I honor your gods,
I drink at your well,
I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place.
I have no cherished outcomes.
I will not negotiate by withholding.
I will not be subject to disappointment.

-- Ralph Blum, The Rune Cards

Civilizations - like societies - like individuals within societies - grow organically. They are living systems that propagate a multiplicity of feedback loops in order to adapt to changing conditions, including the changing conditions inside the system.

Sometimes we reorganize ourselves in response to external events, and sometimes we reorganize ourselves in response to how we have changed inside. By the time we notice a transition, it is already well underway. We only become conscious of that which we can manage. So while it might feel as if things are falling apart, we are in fact already on our way toward a higher level of organization that includes and transcends all that came before.

The direction of our lives is determined by our deepest intentionality. I don't mean that in some simplistic "as you believe so you will be" kind of way. I mean that on the deepest levels of our consciousness, the lives we live are the lives we intend to live. This is true too, I think, for societies and civilizations.

Evolution is random but not blind; it is always patterned after patterns of possibility, potentialities inherent in Being itself that look these days like branching fractals. This implies something daunting about our real responsibility for our lives.

On the macro level of planetary civilization, our collective intentionality determines the direction of our species. We do not merely lurch into the future like a lovable drunk. We tack back and forth across the spectrum lines of destinations we have more or less identified as our destiny.

Those directions can be observed more easily in retrospect, but we have clues to what will emerge from the things our leaders say. I don't mean political leaders - I mean the real leaders who articulate our deeper intentionality so clearly that we align ourselves with their vision. In a digitized civilization in which power is exercised by contributing to and participating in the larger project of our collective life, there are no permanent leaders, there is only leader-ship, exercised by those who name true north for the next generations.

So much of our recent conversation about technological change seems to presume that technologies exist for themselves alone, as if their ultimate purpose is axiomatic to their existence, rather than for the possibilities they disclose or create for those who manufacture them.

For several years, I have explored how we are being transformed by our interaction with technologies of information and communication. Last year's questions were asked in last year's words. We no longer live "in front of our computers;" we live increasingly inside a single digital environment that permeates all things, including ourselves. The question is no longer, how are we being changed by technology? The question that confronts us now is, will we accept responsibility for the project of our lives and of civilization itself? Or will we live inside the narcotic illusions of our simulations ?

The field of human subjectivity that animates the matrix of the digital world is inseparable from the freedom and power intrinsic to our very souls. We are a single trans-planetary civilization and the multi-dimensional arrays of information that make up the matrix is the engine by which it moves. Even if we define the genetic basis of that field of subjectivity and engineer ourselves accordingly, determining how many mystics or manic-depressives will walk the streets, the recursive nature of self-consciousness will always dump us back into our own laps where freedom is inseparable from necessity. Identity is destiny, and the transition to a digital world has made clear that identity is a conscious decision.

Identity is a conscious decision. Responsibility for the project of civilization is ours.

In the next century, contact with other planetary species - currently a kind of vague daydream, diffused and ill-informed - will loom large. Our planetary civilization will move through a zone of annihilation in which we question what it means to be human. Genetic engineering will continue to raise critical questions about who we choose to be. In the matrix - in the parallel distributed worlds in which we already live - leadership ebbs and flows according to will and necessity. Any individual can leverage the power of the matrix from any node in the network, so long as the matrix accepts the inevitability of their insights.

Who will articulate the deeper intentionality of our civilization?

You will. You are both node and nexus of the network, you are the center of the web. You have the means and the opportunity. But do you have the motive?

The words of the ancients turn to rubble and dust when we say them. They are no longer pry bars that we can jam into the fissures of the mountains we would move. We need new levers. The dynamics of our ancient faiths illuminate a landscape alive with the deeper collective intentionality of the human soul, but we need a new vocabulary to illuminate that landscape, we need words that make sense in a new world.

Gandhi was right: God has no religion. Many paths on many mountains reach the same peak(s). The challenge is to leave our comfortable base camps and risk the thin cold air of higher elevations in search of the words that will shatter our false gods and disclose for a bright shining moment that one heart beats in one living being, a self-conscious trans-galactic civilization waking in spacetime endlessly, shaking itself ceaselessly from a deep habitual sleep.

November 5 1999