Recently I became clearer that I really do not want to continue the concept of being a widget manufacturer, even if the widgets (crystal glazed porcelain pots) are beautiful. A weekend night found me channel surfing—I stumbled into a FSTV special on debt in America. Something like 2/3 of the american economy is based on consumerism. Something internal is deeply disconnected: it feels like I am attempting to assemble pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for which no known picture exists.



I realized that I didn’t want to participate any more in this current economic (which is really a reflection of spiritual) paradigm. I characterize the current paradigm as “stuck in second”—invoking the notion of a car’s transmission which has more than 2 forward gears, but the vast majority of people don’t know there are higher gears and consequently don’t look for them. There is more to this: not only do they not know about the possibility of higher gears, they don’t believe such gears exist, and this belief isn’t just casual, but it is concretized, i.e., inflexible. I just don’t want to participate in activities that perpetuate this obsolete, limited Weltanschauung, at least any more than I have to. The Hot Ice studio has been caught up in the current (I see it as old) paradigm: product. commercialism. marketing. sales. customer satisfaction. grow the business. profit. I feel like a lemming waking up to the stampede I’m in and struggling to beat my way toward the edge of the unconscious flow, where I can step out of it, so I can no longer be dragged by the crowd toward some useless, meaningless, suicidal, irrelevant cliff.



What I realized was that I have been distressed by this paradigm for my entire life, but I didn’t have a label for my discomfort. I didn’t have a unifying notion or container. I decided that I would focus my activities, or at least my psyche and by extension it’s physical derivatives, on discovering, or promoting, or advancing, or experiencing, 3rd gear. Here, I sense the relevance (and challenge) of the phrase “fake it till you make it.” I am sure that today my discovery, and definition, of 3rd gear is little more than a whisper, a wisp, a piffle. The territory I enter here has fascinated me for decades: the suits use words like paradigm, epistomology, metaphysics: wikipedia is a fine place to noodle on this, for academics. Yet my left brain is for now all but useless in supplying tools for this journey. I figure I have to translate this notion (3rd gear) into daily activities: it could start out with something as simple as a binary (or triage) characterization. Do this, don’t do that. I feel an opening urge to somehow grab the problem and make some swift sword strokes to frame it and thus tame it. As if I might be fighting a dragon in the dark. I need a generator! Lights! I can’t see! (but I sure can smell the breath, feel the heat, sense the size of this sucker! Am I supposed to slay this “thing”? With what? How?)

The Mental Transmission

Gears

1: little or no consciousness 

2. ego (small mind) consciousness

3. divine (large mind) consciousness



Every human is born with a natural impulse/capability of connecting/participating in gear 3, but this capability is not just ignored by most cultures, it is actively suppressed. The suppression begins at the beginning of the socialization process of a young child, so by the time a child is 6 or 7, whatever natural impulses there were toward maintaining a connection with gear 3 energies have been essentially eradicated. Gear 2 conformity pressures are enormously strong, taking various roles (guilt, derision, physical punishment, isolation, shunning, abandonment, marginalization) to suppress any gear 3 eruptions, inclinations, expressions from becoming viral. It is as if we are unconsciously schizophrenic: we have natural impulses toward gear 3, and we have institutionalized an enormous fear of gear 3; I suspect the fear is due to the fear of the loss of the self, the fear of the loss of the ego. Religions embody this schizophrenia. On the one hand, they emerged as a response to gear 3 impulses, and even a cursory reading of the fundamental principles of all of the world’s major religions shows common themes and threads that are gear 3 oriented. On the other hand, they have concretized and institutionalized themselves both metaphysically and physically, in order to protect their turf, ie to protect the small mind ego-dominated fear of powerlessness. The forms that have emerged have historically resulted (and continue to result) in some of the bloodiest conflicts recorded in human history. Wars are not just or simply religious wars, they are manifestations of being stuck in second. Religions are simply a convenient handle to inaccurately characterize them. Bottom line: in an evolutionary context, we humans are still pretty immature.



Most environmental challenges are on a specific issue (save the whales, ANWR, spotted owl). These challenges would be moot, irrelvant, inappropriate, impossible in third gear; the whole basis for them—competition and conflicting world views—doesn’t exist there.



Competition defines gear 2. We consciously and unconsciously echo what appears to us to be the jungle of the natural world (lions eating gazelles). Lions eat sick gazelles. Most gazelles die of old age or something else beside lions. Gazelles don’t die, they continue. A gazelle dies, but the species continues. If the species dies, it is replaced by another, generally more flexible one. These experiments in life forms are simply the physical manifestation of a way older, way bigger, non-material energy system, a consciousness, in which life and death are irrelevant terms. One could say nothing dies, which is to say everything lives. Death doesn’t exist, tho transformation does. Transformation from one material form to another; transformation from material to non-material and back again. The essence driving the transformation doesn’t change, it simply plays with the pieces. The esssence driving the transformation is not a single point consciousness, a ‘heavenly father’ sitting up somewhere around Alpha Centauri. The essence is more like the essence of the internet: a connected web of consciousnesses, where every sub-atomic particle, every atomic particle, (every electron, neutron, proton) is a node in the network. These particles are conscious and present energy that has intention, even if we don’t know how to slow down and get quiet enough to listen to it. Stuck in second positions us to create scarcity and then fight over it. We don’t know how to get to 3rd gear, and we don’t know what it will be like for us once we are there. Like a car, tho, you can’t be in 2nd and 3rd at the same time. There is an ache, a longing, to shift out of 2nd, but there is a fierce resistance to it as well.



Take home messages:



* Dithering about the existence of 3rd gear is counterproductive. Either accept it or ignore it: make your decision, perhaps ‘faith’, grounded in your experience, not someone else’s claim. Science, which for several hundred years has focused on the material, may not be the route to certify the existence, scope and significance of the non-material. The history of western rationality (“science”, “medicine”, etc.) has repeatedly demonstrated resistance to new paradigms, new ideas, which ultimately, with the scars of battle, replaced old ideas. Celebrate Bruno. Presuming that “this is all there is” creates a meagre endgame.

* Make a very high priority to know yourself. The success of your journey will be based on the honesty you can bring to the task. Angels will help. There will be any number of distractions. The ego is powerful, clever, and terrified.

* Trust yourself. Third gear exists. When the lights are out and you are alone, who do you believe you should trust on this question: yourself or what you’ve been told?

* Shifting to 3rd will take time: rome wasn’t built in a day. Shifting to third is simultaneously the easiest thing in the world to do, as well as the hardest.

* Loving intentions, imagination, compassion, generosity, and humility trump second gear presumptions of insufficiency and self-protection. Non-material wealth trumps material wealth. Which direction is worthy of your investment? Go one way, you get both. Go the other way, you may get neither.

* Talk is cheap. Reading a book is cheap. Do the work.