A New Species.

Cultures thousands of miles apart that had gestated in the womb of preparatory time for thousands of years are suddenly cheek by jowl, attending the same schools, working in the same businesses, sharing the same space and, inevitably, bleeding into each other, sometimes in fury, sometimes in friendship. In the force of the meeting, a new genesis is occurring, occasionally a melding of genes, but more often, a mingling of previously divided worlds which, thrown together, undergo a sea change into something rich and strange.

What results is not merely a hyphenated amalgam, Afro-Asian rock music or Chicano-cyberpunk art, but rather hybrid sounds for hybrid selves, a malleable, syncretic fusion that is generating its own cultural matrix. For human beings, the complexity of this not-yet-definable culture is providing sufficient stimulus to call forth latencies in the human brain-mind system that were never needed before, like bacteria learning to breathe rather than die when the culture of oxygen came in or, closer to home, the ways in which children absorb the mysteries of computer wizardry with ease while their parents struggle to master the basics. To see this cross-cultural stimulation in action, one has only to watch Western bodies pour themselves into Eastern yogas and martial arts, doing things that people bred on milk were never meant to do, given the calcium deposits on their knees. Or attend a workshop in gospel singing for Japanese tourists held at the Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem and watch people who had known centuries of bowing ceremoniously clap and sway from side to side and throats prepared for every formal courtesy belt out spirit-quaking songs.

The breakdown of the membrane I am describing is not merely cultural fusion; it is the joining together of geographies of the mind and body that had never touched before, weaving synapses and sensibilities to create people who are fused into the world mind with its unlimited treasures, its empowering capacities. This is what’s happening in our astonishing Time: evolution as evocation, the quickening charge of cultural mitosis in our very cells. Through commerce and travel, technology and media, we are being catalyzed into ways of being that a few short years ago were the stuff of fantasy and myth. The shift in consciousness happening all around us is a kind of unstoppable if positive plague, a metavirus that is multiplying in our midst. From food, to music, to literature and theater–the very lineaments of culture–consciousness is remaking itself.