🍄 What Image Will We Wield?

Images that rise, flourish, or fade—shape, even dictate, the life or death of cultures.

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In the corridors of human thought and action, where each flicker of insight and impulse gives way to the creation of whole worlds, Alice find ourselves contemplating the Changing Images of Man (1974). A study and manifesto whose purpose was to imagine that humanity’s course has been less driven by the mechanics of progress and more by the symbols we’ve chosen as our compass. Created at Standford Research Institute, Joseph Campbell, contributing author, noted, "humanity weaves an account of our kind’s perpetual self-creation—sculpted not by the hands alone, but by the profound images that arise from our collective mind." 

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander.

"From the very beginning of human existence, Man has relied on mythological images and symbolic metaphor to help bring meaning and purpose to his life. Today, we use these images to define the many evolutionary stages of human history - each image serving as a snapshot, helping to condense the complexity of each era into a single, easy to understand archetypal symbol."—The Changing Image of Man, 1974

In the beginning, there was the hunter, spear in hand, inscribing his will on cave walls. He was one with the wild, carving out survival from the untamed. Then came the golden god-kings of Egypt, where man turned his gaze from the heavens to his fellow beings, with hierarchies and order as his divine language. Later, as the Renaissance dawned, the image of Vitruvian Man embodied the intellect’s mastery, and he stepped forward with a sharpened sense of individual agency, his proportions symbolizing not only aesthetic ideals but humanity’s newfound authority over nature and its laws. Then, with the rise of industrial modernity, came the “man" in a suit, moving briskly through a world dominated by steel and steam—a new archetype for a new age, driven by the machinations of industry.

In their comprehensive three-hundred-page report, SRI researchers identified seven societal functions through which the power of images could shape the future, drawing largely from Joseph Campbell's insights into mythology and historical civilizations. These functions included mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical (or psychological), editorial, political, and magical. Embedded within these categories were the institutions, government agencies, and groups that hold authority in society. The researchers deemed the mystical and magical functions less effective due to public skepticism, and they were left out. And perhaps, this omission is core to explaining where we are today. If you can’t image the mystical and magical functions of life, if you can’t vocalize and picture it, how can a society ever reach coherence? Unfortunately for us, we see the SRI mentality shaping future thought today. The materialist’s narrative keeps proliferating. Historian and philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilization and will change the course of human history. Yes, that may be one image of the future of humanity, but is it the image that humanity wants to manifest? 

Today, at the threshold of another transformation, these images seem both outdated and necessary, calling us to examine ourselves anew. The mythic has morphed into the technological, the enchanted into the materialistic. And yet, the deeper functions of society—the mystical, cosmological, pedagogical—linger in quiet defiance of the data-driven paradigm that threatens to strip meaning from our lives. As Campbell noted, "the potency of a society’s future hinges on the image it wields." And in this accelerated era, what image shall we wield?

What Image Will We Wield?

Consider the ‘Possible Human,’ as Jean Houston, frontier thinker of the human potential imagined—a being who finds joy in the full inhabitation of her body, each cell attuned to life’s symphony. The Possible Human can self-regulate, turn thoughts into healing, emotions into powerful harmonics. Houston was and is not alone; today frontier thinkers glimpse a world where technology could finally resonate with human well-being, where scalar waves and quantum phenomena allows us to engage in subtler ways with reality itself.

The 21st century can be our portal to wielding this potential.  

From quantum computing to bioengineered materials, a new wave of innovation is poised to unlock the latent abilities once ascribed only to science fiction and sages. As our understanding of fields—both informational and energetic—deepens, we glimpse an interconnected universe where thoughts, emotions, and physical health form a coherent whole. This unity, once sensed as mythic, is now explored in labs and through algorithms, the results still staggering to the empirical mind but self-evident to the intuitive one.

Yet we find ourselves trapped in a strange irony. In our obsession with the external, we have ignored the operating system of our own humanity—which thrives on sensory, emotional, and embodied intelligence. Rather than teaching ourselves through rich experience and inner exploration, we’ve become a civilization of downloads and data points. And as our physical communities grow obsolete, our stress, detachment and discord mount.

What if we could transcend this? What if the future of intelligence lay not in cold logic but in a generative, embodied consciousness—an intelligence that doesn’t merely calculate but senses, feels, and relates? It may be that the role of technology, AI, and quantum leaps is to remind us of the mystery within our biology. This human vision, we sense, could not emerge from code alone. It is crafted from our arts, our bodies, and our wisdom traditions. We are not merely cogs in a relentless machine; we are shapeshifters and story-weavers in a universe of shimmering potential, where electrons flit between states, and where thoughts, by some strange alchemy, may indeed shape matter. 

As our science delves into the mysterious depths of quantum mechanics and entanglement, we rediscover a truth that myth has long known: that we are, all of us, connected in a single, vast, and boundless consciousness.

To move forward, we must remember who we are—a web of interconnected beings. The archetypes of old now morph into new symbols, ready to guide us to a more harmonious era where science and spirit, matter and mind, intellect and intuition meet. And so, as we stand on the precipice, it is time to rewrite SRI’s Changing Images of Man. The image that carries us forward may be one of a fully embodied humanity—less alone, more connected, resonant with both earth and cosmos. The next transformation awaits us, waiting only for us to claim it with a collective heart and open mind. 

What Else We Are Wandering

Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

The declaration was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 to address many of the injustices that took place during World War II, including issues pertaining to civil rights, economic rights, political rights, sexual rights, environmental rights, social rights, and developmental rights.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

“This project is an artistic interpretation of the UDHR. This is a series of linocut prints highlighting the preamble and the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are not taught this document in most educational settings. It is leaders like Loretta Ross who teach us to fight for freedom and justice through grassroots organizing to make institutions accountable to these values. It is our responsibility as humans to hold ourselves, our neighbors, and our leaders accountable to a global standard of human decency to ensure that human rights are upheld at all levels. The global fight for human rights is ongoing.”

Solarpunk Storyist:

Worry dark futures will become real unless we imagine something better? You could be solarpunk.

“Any student of civilizations’ ebb and flow can’t help but notice that the futures they envision—images that rise, flourish, or fade-shape, even dictate the life or death of cultures. Ultimately, it is the vision with the deepest spiritual resonance that may define what future comes to pass.”—ALICE

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