An eruption of the implicate order

Seven or eight years ago I was riding in a car service to the Charlotte airport. The driver was, or claimed to be, an ex-special forces soldier with inside knowledge of the workings of the power elite. Something I said had opened the spigot of his political opinions, which gushed forth profusely over the two-hour ride. His favorite topic was the Clintons. He claimed to have been on Hillary Clinton’s security detail. He repeated a story about her, as if it had happened to him first hand, that I’d read in various version on the internet. He said he quit the team after being ordered to commit heinous acts.

I didn’t find this story, which seemed like he pieced it together from 4chan, very credible, but as an amateur mythologist, I’m quite willing to entertain such ideas, even in the debased and self-contradictory form this man presented them.¹ So I listened politely.

Then, at the peak of the driver’s anti-Clinton diatribe, red and blue lights flashed in the mirror. He pulled over to the side of the road, the police car behind us.

The driver handed his license to the policeman with a near comical degree of deference, as if he were serving tea to the Pope. “Yes sir. Here you are, sir.”

“Do you know why I’m pulling you over?”

“No sir.”

“One of your brake lights is out. I’ll just give you a warning. You’d better get that fixed.”

We pulled back onto the highway. “That was pretty weird,” I said. We drove the rest of the way to the airport in silence.

Later I reflected on the oddity of the incident. We were sailing down the highway. The cop would not have seen the missing brake light until the driver slowed down after seeing the flashing lights.

In what one might call “conspiracy reality,” our cell phones were monitoring our conversation in real time, and when the deep state operative heard us talking about a forbidden topic (the turpitude of HRC) he quickly dispatched a police offer to issue a coded “warning.” But this interpretation beggars belief. It reeks of paranoia. Thousands such conversations are in process at any given moment. Neither of us were important enough to merit the special attentions of the Illuminati, who in any case probably have better things to do with the police than dispatch them to interrupt a random dude’s unhinged rant.

Of course, the whole thing might have been coincidence. Yet the timing and symbolism fit so well together that it felt less like a coincidence than a synchronicity — an eruption of an implicate order into everyday experience. That implicate order expresses an intelligence that supplies experiential data points to match whatever mythic reality one enters. So, indulge too deeply in Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories, and weird things start happen to corroborate those theories. The police stop was like a visitation from another reality, one in which the entire mythos of Satanic elites is true.

Every time I write about this topic I receive two genres of angry and/or patronizing emails. The first reprimands me for even mentioning such outlandish conspiracy theories in any terms but those of ridicule, castigating me for indulging in vapid metaphysics while real horrors unfold in the real world. The other scolds me for my naivete, my unwillingness to swallow the red pill and open my eyes to the magnitude of the evil that controls our world, then appends videos detailing the suspicious deaths of people who were about to testify against the Clintons, or the web of human trafficking implicating global elites and institutions.

Both have missed my point. I am not in the business of establishing the truth or falsity of what are called “conspiracy theories.” If pressed, I am fully capable of entering the Cartesian matrix, the myth of objective reality, and opine on which among those theories I think are true. I’m as capable as the next person of examining evidence, marshaling arguments, and making a case. But for many years now, I have felt alien to that territory, alien to the field of narrative warfare in which each party tries to ontologically dominate the others by establishing what is true and what is false.

To add a note of paradox: please don’t think that, because I called objective reality a “myth,” that I am saying anything so crude as “objective reality doesn’t exist.” The more deeply one enters a myth, the realer it becomes. So it has been for modern civilization’s sojourn into the myth of objectivity.

As I said, I am not much at home in that myth; plus, I am fed up with its limitations, and with what one must wall out to keep it whole. One must wall out synchronicity. One must wall out mystical experiences. One must wall out the unknown. And one must wall out vast realms of our creative power. What’s left is a narrow, guarded realm we can never escape, in which our creative potency never can exceed our ability to force change upon what is Other.

There is a fundamental victim mentality implicit in the myth of objectivity, holding us subject to arbitrary forces alien to ourselves. Yet the alternative is not solipsism, the idea that everything is all in one’s own mind. Rather, it is to acknowledge a mysterious intimacy between inner and outer, between self and world, and between consciousness and experience.

Painting by Ági Novák

History, it is said, is written by the victors; narrative warriors also embrace the converse: that whoever writes the story shall be the victor. All true, as far as it goes. The question is, What is the nature of such a victory? What can be achieved by having everyone agree to your version of reality? And what cannot be achieved that way?

One thing that cannot be achieved that way is the healing of our world. Looking at the multiple crises that beset this earth, one readily sees the impossibility of any practical solution. Hope must therefore come from beyond the bounds of practicality. It must come from the places we do not know. It must come from outside the realities that we have sought to impose. “We” here mostly refers to those upholding conventional social, scientific, and political beliefs, but I do not mean to excuse myself and my readers from this call to humility.

Society’s dominant belief systems are disintegrating. Cracks radiate out uncontrollably from the original “crack in the cosmic egg” that Joseph Chilton Pearce described fifty years ago. Restricting our gaze only to the intact fragments of shell suspended on the membrane, we may well convince ourselves still that we know what is real, and what is not. A small and fleeting comfort. Better now to shift the gaze toward the cracks synchronicity and the unexplainable point to.

Shining through them is an intelligence and a mystery so profound as to make one’s own knowledge seem like a bubble of foam on the sea.

Here is a very practical source of hope, and of a level of effectiveness as a change agent that is not available to the information warrior. Let’s take it back to Hillary Clinton, or to Donald Trump, or to your favorite deep state sock puppet or totalitarian institution or globalist organization — to someone or something that is already fully defined in your belief system, fixed in place. Or even to someone in your life who you “know” so well that there is little room for them, in your conception, to grow or change. Are you willing to put down what you think you know? Are you willing to make room for the impossible?

You might say, “We must recognized reality and stop deceiving ourselves that these people are anything but evil.” But do you know that? How do you know that? Maybe there is something else in them besides what you know. Maybe what you “know” blinds you, and confines others in the image of your perception. So it is in American politics, where each side thinks the other consists of horrible, foolish, or benighted people. Treat someone accordingly, and they fulfill the expectation.

The healing of our world will not come by sweeping all the old institutions aside. It will not come through mass arrests and purges of the evil people infesting the swamp. Nor will it come though the equivalent purge of our own psyches. Rather, it will come when enough people, especially those we have written off or demoted in our minds to lower spiritual status, step into new roles within a new story. For that to happen, we must not hold them captive in existing stories of what is and what may be. We must not ourselves there either, or the world. Instead let us wield the power of story deliberately in a different way than before, as an offering not a conquest.

After all, the world as we know it is woven from stories, agreements, symbols. A nation is but a story. A border is a story. Law is a story, Money is a story. Property is a story. They are as real as we make them. Money in particular is the very essence of “practicality,” in matters of which one must be “realistic.” Yet its power comes wholly through agreements about the meaning of symbols. Beyond these obviously symbolic systems, our sense of medical reality, scientific reality, and material reality is also more conditional on agreements than the objectivity-steeped mind can recognize. Therefore, to claim our full power as creators, we must escape our captivity from the stories we have mistaken for reality. Then we can discover new stories that are fit habitation for whom we want to become.

1. Note: when I call something a myth, it is not to imply a verdict on its objective factuality. Whether you believe Hillary Clinton to be a great leader, a cynical politician, or a psychopathic monster, you can still recognize the mythic character of the stories surrounding her.