The Body Politic
The Perennial Map addresses the interior journey, the individual in their inner life. The Body Politic addresses the collective, civilizations and the dis-eases they fall into, and the wisdom traditions' long view of what keeps happening and why. They are the same journey at different scales. The person doing the interior work the traditions describe is being shaped, without knowing it, into the antibody the body politic needs. These two sections are the same movement, seen from different distances.
The body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, begins to produce antibodies, strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease.
— Terence McKenna
Every layer that follows is a step toward one recognition: the body politic is sick because its members have forgotten who they are, and it heals one person at a time, through the people who remember. The wisdom traditions call the person who remembers, and carries it back, the antibody. The full teaching closes this page. What comes between here and there is how the traditions arrived at it.
6 Layers
The Diagnosis
The traditions observing civilizational sickness from outside any particular political moment.
The Living Story
Campbell's central insight: civilization organizes itself around living mythology.
Honest Ground
The existentialist confrontation with the silence: honest, unflinching, accessible to all.
The Opening
The 1960s as the body politic producing antibodies in real time.
The Longer View
Maharaj-ji's teaching, the longer view held properly.
The Recognition
The culminating answer, the one each reader can inhabit from their own ground.