MM – HOW TO LET RIP

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YOU KNOW IT’S THE WRITE WAY

LET RIP

To let rip is certainly an enthusiasm,
from hobby, to work, to orgasm;
We can take it too far as we dart,
and we end up ripped apart;
Sometimes it can fill us with wrath,
especially when ripped off;
it can often mean fantasy we sprinkle,
on our lives, like Rip Van Winkle;
Go too far and danger becomes rife,
threatening to take our life;
And then it all will cease,
as we lie below the sign:
R.est I.n P.eace

(c) Anthony North, April 2008

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COMPLETELY RIPPED

To be ripped away is to be separated from something, or someone. In this sense, it can be sorrowful. To be ripped from a loved one can bring desolation. To be ripped from friends can bring isolation.
The threat of being ripped can have an important effect on our behaviour. Often, it is fear of sorrow and isolation that moderates what we do. In this sense, fear of being ripped away can be an important social mechanism.

This said, the modern world holds problems. It often rips us from what we should be as people. Consider the onward march of globalization, destroying local cultures and offering ‘sameness’. This rips us from our local societies, and we no longer find meaning and direction, sating this loss with placing meaning in consumer choice.

The modern world is also brimming with information.

It guarantees our attention upon the world. Yet, so often the true ‘self’ is found, not in the physical world, but the inner mind. But this is increasingly more difficult to find, ripping us from our ‘self’, unable to complete who we really are.
Being ripped from something denies us ‘completion’. This leaves us forever the wanderer, not knowing who we are, what we want to achieve. Yet in one way, this isn’t too bad.
If we ever get completion, what then? Isn’t this the end of a process? In effect, we are ripped from our reason for doing things. This is an important point. It tells us that, often, it is the journey we are on that is fulfilling, and not the eventual outcome.

© Anthony North, April 2008

TECHNO-ANIMISM

Few of us have not heard of, or seen, The Matrix. A film that mixes the ultimate ideals of cyberspace with religious and mythological imagery, it is seen as pure fiction. But fiction has a habit of coming true.
Many would scoff at such an idea. Religious hog-wash has no place in the modern technical world. But I would argue our innate spirituality will recur in every society and culture – even the most atheist, materialist and technological.

The first religion was arguably the animist.

Seen in ancient tribal societies throughout the world, everything had a spiritual reflection. This included animals, rivers, mountains, and even the weather.
This was so because the physical world had a spirit world running parallel to it. This world was accessed through the hysterical rituals of the shaman, who would enter, and commune, with the spirits in trance.

This is why most ancient gods were animals.

Eventually, however, the chimera appeared – a god that was half animal, half man. This indicates that spirituality had shifted position.
Whereas the first religions were very much nature based, as man’s society advanced, religion passed through to society, with men coming to be seen as divine, first as animalistic themselves, and eventually fully man-gods.

A parallel spirituality was still evident.

But now the man-gods who populated the parallel spiritual world were symbolized in mythology, represented agriculture, and had their homes in the stars.
With the birth of Christianity, this was to change. The physical and spiritual worlds were always interactive. But in Christ, this interactiveness was denied, until death. The Christian had to be very much in the real world, his place in the spiritual afterlife decided upon by his deeds in this world.

Paganism, however, continued the interactiveness.

This developed into the western occult tradition, where the witch and adept continued to access the parallel world. And it was to have mass popular expression once more with the arrival of Spiritualism.
Eventually, intellectuals began to look at the parallel spiritual world. Most famous among them was Carl Jung, who devised the ‘collective unconscious’, populated by ‘archetypes’ previously seen in mythology.

The new expression saw the parallel world in terms of our inner psychology.

It was our mind that was parallel to the physical. And if so, then all peoples of all times share a kind of universal psychology that will always express itself.
Thus we come to today. And as the internet gains ground, and ideas of cyberspace arise, can we see the collective unconscious reasserting itself with a technological parallel world alongside the physical?
We are already beginning to see cyberspace as a fantasy-laden realm separate to the physical, and we are filling it with all the symbolism that traces itself throughout our spiritual history. The parallel world of our ancestors will, it seems, be reborn wherever we have the imagination to conceive it.

© Anthony North, April 2008

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