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an historical locus, but the means of escape from all times and places : "The
individual 's consciousness in meditation takes him out ofhistory ; it gives him
a glimpse of the total field beyond his personal location ."
Having gobbled up nature, society, and history, cosmic consciousness
turns its hungry eyes toward other peoples and sees in them only attributes of
itself. " What separates beings in the world is not space but consciousness, " or
the lack of it, rather. An expanded consciousness is without spaces or dimen–
sions; its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere . "Cosmically,
mankind is a single de Broglie wave, or what Christians would call the Mystical
Body of Christ." And the beauty of cosmic consciousness in its collective
aspects is that it does not require you to give up anything of yourself: " In the
Mystical Body of Christ, at the very end of human spiritual evolution, the
more
one expresses his uniqueness and his absolute freedom, the more truly
he relates to the ecstatic whole of the single being that is mankind ." The more
you are yourself, the more you are everybody, yes, but also the less everybody
else is anything at all ; and the less, as Thompson's argument twists, you are
yourself. The" absolute freedom" turns out to be an absolute servitude. Once
free from nature, society , history , space, time and other people, you become
a plaything of the gods . "They play
through
us
with
our history," says
Thompson :
Just as we corral beasts to keep them in their place for our use , and as we
sit on the fence and watch them ruminate all day long, we wonder how
they can stand
to
eat all the time ; so the gods and demons corral us in
history, and as they sit on the edge , they wonder how we can stand
to
think
all day long . Within our corrals of history they come
to
stir up our
wars and passions, so that we can be fat with the astral emanations that
sustain them . Knowing that we are afraid of death , they catch us with its
linked opposite , sexuality. Eros is thus the anr, ctive jailkeeper in the
prisons of Thanatos .
The body is a coffin and sex is what keeps it there. Tl.e resurrected body
will be sexless . Already in
At The Edge a/History
Thompson was noting with
a kind ofsuppressed glee that" scientists now speak openly about the obsolete
nature of the body and childbirth" and that "child-bearing is about to
become the ritual art of the affluent classes, as breast-feeding is now. " He
optimistically predicted that" it is only a question of perhaps a century or less
before Homo Sexualis takes his place with Homo Neanderthalensis ." The
ground for his optimism is that ' 'we are literally sick of and sick with the
phallic culture of our industrial technology ." In
Passages About Earth
Thompson explains how cosmic consciousness will cure our sickness:
"pucting semen into the head is what Tantra Yoga is all about." When we
