The Ascent of Humanity
Charles Eisenstein
More than any other species, human beings are gifted with the power to manipulate their environment and the ability to accumulate and transmit knowledge across generations. The first of these gifts we call technology; the other we call culture. They are central to our humanity.
Accumulating over thousands of years, culture and technology have brought us into a separate human realm. We live, more than any animal, surrounded by our own artifacts. Among these are works of surpassing beauty, complexity, and power: human creations that could not have existed—could not even have been conceived—in the times of our forebears. Seldom do we pause to appreciate the audacity of our achievements: objects as mundane as a compact disc, a video cellphone, an airplane would have seemed fantastical only a few centuries ago. We have created a realm of magic and miracles.
At the same time, it is quite easy to see technology and culture not as a gift but as a curse. After millennia of development, the power to manipulate the environment has become the power to destroy it, while the ability to transmit knowledge transmits as well a legacy of hatred, injustice, and violence. Today, as both the destruction and the violence reach a feverish crescendo, few can deny that the world is in a state of crisis. Opinions vary as to its exact nature: some people say it is primarily ecological; others say it is a moral crisis, a social, economic, or political crisis, a health crisis, even a spiritual crisis. There is, however, little disagreement that the crisis is of human origin. Hence, despair: Is the present ruination of the world built into our humanity?
Is genocide and ecocide the inevitable price of civilization’s magnificence? Need the most sublime achievements of art, music, literature, science, and technology be built upon the wreckage of the natural world and the misery of its inhabitants? Can the microchip come without the oil slick, the strip mine, the toxic waste dump? Under the shadow of every Chartres Cathedral, must there be women burning at the stake? In other words, can the gift of technology and culture somehow be separated from the curse?
The dashed Utopian dreams of the last few centuries leave little hope. Despite the miracles we have produced, people across the ideological spectrum, from Christian fundamentalists to environmental activists, share a foreboding that the world is in grave and growing peril. Temporary, localized improvements cannot hide the ambient wrongness that pervades the warp and woof of modern society, and often our personal lives as well. We might manage each immediate problem and control every foreseeable risk, but an underlying disquiet remains. I am referring simply to the feeling, “Something is wrong around here.” Something so fundamentally wrong that centuries of our best and brightest efforts to create a better world have failed or even backfired. As this realization sinks in, we respond with despair, cynicism, numbness, or detachment.
Yet no matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today. Though we may rationalize it, it is not rational. We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life. These moments come to us alone in nature, or with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty. At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.
We intuit that something similar is possible collectively. Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individually more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it. It is what musicians are referring to when they say, “The music played the band.”
Another way of being is possible, and it is right in front of us, closer than close. That much is transparently certain. Yet it slips away so easily that we hardly believe it could be the foundation of life; so we relegate it to an afterlife and call it Heaven, or we relegate it to the future and call it Utopia. (When nanotechnology solves all our problems… when we all learn to be nice to each other… when finally I’m not so busy…) Either way, we set it apart from this world and this life, and thereby deny its practicality and its reality in the here-and-now. Yet the knowledge that life is more than Just This cannot be suppressed, not forever.
What error, then, what delusion has led us to accept the lesser lives and the lesser world we find ourselves in today? What has rendered us helpless to resist the ugliness, pollution, injustice, and downright horror that has risen to engulf the planet in the last few centuries? What calamity has so resigned us to it, that we call this the human condition? Those moments of love, freedom, serenity, play—what power has made us believe these are but respites from real life?
Inspired by such moments, I have spent the last ten years trying to understand what keeps us—and what keeps me—from the better world that our hearts tell us must exist. To my endless amazement, I keep discovering a common root underneath all the diverse crises of the modern age. Underlying the vast swath of ruin our civilization has carved is not human nature, but the opposite: human nature denied. This denial of human nature rests in turn upon an illusion, a misconception of self and world. We have defined ourselves as other than what we are, as discrete subjects separate from each other and separate from the world around us. In a way this is good news. Profound changes will flow, and are already flowing, from the reconception of the self that is underway. The bad news is that our present conception of self is so deeply woven into our civilization—into our technology and culture—that its abandonment can only come with the collapse of much that is familiar. This is what the present convergence of crises portends.
Everything I wrote in the preceding paragraph about our civilization also applies to each of us individually. Saints and mystics have tried for thousands of years to teach us how we are trapped in a delusion about who we are. This delusion inevitably brings about suffering, and eventually a crisis that can only be resolved through a collapse, a surrender, and an opening to a state of being beyond previous self-limitation. The shift in our collective self-conception is intimately related to a parallel shift in our individual self-conception. In other words, there is a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis.
As this planetary crisis invades our individual lives, unavoidably, neither the personal nor the collective misconception of who we are will remain tenable. Each mirrors the other: in its origin, its consequences, and its resolution. That is why I interweave the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit, and self.
* * *
Despite my faith that life is meant to be more, little voices whisper in my ear that I am crazy. Nothing is amiss, they say, this is just the way things are. The rising tide of human misery and ecological destruction, as old as civilization, is simply the human condition, an inevitable result of built-in human flaws like selfishness and laziness. Since you can’t change it, be thankful for your good fortune in avoiding it. The misery of much of the planet is a warning, say the voices, to protect me and mine, impelling me to maximize my security.
Besides, it couldn’t be as bad as I think. If all that stuff were true—about the ecological destruction, the genocide, the starving children, and the whole litany of impending crises—then wouldn’t everyone be in an uproar about it? The normalcy of the routines surrounding me here in America tells me, “It couldn’t be that bad.” That little voice echoes throughout the culture. Every advertising flyer, every celebrity news item, every product catalog, every hyped-up sports event, carries the subtext, “You can afford to care about this.” A man in a burning house wouldn’t care about these things; that our culture does care about them, almost exclusively, implies that our house is not burning down. The forests are not dying. The deserts are not spreading. The atmosphere is not heating. Children are not starving. Torturers are not going free. Whole ethnicities are not being exterminated. These crimes against humanity and crimes against nature couldn’t really be happening. Probably they have been exaggerated; in any event, they are happening somewhere else. Our society will figure out solutions before the calamities of the Third World affect me. See, no one else is worried, are they? Life hums on as usual.
As for my intuition of magnificent possibilities for my own life, well, my expectations are too high. Grow up, the voices say, life is just like this. What right have I to expect the unreasonable magnificence certain moments have shown me? No, it is my intuitions that are not to be trusted. The examples of what life is surround me and define what is normal. Do I see anyone around me whose work is their joy, whose time is their own, whose relationships are forever passionate? It can’t happen. So, say the voices, look after your own security, control the pain, and find new and better entertainment to keep life's tedium at bay. Let good enough be good enough. Listening to these voices, is it any wonder that for many years, I devoted most of my energy and vitality to the escapes from life? Is it any wonder that so many college students look forward already, at age 21, to retirement?
If life and the world are Just This, we are left no choice but to make the best of it: to be more efficient, to achieve better security, to get life’s uncertainties under control. There are voices that speak to this too. They are the evangelists of technology and self-improvement, who urge us to improve the human condition basically by trying harder. My inner evangelist tells me to get my life under control, to work out every day, to organize my time more efficiently, to watch my diet, to be more disciplined, to try harder to be a good person. On the collective level, the same attitude says that perhaps the next generation of material and social technologies—new medicines, better laws, faster computers, solar power, nanotechnology—will finally succeed in improving our lot. We will be more efficient, more intelligent, more capable, and finally have the capacity to solve humanity’s age-old problems.
For more and more people today, these voices ring hollow. Words like “high-tech” and “modern” lose their cachet as a multiplicity of crises converge upon our planet. If we are fortunate, we might, for a time, prevent these crises from invading our personal lives. Yet as the environment continues to deteriorate, as job security evaporates, as the international situation worsens, as new incurable diseases appear, as the pace of change accelerates, it seems impossible to rest at ease. The world grows more competitive, more dangerous, less hospitable to easy living, and security comes with greater and greater effort. And even when temporary security is won, a latent anxiety lurks within the fortress walls, a mute unease in the background of modern life. It pervades technological society, and only intensifies as the pace of technology quickens. We begin to grow hopeless as our solutions—new technologies, new laws, more education, trying harder—only seem to worsen our problems. For many activists, hopelessness gives way to despair as catastrophe looms ever closer despite their best efforts.
In the following series of essays, I will explain why trying harder can never work. Our “best efforts” are grounded in the same mode of being that is responsible for the crisis in the first place. As Audre Lord put it, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Soon, though, this mode of being will come to an end, to be replaced by a profoundly different sense of the self, and a profoundly different relationship between human and nature. I will describe a gathering revolution in human beingness.
This revolution is not just a personal or even a social phenomenon. A change in our sense of self implies a change in our sense of world too—a change in what we consider real or possible. In researching The Ascent of Humanity I visited the darkest despair, as I realized the true magnitude of the crises on hand. What the doomsayers say is true: our situation is beyond hope. Perhaps if we had reversed course in the 1960's, if we had zealously applied all the ecological and social understandings that arose at that time, there would still have been hope. No longer. It is too late. Only a miracle will save us. And so I say, "Let us devote ourselves to the study of miracles."
And what is a miracle? A miracle is an occurrence from beyond our world—beyond, that is, the reality we know. A miracle is an expansion of the Possible. Miracles abound today, crowding at the gates of the realm of objectivity and reason we have created. We hold them back with increasing difficulty, all those things which simply don't fit into the conventional worldview. They point to the technologies of a new world, but they are not really new technologies, new techniques for extending our domination of nature. They are, rather, a wholly new (and very ancient) mode of technology. They spring from a profoundly different understanding of self and world, and they will therefore remain marginal, "alternative", until the world we know today has collapsed.
We can see this collapse, then, as a birthing process. The old world dissolves, and a series of intense contractions births us into a new world. We are being pushed into the light.
Even in the darkest days, everyone senses a higher possibility, a world that was meant to be, life as we were meant to live it. Glimpses of this world of wholeness and beauty have inspired idealists for thousands of years, and echo in our collective psyche as notions of Heaven, an Age of Aquarius, or Eden: a once and future Golden Age. As mystics have taught throughout the ages, such a world is closer than close, “within us and among us”. Yet as well it is impossibly far off, forever inaccessible to any effort arising from our present self-conception. To reach it, our present self-conception and the relationship to the world it implies must collapse, so that we might discover our true selves, and therefore our true role, function, and relationship to the universe.
I will not offer merely another critique of modern society, and the solutions I explore are not along the lines of “we should do this” and “we shouldn’t do that.” Who the hell is “we”? You and I are just you and I. That is why so much political discourse (about what “we” must do) is so disheartening; that is why so many activists experience such despair, such despondency. You and I, no matter how much we agree with each other, are not the “we” of collective action, as in “we need to live more sustainably” or “we need to pursue diplomatic options.” I find many people resonating with my intuition of a wrongness about life and the world as we know it, but their response is not empowered indignation, it is despair, helplessness, impotence. What can one person do? These emotions too are symptoms of the same separation behind all of our crises. When I am a discrete and separate individual, whatever I do makes little difference. But this logic is founded upon an illusion. We—you and I—are actually powerful beyond imagining.
Have you ever found yourself shifting back and forth between an exalted optimism that a great change is gathering, and a dark despair that denies any plausible future but a continuing downward spiral of ruin? If so, you too are in the midst of a revolution.
In coming months I will offer a series of essays on this website, drawing from my 2007 book The Ascent of Humanity as well as new material, and dedicated to accelerating the revolution in human beingness. They will explore the central themes of The Ascent of Humanity: the origins, expression, and purpose of the great Age of Separation that is culminating in our time; the crises it has engendered, and the Age of Reunion to which it is giving birth. Or, to put it more directly, they will assay the realm of despair in order to reach the light beckoning beyond it. Such an assay is necessary, for as the saying goes, "The only way out is through." What optimism can be authentic, if it has not integrated the full depth and breadth of despair? Optimism that ignores ugly realities inevitably bears its opposite. The time has come to get real.
Charles Eisenstein is a speaker and the author of The Ascent of Humanity and other books.
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Right on!
Redefining human identity
Very interesting. This is something that many people in our community have been discussing for a long time.
"Soon, though, this mode of being will come to an end, to be replaced by a profoundly different sense of the self, and a profoundly different relationship between human and nature." I seriously hope you're right...
The Golden Age is indeed within our psyche. I know quite a few people who seem to have found it. Now it's only a matter of refining our vision and transforming the mainstream culture into something more real, more genuinely beautiful, and more sustainable for the future.
Preach on, the choir listens!
"Have you ever found yourself shifting back and forth between an exalted optimism that a great change is gathering, and a dark despair that denies any plausible future but a continuing downward spiral of ruin? If so, you too are in the midst of a revolution."
What you describe here is the rollercoaster of my soul over the past two years. Case in point: I am currently reading Ed Ayres God's Last Offer, compelled by that part of myself that desires the long hard look at the big picture in order to feel sane. Then a few days ago, I went to see Sean Penn's film Into the Wild, and my heart melted and burned at the beauty of humanness and pure love that this powerful film portrays. Despair doesn't make me any less passionate for joy...
I look forward to your future essays...
;)
st
ok but what do we do now?
Hi Charles, Thanks for the great piece. I am delighted to feature your work in our magazine.
I would put the same question to you that so many people put to me, all the time these days: Accepting what you say as true, then what do we do now? It seems we are sliding toward a multi-leveled crisis that could easily get beyond any ability to control. Isn't there some preparation we can do, in the meantime, to make this transition less brutal for ourselves, our loved ones, and everyone else with whom we share the planet?
Also, I would be curious if you could be more precise about miracles. I have experienced some in my own life, and they seem to have a logic to them, and even an implied aesthetic, that is beyond the individual intention, or perhaps they point out where individual intention and the greater cosmic process meet each other.
If you feel like responding in comments, that would be great. Otherwise perhaps you will address these questions in future essays?
Yours, Daniel
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
Ah yes, what do we do now?
Ah yes, what do we do now? Certainly a lot of people have answered that question using the "we" of collective action. Such answers can be disheartening, because you are not "we", you are just one person. Answers like "We should leave Iraq" or "We should reduce our CO2 emissions." These feed into despair when you turn down your thermostat and no one else does. The world-devouring machine doesn't slow down appreciably when you (and I mean you as in one person, you) recycle your bottles. Digging a little deeper, this despair is rooted in the conviction that your individual actions cannot matter very much. As they indeed cannot, in an objective universe of force and mass. Despair is built into this world view. We are composed of but atoms and void, subject to arbitrary, impersonal forces that determine our actions just as completely as the Newtonian particles that compose us.
When we free ourselves from this ontology, which is as you know scientifically obsolete, then lots of practical actions become manifest. Freeing ourselves from the illusion of separation (objectivity) also brings us into miracle consciousness. Anything less than a transformation in the human sense of self is not a true revolution, or at least not deep enough a revolution to alter our collision course with nature. Our present crisis is the inevitable result of our very sense of self. That is why prophets and mystics could see a collapse coming thousands of years ago. It is built in to who we are (or more precisely, who we have been being). And that is why we all sense a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis.
The Ascent of Humanity devotes like 600 pages to laying this all out. In the present forum I cannot lay it out systematically, but I will explore many themes revolving around the deep origin and purpose of the crisis, as well as how we can enact an "Age of Reunion" on a personal level.
But to answer your question in a brief and probably unsatisfactory way, the way to enter miracles is to release the sense-of-self that accompanies the worldview that says they are impossible. That release can happen in many ways, often through what appears to be an external agency (possibly tragic). However, even calling into question our concept of self, which is less deep than our sense of self, can be powerful and lead to a feeling of expanded possibilities.
Charles Eisenstein
www.ascentofhumanity.com
"The time has come to get real"
Awesome post.
I've been obsessing a bit recently that there is coming a moment where our technologies will be identified as ghostly shackles to be cast off - so this article has really struck a nerve in me.
Obviously, many other people are pondering these matters - there has been a great deal on this topic here at RS - so I attach below a useful but lengthy quote from Jean Gebser, that springs to mind when I ponder "technology" -- also fits my notion of what Blake meant by "fearful symmetry."
(Where Gebser mentions "magic man" below, it might be useful to envisage homo sapiens at the inception of conciousness, in the dreamtime - perhaps early palaeolithic era.)
______________________
All "making," whether in the form of spell-casting or of the reasoned technical construction of a machine, is an externalization of inner powers or conditions and as such their visible outward form. Every tool, every instrument and machine is only a practical application (that is, also a perspectival-directed use) of "inherent" laws, laws of one's own body rediscovered externally. All basic physical and mechanical laws such as leverage, traction, bearing, adhesion, all constructions such as the labyrinth, the vault, etc., all such technical achievements or discoveries are pre-given "symmetries" or laws in man's structure which can become conscious by being externally projected into a tool.
This is equally true of the natural capacities at the disposal of magic man we spoke of above such as telesthesia and telepathy; but it is not true of our radio and television. Today, European man supersedes, that is, excludes time and space by utilizing such contrivances since he is caught up in the consciousness-sustaining world of space and time and is scarcely able to achieve this supersession any longer by himself. Magic man does not need this exclusion at all since he lives and moves and is absorbed in a spaceless-timeless world of which he is a part. In this respect the acts of yogis are not miracles but natural occurences; the miracle would be if such phenomena or events unbound by space and time did not have their place in the spaceless-timeless world.
The European has for the most part forfeited these capacities through the unfolding of consciousness and has replaced them by their projected objectivication or externalization into television or radio. (The giant telescopes belong to this same context inasmuch as magic man "saw" and "knew" those phenomena which we "discover" via such instruments, though in a merely optical and spectoral form.) We might also say that we would not have such instruments if we did not possess within ourselves the genuine capability of such achievements as they permit.
This consideration also points up the limits of technology, for technology is definitely unable to bestow upon man the omnipotence which he imagines himself to have. On the contrary, technology necessarily leads to an "omn-impotence" to the extent that the process of physical projection is not realized. It is, for example, a requirement of a projection that it not be left without temporal limits; it must be integrated. But such integration is possbile only if the projection is retracted, and retraction can be realized only out of a new consciousness structure. Psychic projections can be undone only by conscious mental understanding. Does this perhaps suggest that material-physical projections can be resolved through the integrating spiritual capacity of diaphany? Be that as it may, we have in any event a possibility of resolving the problem of technology, a problem which cannot be solved merely by further technological advancement.
ghostly shackles
Thanks for the Gebser quote. I have certainly gone through times where I thought technology was a big mistake, a big detour. But I now believe that the technologies of Separation have their place. We have applied them far, far beyond that though. In a more beautiful future, technology as we know it will serve a reduced role even as it continues to develop.
Gebser's point, which is quite profound, touches upon what I call Storyteller Consciousness, which is in part to make the unconscious projections and rituals of technology conscious, and thereby achieve the retraction that Gebser refers to.
Charles Eisenstein
www.ascentofhumanity.com
Integral Technology
I now believe that the technologies of Separation have their place. We have applied them far, far beyond that though. In a more beautiful future, technology as we know it will serve a reduced role even as it continues to develop.
Yes, I agree - our "technologies of Separation" (useful phrase) were perhaps necessary in order for us to evolve our wonderful mental powers and free us from our often disruptive or intrusive intuitive and emotional powers -- and also from our dependence for survival on a harsh, back breaking, and fragile agricultural existence. However, this mentalised being is now deficient, not suitable for the new reality we are experiencing -- yet it is still producing tech based on the dualistic old world principles, which are likely to continue to have destructive and repressive effects.
What technologies an integral being might produce is an interesting question. Perhaps we are seeing hints of it in the social networks and 'green' tehnology theories. Still, whatever we do, its likely to be great fun, very beautiful, and seeming miraculous in comparison with what our current technology dreams.
Very much looking forward to your next article Charles.
Best wishes.
Ride the Snake
Oh there is hell on earth, to be sure. But often I feel a good way to go is to calm the personal and collective notion of “Something is wrong around here.” and open up to the feeling that "Something is right around here!"
Like a surfer about to catch a wave.
One need not succumb to the undertow, or be bowled over by the coming wave.
And one needs some degree of 'technology' (surfboard) to better facilitate the flow.
"Ride the snake, the ancient snake"
I agree with your thoughts on the illusion of a seperation from nature. Of course it is all natural, from trees to cars, skyscrapers to moss. There is nothing that is truly unnatural. Only unbalanced. Considering this in relation to the crisis, I think one has to boldly face the role of death and decay. Not as a bad thing, but a joyous, transformative process. A process, like seasons, that intertwines both the living and the dead. There is always present that which may be considered life and that which may be considered death. In the same way that there is simultaneously destruction (fires, wars, ecologies etc) and new construction (consciousness, technologies, regenerating ecologies etc) or evergreens beside spindly, dormant oaks.
I sense a change into a new 'unbalancing'. What was once was considered death, becomes life. But this life-in-death is not even close to what it was ever (generally) expected to be. It is triumphant. It is the ever expanding miracle. Perhaps.
What optimism can be authentic, if it has not integrated the full depth and breadth of despair?
What I'm getting at here speaks to the above quotation. An integration and openess to the full, mystical and miraculous implications of death-in-life may be a first glance and small step into eras of unleashed,overflowing optimism and unprecedented beautiful realities.
In any event, thanks for the article. Looking forward, and upward, to more.
So many great comments! I'll
So many great comments! I'll respond at least a little to as many as I can. I've often received comments along the lines of the first point you made about shifting from "something is wrong around here" to "something is right around here." People also say, "But don't you know that 'it's all good'?" Yes. From the ultimate metaphysical perspective you could say that. HOWEVER (and look, it is a big however), well, two things. First, if you truly have a feeling that something is wrong, don't just pretend it's not there and pave it over with a metaphysical dogma. Last weekend I spent time with poor people in California and when I heard stories of, say, how Child Protection Services took their children because the mom had been arrested for possession of marijuana, I felt a deep sense of indignation, of protest. Now I suppose I could also have thought, "Wonderful! These noble souls have an opportunity to grow." Or something like that. And that thought was in the background too.
Secondly, here is a titillating koan for you on this metaphysical issue: It is indeed all good <em>only because</em> of our heartfelt perception that there is something wrong!
Charles Eisenstein
www.ascentofhumanity.com
Above the Clouds
Hi Charles,
I agree, and I don't want to give the impression that I've got my head in the clouds or thrust into the sand. There are a lot of things that need fixing, clarity, balance, health and so forth. We are engaged, witnessing and participating in life or death on the planet and for the species. But there is generally only a vague notion of what death is and this creates some problems in the realms of security, panic, materialism, despair. People try to grab what they can, while they can, hoarding, dominating.
If the understanding, the knowing, of what death is is profoundly altered, propelled by its presence of a tremendously surprising nature, then so too will change the notion of life.
Me too!
I, too, have figured out on my own that something is happening. I remember the day when I discovered that everything is perfect. I used to view the past (Those barbaric days of old when human knowledge was so limited; when great challenges were met with defective solutions) as imperfect, flawed; as if humanity back then was in a state of profound and utter ignorance. Then I discovered that humanity had to get through THAT first, before it could ever attempt to get through THIS. In other words humanity, in every moment of its existence has always been perfect! Thus, I must acknowledge that in this moment I am perfect; Humanity is perfect. And "The only way out is through."
One thing "I" can do is to follow the creatures’ example. Many creatures somehow knew to avoid the recent great tsunami by fleeing the coastal areas. I've read that sharks are moving north along the western European coast and Elk, and other land animals are doing the same in North America. Perhaps I need to think about moving farther north, avoiding close proximity to sea level.
Another thing "I" can do is develop my spiritual center by establishing a personal daily ritual of communication with the Sacred, the Planetary, and the Species Mind. In addition, I can rediscover and meditate upon (perhaps, journal) every occurrence in my life that was in some way synchronistic or coincidental, thereby developing an appreciation for the miraculous based on my own personal experience.
I might enroll in a seminar or two covering topics such as Celtic folklore, Native American tribal wisdom, Wicca, and various forms of ritual and magic. Read. Read. Read!!!
Perhaps I should seek out local places of eclectic thought such as Occult Storefronts, Universalist type meeting places, Pagan gatherings, etc.
“Before you can have an original thought, you must have a serious doubt” -Neon
In my humble opinion
Mr Eisenstein, thank you. Rarely have I read such an eloquent summation of the big issue. The Dark Side is certainly at large in our world. Why? One could attribute its overwhelming force to any number of fundamental causes. The selfish gene/personal survival, hence selfishness and greed? We humans do not seem to be able to get past this essential stumbling block: the illusion of Selfhood, compounded by the myth of Progress.
The selfish gene enables, from time to time, little gifts - almost in order to keep us plugged in. The sublime gifts you write about here: "... possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today. Though we may rationalize it, it is not rational. We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life. These moments come to us alone in nature, or with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty. At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control." The fear that is barely subdued and contained by the vast hell-for-leather management and control program is ever present, it pervades everything. It's a hardwired human trait.
For all our 'progress' we have not dealt with our existential fear. Obvious to me that we're never going to solve anything, or make any genuine progress until we face our fears of annihiliation. Every age has its bogey man - in the last 25yrs we've adopted 'environmental decay' and, more latterly, topped it off with 'terrorism'. In the not too distant future, I confidently expect to see headlines like: 'Terrorism behind global warming', 'Rampant consumerism? Blame terrorists.'! The 'threat' is always 'out there'. Never within.
In other words, we continue to deny our existential responsibilities. There can never be any authentic progress, to an existence where we can experience many more of these sublimes gifts, until we each take responsibility for ourselves, our fearful self-centredness and our overweening control-freakery. Technology is not our saviour, it is our soma, our comfort blanket.
This need to take responsibility and to see things as they really are is not just some arcane, new agey, 'spiritual', mumbo-jumbo. This is rooted in the underpinning reality where 'miracles' come from: the quantum field. This underpinning happens to bear an indisputable similarity to the teachings of every sage from time immemorial - because, of course, they were talking about the same things long before they had the tools to prove quantum reality (what inspiring faith!). We have the answers staring us in face, all the time, in all places. Yet we arrogantly and fearfully persist in ignoring them.
Way inout
"We can see this collapse, then, as a birthing process. The old world dissolves, and a series of intense contractions births us into a new world. We are being pushed into the light."
This is what my work with natural entheogens has shown me on several occasions...
I agree with you Charles, i have come to the same conlusion- only a "miracle" will work... and miracles aren't all that unnatural , as the new physics has discovered...
The Mayan view on technology , as described by Martin Precthel in this interview http://metahistory.org/interv_Prechtel.php
is that it is a gift from the spirits, and our problems arise because we assume it is ours, neglecting to pay our respect and dues to the spirits that maintain life on the planet.
After regaining the sense of self comes the sense of community and the community paradigm is where we ought to be turning to , IMHO... not just in mediated internet communities but real-life projects, too...
Great Leap in Maturity
I believe we are in a position as a species where our development has accelerated to the point where in order to maintain their control (to maintain the illusion that we as individuals are powerless) the elites of the planet will need to start taking drastic measures. That is far scarier to me than any environmental catastrophe.
Can technology solve our problems? I think the answer is that only we can solve our problems, but that technology is also an extension of ourselves, and of nature. And at this point, "the only way out is through" holds true. We need to redouble our efforts to preserve our knowledge and our curiosity and its fruits in technology, and use it to bolster our independence, before the technology of domination wins out.
It's not going to help us if we allow our humanoid brains to cede reality to invisible realms that we believe will save us from our sins; our inescapable human flaws. The golden age, the great spiritual revolution, is merely learning to stand up and fend for ourselves. Just a leap in maturity.
Are we having fun yet?
Fun, great leaps, etc.
Future posts will cover many of these comments, but I can't resist taking a little time for them right now. I agree with Sowalsky: there is something wrong with "fun" as usually conceived (as the opposite of boredom.) Boredom is actually quite a new phenomenon -- the word only came into its present meaning a few centuries ago. Before then, people were never bored. Boredom is the name we give to the condition where it hurts simply to be. Why does it hurt to be? The pain arises from the "interior wound" as Stephen Harrod Buhner calls it, the cutoff from most of our true, connected being. It is a direct result of Machine civilization. And so we desperately fill up empty moments with entertainment -- another sinister concept. To entertain a guest means to bring him into your home; to be entertained means to be brought out of yourself. Most of the "fun" Sowalsky talks about is mere consumption, in contradistinction to play, which is the production of fun. In this as in many other realms of life, we have lost our self-sufficiency and become mere consumers. As he or she points out, consumptive fun isn't really usually all that fun, especially compared to creative work, which is a form of play and is what childhood play (alas, greatly circumscribed these days) is supposed to prepare us to do.
RE: Fractality's comment that the fear and control that springs from it is a hard-wired human trait: I don't agree, or perhaps I could say that the hard-wiring is changing! I think the fear and control is a product of our sense-of-self, of our fundamental ideology of self and world.
To Ecolocal regarding the Mayan view of technology as a gift. All pre-technological peoples saw the universe essentially as a vast gift circle. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe a money system that would actually recreate the gift dynamic (whereas an interest-based money system destroys it). Starting at http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter7-2.php.
I have long played with the seemingly contradictory positions of mossyfern vs. some of the other comments, i.e. "We should be practical and try harder and get our heads out of the clouds and not expect salvation to come from some airy-fairy spiritual realm of miracles" vs. "The old ways of trying harder are not working, we have to work on other realms beside the material." I will touch upon this theme, tangentially and directly, in future posts. I want to thank everyone for your thoughtful comments. The quality of discourse on this website is amazing! Charles Eisenstein www.ascentofhumanity.com
Add to the good brew
Hi Charles: Good to speak with you! Good also to see your post on Pinchbeck's site and the subsequent responses. My sense is that a LOT of folks are about to get wind of your work. Its hard to believe I just "found" you randomly on the Internet in the Spring. In fact I don't believe that. Instead, its the phenomenon of some kind of positive force in the Universe, Mckenna's Hyper Object if you will, that is propelling us towards it. It's inside our DNA and in the galaxies. That said, what I heard you say over the phone ( and I'm paraphrasing and extrapolating) is that socio-ecological collapse is providing the evolutionary pressure for us to abandon our false sense of self. Its a kind of stimulus to wake up. Our job and this speaks to the Pinchbeck's post about where we go from here is to SURRENDER to the Life Force, to Love, to Miracles, and to the Present Moment. This surrendering will strengthen the field so to speak. Worrying about collapse only reinforces the false sense of self. The more we do this we create an energy that gathers attractively around it so, as you say, lot's of awful things may be happening but they don't have to happen to everybody/thing. Almost like a parallel Universe. The more we abandon our false core perception of isolated fragments bombarded by meaninglessness the more we open ourselves to something entirely NEW ( and very old) Keep it up!!! Bill
Hi Bill
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That said, what I heard you say over the phone (and I'm paraphrasing and extrapolating) is that socio-ecological collapse is providing the evolutionary pressure for us to abandon our false sense of self. Its a kind of stimulus to wake up.
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Exactly! The old sense of self just won't be tenable anymore, and this will happen on an unprecedented scale.
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Our job and this speaks to Pinchbeck's post about where we go from here is to SURRENDER to the Life Force, to Love, to Miracles, and to the Present Moment. This surrendering will strengthen the field so to speak. Worrying about collapse only reinforces the false sense of self.
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Absolutely. I agree with Daniel Pinchbeck and I agree with you. Worrying about collapse comes from the same premises as the false sense of self comes from.
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The more we do this we create an energy that gathers attractively around it so, as you say, lot's of awful things may be happening but they don't have to happen to everybody/thing. Almost like a parallel Universe. The more we abandon our false core perception of isolated fragments bombarded by meaninglessness the more we open ourselves to something entirely NEW ( and very old)
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Yes, and here is a key though subtle point; the "reason" for not worrying about the collapse cannot be that our "positivity" will protect us from the awful things that are happening. It is that we are in a sense OK with awful things perhaps happening to us, because we no longer direct our life energy toward maximizing personal survival and comfort. We surrender to what feels right. We are not afraid. Not because we are insulated from danger; we are simply not afraid. The surrender has to be real. If it is a contrived surrender secretly hoping to bring magical protection from awful things, then it will not work.
-Charles
We can still survive