What’s in it for Me?

Carl H. Flygt

February 2006

The response I get from ordinary Americans when they understand I have a serious and detailed theory of conversation is to challenge me to give them a reason for it that appeals to their self-interest. What could possibly justify the investment of time, energy and capital necessary to understand and to apply what is being proposed? Why, of all the commodities available to the contemporary consumer of information and technology should a theory of conversation occupy a privileged position? What, in short, is the use of a theory of conversation to the ordinary individual in a democratically free, technologically enhanced and economically prosperous Western society?

The answer of course is that such society has lost its spiritual moorings. The cosmic profundity of life and consciousness has been covered up by social conventions and material artifacts geared to satisfy the appetites of digestion and of sex, but of little else. People deal with one another abstractly, as features or functions in a gigantic simulation of life. The realities of the spiritual world, of the world prior to birth and after death, are no more explicit and part of day-to-day experience than the society of the college sophomore is to the world of the child entering kindergarten. We know such a world in all probability exists, because we all experience spiritual dreams and psychic synchronies from time to time, but we have no general education for it, no systematic connection to it and no method of communicating with one another when inside it. Our world is not spiritual, ethereal and fundamentally surprising, but conventional, material and overwhelmingly repetitive.

Our conversations, of course, reflect and reinforce this imposition of convention and this lack of education. We are committed to a cultural epoch and a state of sociological evolution which simply is what it is. In many ways we are much better off than our forebears of the 1850s or the 1620s, and they likewise had advantages that the people of ancient Mesopotamia and prehistoric America could not have enjoyed. But those harder, simpler times had something we today seem helpless to recover – a direct acquaintance with cosmic reality, with the awesome facts of birth and death, with magic and miracles, with honor and tragedy, with reverence and dignity, and with a superordinate dimension of self-consciousness that we seem unable or unwilling to take seriously in our common comportment with one another.

My theory of conversation is geared to make this sort of self-consciousness again into a fact of ordinary life. It is calibrated to make the objective spiritual initiation reserved in ancient times for the priest or the chela into a sociological phenomenon distributed among groups of individuals with commitments to scientific rationality, to progressive and universal values, to political common sense and to cultural exhibitions of the highest order. It is supposed to make the free individual into a responsible, causal and measurable force in world evolution. It seeks to produce men and women of a higher type and a higher function, a force in nature contiguous with the well-formed dream, the clairvoyant intuition and the enlightened human body with its octaves of sonic resonance and luminary effulgence.

What’s in it for me? Nothing and everything. Conversation in its ideal form represents the death of the tiny, self-interested ego. It represents the inversion of egoity and its replacement by a socially distributed form of self-consciousness. In that sense, few things could be less attractive to the ordinary individual. But to those in whom a certain weariness with contemporary life and culture, and a certain distaste for the company of those who remain committed to materialism and its idolatry has developed, my theory may represent something of real value. It may represent a way to work together for a better world in a way that is cosmically correct. For such people, it may represent commitment and entitlement to social norms that could serve to shape the next epoch of human evolution. If such an ideal is satisfactory to the hopes and wishes of even just a few, much will have been gained in making it available to a general public, and to a world in which little of spiritual substance could be expected to accrue without it.