I enjoy the whimsy and inventiveness that J. Michael Yates brings to the proverbial table in his short story, “The passage of Sono Nis.” It is about a man waking up and witnessing some kind of wayward marathon with millions of people involved. “Just beyond them and the opening of the doorway streamed the river of runners that awakened me,” writes Yates. “In such close file they ran that noses seemed pressed painfully against backs of heads.” For the runners in the center of this inexorable march through the town, the sense of mortal peril must have been kept at bay by the homogeneity of the runners’ movements; all the taut leg muscles, all the bobbing heads, and the clamor of the footsteps must of seemed liked it provided some sort of high octane/propulsive solace. But for the runners at the periphery of the throng, the runners who got closer to the sharpened edges of the building, the sense of mortal peril was probably at an all-time high. “Even as I stood there, one fatigue-minded runner attempted (with infinite will and impotent strength) to spring free of that flood into the safety of my entranceway. As I noticed his intent, in that fragment of a second, I was compelled to stumble forward over the corpses, my arms outstretched to aid him. He saw me and shot forth his hand, but the instant our finger-tips met, the force of the closing gap where he had been running for who knows how long, caused the stream to bow and he was driven with the energy of an avalanche against the granite corner of the archway—divided in two before my horrified eyes.” After seeing this macabre sight in the entranceway of his home, Sono Nis, the ostensible observer of such an alacritous sea of people, decided to somehow get into the center of the throng and join in on the endless run. Thankfully, he succeeded.
Besides being a delightful tale about an intrepid man’s adventure, “The Passage of Sono Nis” touches on important, relevant themes. More precisely, the short story alludes to our “drive for more conformity and systemization” and our collective will to turn the Group Mind—the animus mundi if you will—into a utilitarian and mechanized apparatus. In Howard Bloom’s book, “Global Mind: Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To The 21st Century,” one finds cogent, formidable evidence for the emergence and perpetuity of such a mind-numbing apparatus. “A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of its parts,” muses Bloom. “For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5 percent of DNA is dedicated to DNA’s ‘real job,’ manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95 percent is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book ‘printed’ in a string of genes.” If we superimpose this example over the monolithic spires and variegated cupolas of the Collective Mind, we uncover an alarming fact: we spend very little time cultivating our imaginations. However, we do spend a lot of time entrenched in the minutiae of this mechanized apparatus we call societal life.
Rene Guenon, an esoteric scholar, wrote in The Reign of Quantity & Sign of the Times, “If the domain of manifestation that constitutes our world is considered as a whole, it can be said that the existences contained therein, as they gradually move away from the principal unity, become progressively less qualitative and more quantitative.” This movement towards quantity, as the erudite Guenon states, is actually a movement to the circumference of existence, where man and his progeny are subjected to the terrors and vicissitudes of mechanization and self-dissolution. In other words, this movement, albeit a natural one, places man in a war zone of his own making and, furthermore, incapacitates his psychic faculties by turning his senses outward into the disparate field of objects instead of inward into his inner sense of being. It’s a movement from divine imagination to encumbering worries and anxieties. According to Guenon, the only way to rise above this quantitative state of mind is to rise above the degenerating current of the times, which holds morality and dissoluteness together like an hourglass holds sand. “Nevertheless, the truth is that it then becomes no longer proper to use the word ‘benefic’ any more than the word ‘malefic’, for the two terms are essentially correlative and cannot properly be used to indicate an opposition when it no longer exists, for it belongs, like all oppositions, exclusively to a particular relative and limited domain; as soon as the limits of that domain are overstepped, there is only that which is, and which cannot not be, or be other than it is; and so comes about that, if one does not stop short of the most profound order of reality, it can be said in all truth that the ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.”
Guenon’s august statement is corroborated by the words of fellow Traditionalist Fritjof Schuon in the essay, “Universal Eschatology”. “The human condition is in fact the door towards Paradise: towards the cosmic Center which, while forming part of the manifested Universe, is nonetheless situated—thanks to the magnetic proximity of the Divine Sun—beyond the rotation of the worlds and of destinies, and thereby beyond ‘transmigration’.” This Divine Sun could also be seen as a correlative to what inventor-cum-diagrammatic mastermind Paul Laffoley calls “utopic space,” a placeless place which he assures us takes quite a climb to get to. “Achieving Utopic Space is like trying for the summit of the highest mountain in the universe. The convergence of visions is like arriving at various base camps and a sense of security. The divergence of visions represents that bold striking out on your own onward and upward, climbing toward Utopic Space and the final realization that when the terminus is reached we will all experience the end of the future.”
Wherever we are going, while either being strapped down in this mechanized roller coaster of language and laws, or flying high in ethereal domains of canorous and supra-sensorial delight, I hope we don’t see what Sono Nis saw: “There, like the whirlpools of water at the confluence of two strong rivers, swirls of runners revolved against and crushed one another.” That would be truly catastrophic.
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