These dreams

December 23, 2022

I.
What is nominal about our system of government, and perhaps this will change, is that it is a mess. There are three major subgroups whose flaws have proved unmatched to the challenges of the day. There are instigators who love to start controversies, detenteists who want us all to stop and talk about their observations of the process, and subversives who want everyone to check all their actions against their first principles. And this hot mess is from whence comes these matriarchal dreams. 

The current age is full of the uncloistered, unrepetent masculine joy of play unrestricted by the collapse of technique (of the how) against personal limits (and especially not by social norms). In this madness, some have come to desire some sacred mothering energy to tell the kids, as it were, to play nicely with each other. 

As much as we are haunted by the ghost of the matriarchal feminine, we are also haunted by this thought: When we form a community of mind, will we lose the freedom to do what makes us especially ourselves? And will there be the emergence of a fourth subgroup of the permanently revolutionary, or the reformers, and what will its effect be on the process? 

II.
We are not missing the sacred but some kind of matriarchal feminine energy that the sixties energy captured so well. In the beginning of the modern era, this sacred feminine was placed in the assured hands of science with its connection to agriculture, then in the sphere of the trades with its connection to labor, and finally in the guild structure with its connections to liminal spaces. 

This is not a religious tone but is the sort of dark energy called yin that Asians understand so well. It's far from the concept of the void, and it is feminine, but not female, of a sort of spirit found in agriculture and cultivation, tradecraft, and the guild structure's liminal spaces. I say spirit as opposed to and distinct from the soul. 

Western civilization has always been very careless about where its yin was placed, but when you put the matter in terms of spirit as opposed to soul, it is a clearer picture. 

The problem is that the Internet has shattered the previous paradigm into an uneven field, orality losing ground, being appportioned less; soul trying to make up the difference in the quiet places where spirit used to dwell. 

Spirit seeks out soul in the proper order, and thus soul encroaching on the realm of spirit throws the system out of balance, hence the disordered, unbalanced preoccupation with matriarchal energy. 

III.
We are not missing the sublime because the sublime is all around us. We are not missing something malefic, nor is it heaven or hell. But in the subtle distinction between utopia and progress, where utopia is the soul and progress is the spirit, there is some room for proper explication, such that it could be said that progress is the proper home of the spirit; utopia: the soul. Conditions of life in the current governmental style are such that the self has to be considered whole but society is infinitely fragmented. And hence we are plagued by unchecked selfishness. The entrance of the soul-concept into the rhythm of progress and the home of the spirit brings untimely thoughts of utopia into the work of progress, and gums up the works. We do not live in a perfect society, or a perfect moment, even a perfect technological era. But try explaining that to those that only want a taste. 

We should not have to explain that idealism does not have to mean utopian dreams, but now suddenly we do seem to have to. These matriarchal dreams have to do with the confusion of the soul, utopianism, and dream as it tends to want access, now, to progress and the work of the spirit.