a0 an authoritative God who brooks no competition, a mechanistic and gender-biased science that is set up as wholly objective and universal, and a monopolistic intertwinement of military, corporate, and governmental interests.\u00a0 Monoculturist tendencies reduce gardening to agribusiness, forests to timber, land into real estate, plants to chemicals, customers to profiles, responsibility to laws, education to licenses, and patients to their illnesses.<\/p>\n

In much of the world, all this has resulted in increasingly irrational government pronouncements and actions, the rise of fundamentalist ideologies, an escalating climate of fear, the spectre of a Garrison state, a de facto war on nature, an intractable addiction to fossil fuels, record obesities, cancers, auto-immune disorders, and consumption of anti-depressants.\u00a0 These all tell of societies increasingly strained, and often failing, to normalize themselves to their growing dysfunctions.<\/p>\n

The great diversity of stories, the \u2018gene bank\u2019 of worldviews that comprise our collective heritage, has suffered the fate of the many peoples that held them.\u00a0 Forces of colonization, of military, religious, and economic conquest, have altered long held symbolic and ritual bases for co-creating the world.\u00a0 They have wreaked demographic collapses through disease, slaving, and market processes;\u00a0 devalued local knowledge as a triumph of reason over superstition;\u00a0 and cast a generally derogratory eye over rural peoples generally and colonized populations in particular. \u00a0This has idealized an ecology of knowledge reduced to a singular story.\u00a0 Born of a superiority complex, this story can only know the \u2018other\u2019 in patronizing or fearful ways.\u00a0 It thereby alienates humans from the world and nature becomes, as the quintessential modernist Sartre proclaimed, \u201cmute\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, it may be that Sartre, along with much of humanity, has simply forgotten how to listen.<\/p>\n

This great forgetting has defined modernity.\u00a0 It has led to disenchantment of the world.\u00a0 It is the origin of the cosmological fragmentation that divides knowledge into academic fiefdoms, the economics that disregards reciprocity to the land, and the politics that ignore the needs of future generations.\u00a0 It supports blindness to the rights, needs, and domains of others.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is upon this collective amnesia that modern ideals of human development and behavior have evolved.<\/p>\n

The Cosmopolitan<\/em><\/strong>
\nThese ideals have condensed themselves in the figure of sophistication known as the \u2018cosmopolitan\u2019.\u00a0 Also known as the metropolitan man, the worldly woman, the polished bon vivant, the figure of culture, and so on, this person is considered to be open-minded, refined in tastes, dispassionate, socially skillful, and possessing an urbane or international outlook.\u00a0 It describes a life lived in the pursuit of a wide range of experiences, allowing a great breadth of understanding, which is generally turned to practical effect.\u00a0 It connotes the flowering of the individual in the contemporary world, and for many gives direction, focus, and meaning to the drama of modernity.<\/p>\n

However, the scope of these experiences, and the understandings gained from them, are limited by the founding myths of modern civilization.\u00a0 While cosmos literally means \u2018an orderly universe\u2019, and politan \u2018a citizen of\u2019, the cosmos of modernity has been truncated by the divisive ideologies and singular knowledge that informs it into a narrow slice of reality.<\/p>\n

Those trained in this \u2018cosmos\u2019, i.e. the well educated cosmopolitan, generally live in, or derive their sustenance from, the cities made possible by the advancement of science and technology.\u00a0 These cities, except for the few adaptable plants and animals, are generally mono-species environments.\u00a0 In them we talk, walk, work, and play with each other and so go thru life nearly exclusively in relationship with other humans.\u00a0 We are therefore deprived of the more full-spectrum social experience that we have evolved with as a species.\u00a0 The livelihoods of the cosmopolitan are usually aligned with the economy that supports the city, and by extension global industrial culture.\u00a0 This economy has long exercised power without responsibility and violates nearly every principle known to attend healthy ecosystems (the Gaian dharma). Carl Jung succinctly sums all this up with his realization early in life, that compared to the natural world, \u2018for all its wealth of learning, the urban world was metnally rather limited.\u2019<\/p>\n

The consequences of modernity, the dues owed on a Faustian bargain, are creating a world very different than the one the cosmopolitans have been socialized to deal with.\u00a0 The \u2018real world\u2019 of the cosmopolitan is dying.\u00a0 It has reached the end of its life span, and as dawn follows night, the earth, in her infinite compassion, is birthing a more \u2018actual world\u2019 thru those humans open to receive it.<\/p>\n

Awakening<\/em><\/strong>
\nWith healthy diversity, other ways of knowing the world are never eclipsed, but wan and wax depending on individual and social circumstance.\u00a0 It is a tribute to the organizing intelligence of creation that when a knowledge disappears or is in some way forbidden, it sets up a strong polarity, a strong tension to regain equillibrium.\u00a0 This force is now pulling hard on much of humanity to step out of the cosmopolitan trance, to break free of the hypnotic attraction cast by consumer fetishism, desert-born monotheism, scientific materialism, economic fundamentalism. and their mantras of superiority.<\/p>\n

This pull towards balance generally manifests itself as the feeling, either gradual or sudden, that something is wrong with the cultural script one is born into or taught.\u00a0 It may be felt as a missing constituent, an absence of something that seems to be present in other cultures.\u00a0 This leads to a search for wholeness, and often the discovery of entirely new ways of perceiving the world, of living one\u2019s life.\u00a0 For example, the huge income disparities in the world can be felt as a disequillibrium, an injustice that somehow needs to be rectified.\u00a0 It may lead one to look at the need to belong, and how in a large scale society this is directed towards status groups and their pecking orders.\u00a0 Yet one can discover that we are a tribal organism by nature, existing best in communities of 10-100 people.\u00a0 In such a social environment, where all people are aware of each other, the need to belong cannot be exercised as a divisive strategy.\u00a0 It can only be exercised as consideration for others and the egalitarian ethos that brings about.\u00a0 With this realization, one may then seek out smaller scale communities to \u2018normalize\u2019 one\u2019s social self, or work to defuse the status games in one\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the lack of a life force concept in one\u2019s culture could lead, e.g., to an interest in prana and the study of ayurvedic medicine, and open one to the world of resonance cosmologies.\u00a0 Similarly, when one grows up being taught nothing about interspecies or interdimensional communication, one might seek out the assistance of a Teacher plant, or spirit guides, which could open one to the magic and mystery of indigenous consciousness, of an enchanted universe.<\/p>\n

This call from the earth to remember may come as a personal or collective crisis.\u00a0 It may take the form of illness, a great loss, or deep and protracted suffering.\u00a0 This may precipitate a new understanding of the world, one that diverges from concensus perception to the point of irreconcilable differences.\u00a0 In such a situation, there is no way back (other than the route of denial), and the steps forward are often into the unknown.\u00a0 To continue, one must trust and surrender to a higher guidance.<\/p>\n

Crisis therefore offers great opportunities for change.\u00a0 It engages the self-renewal practice of dying and being reborn to oneself.\u00a0 This cycle of growth is seen thruout all of Nature.\u00a0 Just as the seasons dissolve into and emerge out of one other, just as the harvested fields must be tilled under to prepare for new crops, so one is presented with an opportunity to be transformed.\u00a0 There is a choice, to seize this opportunity, or to pass it by.\u00a0 Those who take it emerge into a world beyond the nature-culture split, beyond the conventions of the cosmopolitan.\u00a0 Reborn into the sylvan cosmos, the society of Nature, one is awakened to a new, full-bodied life, to live in a new, full-spectrum world.\u00a0 Such a one can be called a sylvapolitan.<\/p>\n

The Sylvapolitan <\/em><\/strong>
\nThe sylvapolitan grows out of the compost of the cosmopolitan.\u00a0 By taking up the nutrients of the historical phase of separation (e.g., rapid development of the rational mind, technologies such as the internet, and the democratization of the world\u2019s sacred traditions) and reconstituting them in dialogue with the natural world, they are brought back to the tribes of creation as a common wealth of nourishment and creativity.\u00a0 This is much like the archetypal hero\u2019s quest, or myth of eternal return.\u00a0 The sylvapolitan is a cosmopolitan who has returned home, transformed and matured by the challenges of ego-entranced existence.<\/p>\n

This homecoming is marked by re-membrance of a native fluency in the ecology of knowledges that mediate the sensory world.\u00a0 A full spectrum of understandings comes from learning, e.g., the language of smells:\u00a0 odors, fragrances, stenches, and stinks;\u00a0 exercising the imaginal cognition, dreams and visions, allowing the mythic world greater vibrancy;\u00a0 or working the hands to know spirit in formation thru touch, thru massage, or sculpting.<\/p>\n

Reality thereby becomes \u2018ecologicalized\u2019 by having the appropriate knowledges linked up to its many dimensions.\u00a0 The world then moves from the cosmopolitan metaphor of a \u2018single screen\u2019 reality to that of a many faceted jewel.\u00a0 By turning the jewel, one appreciates the many colors and luminosities of life as it shines in the world.\u00a0 To live in a multi-faceted reality impels one to develop an agility in perspective, a tolerance for diverse viewpoints, a fluidity in boundary making, and an ability to shapeshift.<\/p>\n

The sylvapolitan thereby experiences the world thru its many attributes, yet grows in sensitivity to subtle areas of connection between \u2018self\u2019 and \u2018other\u2019.\u00a0 To exist in this paradox, to hold fast to unity while being buffeted by the powers and passions of diversity is a way to realize great strength and wisdom.\u00a0 These qualities of a sensitive strength over a forceful one, an abiding wisdom over a manipulating knowledge, are native to a world that talks back, that can respond in kind, one that is fully and completely inhabited by an ecology of souls.\u00a0 In such an organismic landscape, rocks, gardens, waterways, volcanoes, clouds, cities, and highways all pulse together in ever-changing relations of harmonics and dissonance.\u00a0 These create metabolisms, nested within one another in increasingly more encompassing \u2018bodies\u2019:\u00a0 cells, individual plants or animals, human families, towns, forests, coastlines, nations, landmasses, humanity, the atmosphere, the earth itself, and so on.<\/p>\n

Thru being in conscious, participatory relations with the world, the sylvapolitan develops the ability to read the pulses of these telescoping bodies.\u00a0 Their interrelated needs, goals, temperaments, health, illness, crises, and cycles of life and death can be \u2018read\u2019 thru various signatures;\u00a0 these include changes in atmospheric activity, seasonal intensities, geologic movements, plant and animal populations, human social forms, and individual bodies, behaviors, moods, and vitality states.<\/p>\n

As a pulse reader of the planet, the sylvapolitan is attuned to its life.\u00a0 Its problems become the sylvapolitan\u2019s problems, its solutions the sylvapolitan\u2019s solutions.\u00a0 Such a one is called upon to perform the Gaian dream, to become the solution, to embody the changes, to act out the transformation of life on planet earth, to bring the future into the now.\u00a0 In this way the sylvapolitan is a defining, growing edge of species development.<\/p>\n

The sylvapolitan is to various degrees realized in the many cultures that support direct communion with the sacred and practice relational indigeneity.\u00a0 These include the more esoteric elements of many religions, such as the Sufis, Gnostics, Essenes, Sadhus, Rastafarians, and Mt. Taoists;\u00a0 the wisdom figures of earth-based cultures, such as tribal elders, storytellers, diviners, and medicine people;\u00a0 those that advocate stress reduction and embodied awareness of the world, such as body workers, yoga and tai chi chuan enthusiasts;\u00a0 practitioners of life force-based medicines, such as ayurveda, TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), aromotherapy, and bioenergetics;\u00a0 advocates of sustainable technologies and life ways, such as permaculturalists;\u00a0 those engaged in earth-issued spiritual healing practices, including sweat lodges and work with teacher plants;\u00a0 those in the devotional or spiritual arts and sciences;\u00a0 and those who simply have a comprehensive grasp of the current state of the planet and devote themselves to its positive transitioning.<\/p>\n

The term sylvapolitan refers to both a path of individual self-development, and the culture that supports it.\u00a0 Its describes a life of spiritual growth, which in essence is universal, but in circumstances very particular to this time in history.\u00a0 The human \u2013 nature split of modernity is the surface manifestation of a deeper rift between humans and our divine nature.\u00a0 The pull towards reunion will be effected thru a healing of the world we have destroyed.\u00a0 In doing so we will ourselves be remade by the world, revitalized and reconstituted as the sylvapolitan.<\/p>\n

The cosmopolitan, like the sylvapolitan, describes both a universal figure (a materialist not yet awakened to the spiritual life) and a circumstance particular to modernity (a 500 year reign of dominance).\u00a0 However, the era of the cosmopolitan has matured, has grown to adulthood.\u00a0 It is now faced with an intiatory passage that must involve the death of its founding assumption, and thereby its root sense of identity.\u00a0 It remains to be seen when, how, or even if this transition is made.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, some adherents to cosmopolitan culture resist the change, and move into the contractive, fear-based strategies typical of dying civilizations.\u00a0 Other elements of it, such as green technologies, and social justice movements, have already filtered thru to the sylvapolitan world, creating models and fields of attraction for those to follow.\u00a0 However, most migrating out of cosmopolitan culture have only imperfectly relocated themselves.\u00a0 Many find themselves betwixt and between worlds, partly in one culture and partly in another.<\/p>\n

For example, we are largely hostage to an infrastructure dependent on fossil and nuclear fuel, though most of us are aware that the longer this dependency is sustained, the more unpleasant the outcome.\u00a0 Individually, someone may have undergone a health crisis which woke them up to the wonders of a wholistic lifestyle.\u00a0 Though they now eat organically, mediate and pray daily, and work diligently on improving their relationships with others, they are still employed at a job that they are unhappy with, subject to junk food binges, and addicted to T.V.\u00a0 Another person may have a great intellectual grasp of sylvapolitan culture and enthusiasm for it, but resist living it for any number of reasons, and, visa versa, someone may love to do yoga, in essence a sylvapolitan practice, but have no grasp of its possibilities as a spiritual way of life.<\/p>\n

Still another person, amazed and infused by a Teacher plant or its chemical counterpart, and blossomed briefly into the sylvapolitan world, is left with choices on how to integrate the experience.\u00a0 S\/he may replicate the Faustian ethos of modernity and seek the power of the experience without working on purifying oneself to handle it responsibly.\u00a0 This strategy is best facilitated by drugs, those vitality imposters that \u2013 on the surface – appear to operate beyond the reciprocity principle of the Gaian dharma.\u00a0 However, the actuality of drugs is that one ends up chasing a high of ever diminishing returns, which to an extent normalizes one in the cosmopolitan culture of addictions.\u00a0 In contrast, s\/he may choose to accept the challenge of applying oneself to the teachings of that brief bloom into the sylvapolitan world.\u00a0 This requires one to engage in responsible and free flowing dialogue with the natural world, and to embark on a path of self-discipline at the service of self-understanding.<\/p>\n

Whether precipitated by a Teacher plant or not, when one awakens to a life of spiritual growth one begins to become aware of what inhibits that growth and what supports it.\u00a0 Currently, one must be able to recognize the glamor bardos of late stage cosmopolitan culture – the mega-malls, the image-spins of lifestyle magazines, the cult of celebrity, the hubris of military might and religious right – and forgo indulging in them.\u00a0 One must become aware of the myriad addiction triggers woven thru the economic landscape – the supermarket tabloid headlines, the free coffee and donuts, jumbo sized-anything, internet porn \u2013and be careful of their influence.\u00a0 One must be conscious of the seduction of normality, and be aware that the group mind, unconscious of itself, is easily manipulated and often ebbs to its lowest common denominator in a climate of fear and denial.<\/p>\n

It is thru attunement to a body-based intelligence that these attractions become understood as distractions, because what looks good or sounds good to the senses often doesn\u2019t feel good to the body.\u00a0 The body is the primary instrument of navigation on the path of spiritual growth in this world.\u00a0 It is thru the body that one is aware of the deeper currents of one\u2019s life that always flow towards union with the divine, it is thru the body that one is aware of the layers of oneself that obstruct this flow.<\/p>\n

It is thru self-purification of the body in the crucible of relationships that these layers are dissolved, that space is created for inner transformation.\u00a0 When the forces of equilibrium are unleashed they move like storm winds from a high to low pressure area, or a river broken free of a dam.\u00a0 The body is blown free of the detritus of its past and it drinks of the nourishing waters of spiritual renewal.\u00a0 The seed of spirit within sprouts, grows into a spiritualized body, and flowers into the realm of the sylvapolitan.<\/p>\n

As one moves into sylvapolitan culture, one\u2019s life becomes increasingly given over to the cultivation of radiance.\u00a0 In its early phases this is felt more as an attraction to life force, and in its mature phases more as an attraction to the divine. \u00a0The body is operative at a higher frequency, and resonates with a more subtle world.\u00a0 The fabic of existence is felt as silken, translucent, and composed.\u00a0 Light pulses thru objects as magic thru wands;\u00a0 reality is frictionless as dualisms melt together; \u00a0thoughts condense easily into actions;\u00a0 and feelings are transparent to their source.\u00a0 The membrane between the worlds is stretched thinner and one must capacitate oneself to handle a greater intensity of spiritual force.\u00a0 The body inherently knows how to unfurl itself before these forces.\u00a0 It knows how to take more of a charge, to dissolve and reconstitute itself to take even more of a charge, to allow the spirit maximum radiance.\u00a0 In this way the body is reorganized from a higher dimension of itself, and becomes a more direct expression of the actuality from which it arises.<\/p>\n

This is the path of the sylvapolitan.\u00a0 It can be understood as a curriculum of transformation, an ongoing process of expanding and shedding (but every shedding is in someway an integration) selves, of dialoguing our uniqueness with ever more encompassing identities, allows the earth, and ultimately the Divine, to become conscious thru us.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2008 Morgan Brent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Cosmopolitan to Sylvapolitan   Modernity and its Discontents Modernity is rooted in an assumed split between Nature and culture, and beneath that, between the spiritual (often assumed not to exist at all) and the material worlds.\u00a0 This rift first appeared eons back with the emergence of human self-reflective consciousness, but only within the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":961,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tribesofcreation.com\/solar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}