Cornwall Reflections

Considering Bennett’s Cosmology, the universe in the context of my own life indeed seems quite dramatic. If our purpose is the conscious transformation of energy, against the background of mind and soul, I find myself wondering what the plan is?

It would seem there are a number of selves attempting to be of influence and yet my soul is unclear, with a clear direction unapparent until recently and possibly still so.

For whatever reason the Eden Project came up on my radar and having finished the Dramatic Universe just before visiting, it appears to be a fantastic synthesis of the four great cultures. One of the contemporary wonders of the world, with its lightly imposing geodesic domes, spiritualised from within, acting as a dramatic commitment to mother earth with gigs and concerts. Inspiring stuff. Upon arrival I also notice that Newquay has a SpacePort, but later learn it’s apparently just a runway owned by someone in telecommunications.

The Prompt

While visiting the gardens, I stay at St. Christopher’s hostel in Newquay, which is a colourful place. The bar staff are friendly and accommodating, the clientele pretty hazardous, like most of the area.

After a confrontation with some hostile chimps playing pool, and having politely stood my ground, one of them apologises for his friends and strikes up a conversation. This conversation leads to an interaction around the Eden Project’s education programme and, unable to answer my questions, the friendly actor of the group tags in a friend before two of them debate the project’s value in front of me. I remain opinionated about my own experience but neutral to the discussion.

This exchange is cut short by someone asking if they can play pool, which leads elsewhere. The next day I find myself wondering how the project’s value was lost on the ‘nay sayer’ of the group, who had been on several school trips over the years and by his own account learnt nothing. It also appeared such based on my own observations. Assuming that this was not necessarily his fault, I reason that perhaps the education programme failed him somehow since he couldn’t see the forest through the trees. Having no experience with such trips I decide to find out through some research.

Participatory Action Research

Formulating some basic questions, I set out to ask the locals about their impressions. The first interview is extremely negative, the next more positive, and so on. Weighing up the pros and cons, it seemed like most people were pretty neutral about the project but feel Eden is probably not serving the Newquay locality or particularly benefiting them in any way.

Having gathered enough testimonials for the day I return to the hostel before encountering a surf instructor that I’d met over the week named Willow who is somewhat unopinionated — he starts talking about outdoor education instead, which leads to questions about immaterial schooling.

This leads to interviewing various members of the hostel, who highlight the area’s problems while suggesting potential interventions when lightly prompted. This is generally oriented around drink and drug abuse as well as homelessness and surfing. Themes include psychedelic therapy, religion that works, abstinence from technology, an alcohol-free pub or youth centre, guerrilla gardening, food drives and feeding the homeless, the council misallocating resources, tourism and so on.

Writing things up the next day, I end up doing a few more interviews with the staff members I missed as well as talking with a local chef serving RAF who gives me the down low on the local business ecosystem. He says the council are buying Walkabout, a huge pub that is losing millions due to the lack of off-season tourism, and says he’s going to Sailors for dinner, owned by the same bar group. Looking this place up I recognise my past working for SBG and begin to infer some of the area’s deeper problems, while considering solutions.

Pattern Integrity

In a nutshell, the pattern integrity of the area is getting smashed by the summer tourism, which revolves around partying. When the tourists leave, their patterning essentially haunts the area, lingering like a bad smell that leaves the locals dispirited and worse off. The tourism brings in money, generally consumed by the larger businesses which cater to degenerate behaviour (such as Walkabout), at the cost of the locality’s ‘mind and soul’. This ‘energetic patterning’ can be seen all over town; tattoos symptomatic of a death cult, homelessness, booze and drugs everywhere, etc.

If the pattern integrity of the town has been lost, the question becomes how to regenerate it? Let’s not forget that this is in the context of Bennett’s work and its implications. How does the ‘degenerate automatic energy’ that pervades the town get turned into ‘regenerate automatic energy’ that can be raised to sensitive, conscious, creative and unitive energy? In other words, how can the area serve the cosmic purpose in order to fulfil the human role beyond mere animism? Is there an intervention for its transformation?

Many good ideas came up during the staff interviews which seemed to touch the elephant, but they didn’t have the necessary viability to pass the test of pragmatism and grounded perspective of the bar’s management — who could articulate the various roadblocks that idealism tends to ignore. I add the new testimonials to a document and take the train to Exeter to explore the university and see what opportunities might be realised there.

The Train to Exeter

While on the train, I question if a material intervention is really the matter at hand; mindset and perhaps soulset appears to be the ‘big issue’ (no pun intended). The significance of the pattern begins to emerge around the humanoid cosmos, relating the energies, potencies, and local relationships. Participatory repatterning seems to be the theme, but how is one to coordinate such a transformation? What are we really doing with regards to the more esoteric aspects expressed in Bennett’s work?

Returning from a reconnaissance mission at the university after staying a night in the Globe hostel, which is a slum, I notice one of the people staying there around the cathedral who falls over face first, and then a friend of his also staying there, who runs off to get help. Back at the hostel I end up taking a testimonial that starts to bring the pattern together. George says ‘a homeless town or city’. His suggestions are telling — he says yes to a town of geodesics but says they wouldn’t go unless there were drugs about, since they hang out around the centre for access to food, money and narcotics.

Eden as Germinal Pattern

Perhaps the deeper significance of the relational patterning I’ve been witnessing is as follows:

The EPIC colloquium being a significant point of integration, leveraging Eden as a source of order, pattern, integrity and inspiration — perhaps to prototype extraterrestrial living. Exeter University in that regard might be the place to prototype such a study, trialling a homeless city in Newquay in the form of small geodesic huts, supplying food through the gardens, possibly the ‘drugs’ necessary to get homeless out of the centre in the form of psilocybin mushrooms, acting as both therapy and as a catalyst for the energetic transformations needed to ‘spiritualise the biosphere’.

It would seem that such a prototype, if successful, could be quite an interesting proof of concept for ecological civilisation, though I wonder how risky such a venture might actually be — as based on JGB’s creation myth in the Foundations of Moral Philosophy, there would need to be a partitioning and blending requiring careful management. This would require a lot of careful research.

Open Questions

Could this work out? Or would it be a disaster? Can particular values be regenerated, or are the negative ones too deeply embedded? Could mutual currencies be implemented and underwritten to incentivise change, propagating patterning, or would this lead down a slippery slope? Does this account for right action in the context of Bennett’s schema?

We shall perhaps need to mull on it further, though if we are to accept the hypothesis of demiurgic intervention and the notion of the cosmic plan, the patterning of this journey seems significant. Is this what’s being asked for? I don’t know, but frankly I don’t trust the creative agency that has cooked up such a plan — a university would be much more suitable.