Paradise and Identity in Our Futures

This presentation will consider the 21st century environmental crisis and the problem of sustainability as the greatest threat and opportunity for human consciousness. In addition to the problems posed by rapidly unraveling planetary ecosystems, the challenges also concern the systematic political, economic, and religious denial of scientific evidence. The problem of denial locates the cultural source of the crisis as environ/mental: the “/” calls direct attention to the natural world as separate and inferior. But the “/” of this mental distance includes not only a denial of relationship or equality but also response-ability for the globalized erosion of the world's ecological systems, and the looming wasteland for future generations. Moreover, in the denial of accountability to these relations, this crisis also includes the issue of gender relations. In its totality, the environ/(men)tal crisis assumes cosmological scope. As such, the crisis appears structurally coded by a set of socio-psychological, political, economic, and religious relations. These relations are captured in a model called, “Enigma.”

Enigma offers a three-tiered model that identifies myth and metaphor as central to this crisis. Accordingly, it recruits their powers in order to experience, transcend, and transform the sanctification of violence, desire, and identity. This process unfolds through the additional recruitment of the archetypal relations of paradise and wilderness, which expose the origin stories of a culture in the process of collapse and transformation. Enigma maps out, on two levels, the archetypal irony of the lost soul in the quest for paradise pursued through violence, which predictably ends in bewilderment. On descending levels, the code therefore corresponds to the physical and the mental where paradise operates as a repeating history of wounding through desire, and the rationalization of this violence. Transcending the stunted confinement of consciousness to a paradise/wilderness code for self-destruction occurs on the third level, where myth and metaphor are allowed to assume their (relatively) vertical position to a (relatively) two-dimensional world.

As such, Enigma outlines a shift in cosmological codes, from what it calls a borderland world .to a world of boundaries. The ironic paradises of oppression and war against the wilderness disappear through the paradoxical integration of paradise and wilderness, where a spiritual dimension identifies boundaries in which nonviolence unwinds as a golden thread tracing a reverence for life A transformational coherence between ends and means appears as individual and social forms of enlightenment, while also shedding light on the meaning of a bewildered and unsustainable world Enigma will use the United States of America, in particular, as a case study to review the dissociative dimensions of myth and metaphor, as well as to illuminate their transformational processes guiding a culture of fundamentalism and modernity through its death and rebirth in the 21st century.

Bio: My lifelong interests have been concerned with spirituality, healing, and politics, I pursued studies in Asian languages and culture as an undergraduate, studying Chinese for several years, as well as Chinese brush painting and Tai Chi Chuan. I lived and studied in Japan for three years,studying Japanese calligraphy, learning ceramics, and practicing zazen.(I also stayed in Taibei--Yang Ming Shan--for several months, in1977.) In general, my interests were focused on the study of Asian philosophy as path of self-realization, anchored in practices of meditation as both a formal and an artistic discipline.

Work experience in psychiatric and rehabilitation hospitals sparked further insight into consciousness, illness, and the unity of mind and body. During that time, I studied the philosophical foundations of traditional Chinese medicine, and later in Japan , I was an observer at an Acupuncture clinic and school.

My doctoral work focused on the significance of paradise to western culture, a theme that allowed me to explore the politics of consciousness as project of repression or transformation. This avenue of research afforded me the opportunity to look into the origins of my own culture, having defined itself in terms of Exile from paradise, while also examining the American attraction of self- trans-

formational practices centered on assumptions of the existence of an inner paradise.

For the past two years, I have been engaged with an ethnobotanist and an East-West philosopher on a research project designed to study the impact of the introduction of psychoactive biotechnologies to Hawaii . I am particularly interested in how experiences with these plants have transformed lifestyles, behaviors, and attitudes to the future.

Our website offers a survey that is available for anyone over 18 to fill out. This is local study with a global component. The website is: psychoactiveknowledge.org. I am presently an adjunct faculty member at Chaminade University , and I have lectured at West Oahu University and Kapiolani Community College .