Thursday January 3, 2019

I lie awake in the middle of the night worried about initiatory paths and forces representing competing alignments. Can I trust new acquaintances, or do they wish to use me for some ulterior end? Perhaps I should read about Buddhist socialism. The current Dalai Lama, for instance, thinks of himself as “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” and the heterodox economist E.F. Schumacher used to advocate an approach he called “Buddhist economics.” That’s all fine and good, but waters darken once we venture into “technodelics” and emerging efforts to devise tools to alter consciousness. How do we avoid the dangers of instrumentalization under such circumstances? In lieu of an answer, I decide to pair some texts in the hope that they might speak to one another. Take Sun Ra’s “cheery poem inaugurating the new age,” combine it with the version of Amiri Baraka’s play A Black Mass that he recorded with Ra and the Myth-Science Orchestra in 1968, and add Duke Ellington’s essay “The Race for Space” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.”