The Lost Technology of Vision

Altered states appear to have played a more important role in human culture than the modern managerial mind likes to admit.

A chemically unaided visionary session after work: no retreat, no sacrament, no spectacle — just quietude, inner imagery, and the ordinary room becoming porous.

There is a possibility that modern civilisation is not becoming more advanced in the ways that matter most.

It is becoming louder, more agitated, more technically saturated, more informationally overloaded. But none of that necessarily means wiser. None of it guarantees depth. None of it guarantees the ability to stand back from one’s own conditioning, see the world afresh, and think beyond the rigid grooves laid down by fear, propaganda, ideology, and daily stress.

In some respects, we may be regressing.

We live amid astonishing machines, yet public thought is often narrow, brittle, tribal, and hysterical. The atmosphere thickens with war talk, social fragmentation, nervous exhaustion, and endless reaction. People are flooded with data, but starved of perspective. They are over-stimulated, under-centred, and increasingly trapped in repetitive loops of emotion, commentary, and panic. The modern mind is not always expanding. Very often it is being tightened like a vice.

That matters, because a civilisation can collapse inward long before it collapses outward.

A society does not remain healthy simply by producing more tools. It also requires methods of renewal. It requires some means by which human beings can step outside routine cognition, loosen stale patterns, and recover imagination, symbolism, awe, and perspective. It requires, in other words, access to vision.

This is where the discussion becomes unfashionable, awkward, and interesting.