Imagining our Future - Perils and Promise: Story 4. We Are in a Process of Planetary Birth - Pt. 1

Introduction

In this final installment of the "Imagining our Future" series, I will be sharing a few words from individuals I see as thought-leaders on our planet.

Although they come from different walks of life, their basic message is the same: what we need most is an evolution of consciousness, a collective awakening. Their message echoes that of prophets, ancient and modern: "Change your way of seeing and living in the world because the path you're currently walking will lead to disaster."

Planetary Birth

A last image describing our potential as a species is that of "planetary birth." This metaphor uses the archetype of human birth to portray next steps in our evolution. It suggests that we have already embarked on an extraordinarily challenging adventure which is like being squeezed through a birth canal and propelled into a completely new experience.

Framing our situation this way can offer hope in the face of a world convulsed in uncertainty.

We know what giving birth is about. We know how to endure the process and how to help it along. And we know how to love what is born.

At the same time, we need to remember that no birth is ever guaranteed. A baby can be stillborn or simply fail to develop in the womb.

A simple reality - becoming more obvious every day: like any other species, we - "humanity" - can become extinct, perhaps through a nuclear winter or through any number of ecological catastrophes. If we think about it, it seems obvious that, given the vast universe we inhabit, there must be countless failed planets where intelligent life began, but prematurely disappeared.

Instead of giving birth, we may, in fact, become the creators of our own demise, the purveyors of our own species-death.

With this possible reality as a backdrop, we can ask, "What in us might be in an embryonic state? What in us might yet be born?"

Many of us intuitively feel that humanity as a whole can evolve beyond our current state.

Edgar Morin:

"The conscious pursuit of hominization would bring about a new birth of humanity, which although possible, but not yet probable, would bring an end to the 'prehistory of the human spirit."

We are called to become skilled midwives.

At An Evolutionary Crossroads

Thom Hartmann put it this way:

"Because of human actions-- and inaction-- our planet appears to be on a collision course with disaster. We long ago passed a human population number that could be sustained without intensive use of gasoline and oil, so we're burning up a 300-million-year-old fossilized-plant resource (which, if things don't change, is expected to run dry in the lifetimes of our children) in order to feed the [eight] billion humans currently riding spaceship Earth.

"Many more may starve, even more than are starving today. And virtually nothing is being done by governments to offset this very real possibility.

"Perhaps it's too late (by at least four decades, according to many experts) to avoid all of the damage we're headed toward: the death of billions of humans and further extensive destruction of much of the planet's environment through war, natural resource exploitation, and industrial pollution."

***

From an interview with John Seed - a pivotal figure in the Deep Ecology movement - by meditation teacher and political activist Christopher Titmus:

JS: Projections based on satellite photographs show that within the next thirty years all remaining accessible areas of rainforest will have been damaged or destroyed.

CT: Who is destroying these forests?

JS: We all are - due to the lifestyle that we lead.

There are two basic problems. On the one hand, there is the standard of living and rate of consumption in the so-called developed world, where masses of people are living in a luxury that no king or emperor could have dreamed of a couple of centuries ago. Basically, people are consuming the future. At present we are consuming those thousands and millions of years within a few generations"On the other hand there's the question of the growing population of the so-called underdeveloped world, where huge areas of forests are being destroyed by slash and burn agriculture.

CT: As individuals how can we work with these major global issues?

JS: I would suggest that a fundamental change in consciousness right through the human species is necessary. Reforms are useless because the rate of destruction is so fast, and the momentum of the whole human enterprise is so immense.

CT: So, the change cannot be made just by legislation. There has to be a change toward an awareness of our relationship with the earth. In Judaism and Christianity that emphasis isn't so much present. In Genesis it says, 'Man shall have dominion over the earth.'

JS: T he whole basis for our culture is inextricably corrupted by such unecological beliefs. I would say that this belief system is among the most dangerous that exist on earth. There's no possibility other than through a tremendous change in people's understanding. There's no possibility of changing it by physically preventing something that is taking place at the same time everywhere like the tides coming in. People must understand that their self-interest cannot possibly be any different from the interests of the planet as a whole.

***

Primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodhall also believes we face stark choices. She states that, if we cannot get together to change the mindset of humanity (this this especially includes the decision makers in power), we may indeed be doomed.

She adds a corollary: young people will be faced with the enormous task of generating hope and working to create a new world out of our current chaos before it is too late.

***

Our present dilemma includes the emergence of multiple cascading and destabilizing feedback loops: climate change, decrease in agricultural productivity, massive population displacements, species extinctions leading to a dangerous loss of diversity in our biosphere, genocidal wars (including the actual possibility of nuclear exchanges). The list goes on and on.

However, let's remember that - as is true of other species - crises are often a catalyst for evolution. And, to date, humanity has survived many challenges.

Both of these are true: we are on a dangerously unsustainable path, and we have an opportunity to develop a momentum which will create a peaceful, just, and more joyful world. This process will likely take generations and may first involve our "hitting bottom."

However, rather than dwelling on a litany of specific adversity factors, let's instead move beyond these to think about some basic ways we are "stuck" and how we might become unstuck. We can ask: "What is it that needs to be born?"

There are any number of practical actions we can take to realize a positive future for humanity. However, it is a mistake think that our salvation can be found only in what we do in the external world.

Rather, what is clear is that is we need to transform the way we see the world - our thought-forms, narratives, and worldviews.

Beyond the many practical changes that need to happen, what are the most basic mental habits we need to change? Below find two:

Indigenous Wisdom

The first is a worldview from which we can benefit called "indigenous wisdom."

Hartmann has offered a very helpful distinction between "older" and "younger" cultures. Simply, older cultures are more mature. Contemporary technological cultures like ours can be described as less mature or immature.

Like many Native American cultures, authentic nature-based societies inhabit a fundamentally different spiritual universe from younger cultures. People in the former remain connected to nature and to each other. Chellis Glendinning describes nature-based peoples this way: "Their reverent relationship with the Earth [is] rooted in a million-year tradition -- 35,000 generations of low-impact living."

Indigenous wisdom is infused with a feeling of communion with the land and a natural sense of participation in the life force in all that we do.

On the other hand, our younger culture religions and philosophies have proclaimed - both explicitly and implicitly - that all of creation is made only for man. History clearly shows that when our links with nature and the sacred are severed, the human ego tends to devour the land and leave wreckage in its wake. And the simple fact is that, around the world, younger cultures have decimated those that are more mature. The destruction of the Native American culture in North America is only the latest example.

Younger cultures tend to view themselves as existing apart from the Earth -- with dominion over it -- and see the resources of Earth as things to be exploited and then discarded. Nature is not regarded as mother, father, or sibling. Rather, it is often seen an enemy to be conquered and subdued.

We extend these attitudes to our relationships with other people. Slater describes "control culture" as marked by a deep dependence on authoritarian rule, a conviction that order has to be imposed from above and a preoccupation with combat.

Such younger cultures attitudes are so visceral, so embedded in our contemporary worldview, that we often live our entire lives without ever questioning our assumptions about humankind's place in the universe.

This kind of arrogance will cost us dearly. In the near future we will likely be faced with the choice of: 1) becoming willing to revive older culture wisdom --- which sees all of life as interrelated, interdependent --- and sacred; or 2) the demise of much (or even all) of humanity.

If we are to extricate ourselves from the gordian knot constraining us, it is clear that we will need to draw on indigenous wisdom. We do not need to idealize these cultures to recognize that what they offer the modern world is an understanding of the relationship between healing and deep community.

Malidoma Some' was a contemporary West African shaman and author of The Healing Wisdom of Africa:

"The indigenous world can offer to the West are the very things that the modern world is struggling with.

"The general health and well-being of an individual are connected to a community and are not something that can be maintained alone or in a vacuum... the loss of community that we see might be responsible for the loss of healing [or the brokenness] in the modern world. The problems experienced in the West, from the pain of isolation to the stress of hyperactivity, are brought on by the loss of community."

Some' adds:

"Individuality, not individualism, is the cornerstone of community. Individuality is synonymous with uniqueness. It means that a person and his or her unique gifts are irreplaceable."

Some' states that, whether we are raised in indigenous or modern culture, there are two things that people crave: the full realization of our innate gifts, and to have these gifts approved, acknowledged, and confirmed. There are countless people in the West whose efforts are sadly wasted because they have no means of expressing their unique genius. In the psyches of such people there is an inner power and authority that fails to shine because the world around them is blind to it.

In The Spirit of Intimacy - Ancient African Teachings on the Ways of Relationships, Malidoma's wife, Sobonfu Some', beautifully offers a description of a partnership society:

"Community is the spirit, the guiding light of the tribe, whereby people come together in order to fulfill a specific purpose, to help others fulfill their purpose, and to take care of one another. The goal of the community is to make sure each member of the community is heard and is properly giving the gifts he has brought into this world. Without this giving, the community dies.

"When you don't have community, you are not listened to...You don't have people to affirm who you are and to support you in bringing forward your gifts...And without the unloading of our gifts we experience a blockage inside, which affects us spiritually, mentally, and physically in many different ways

Interbeing

A second worldview that may help catalyze a re-birth of humanity can be called "interbeing."

The severing of human beings from nature and each another is rooted in a basic thought-form which can be called "fragmentation." This way of thinking, which usually goes unexamined, treats the world as inherently divided, disconnected, and broken up into smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent.

In contrast, both general systems theory and Buddhism regard all of reality as interdependent and mutually conditioning. Buddhist thought suggests that the nature of reality can be described as "dependent co-arising," where everything exists in relationship and reciprocal interaction with everything else. Nothing exists in isolation.

Philip Slater has argued that fragmentation serves the needs of a "domination mega-culture" that has prevailed on Earth since at least 3000 B.C. Fragmentation feeds and is fed by a "power-over" orientation: men over nature, men over women, men over other men. Put simply, fragments are easier to control.

Philip Slater:

"Perhaps the males in some communities became intoxicated with the power potential of animal breeding and took to a more bellicose life. Whatever the causes, authoritarianism began to appear as a dominant social form in many parts of the world 5 or 6,000 years ago - in the Far East, North Africa, India, and the Middle East - and has continued to be the prevailing mega-culture ever since, spreading to Europe, Africa, Meso-America and most of Asia.

"We begin to find kings, social classes, slaves, standing armies, weaponry, torture, and human sacrifice. Gods are put over goddesses, wives begin to pay deference to husbands and sons to their fathers. Authoritarianism may in fact be defined as a highly centralized social organization developed in order to exercise coercive control over unwilling participants in the community."

**

Today, human beings are increasingly focused on distinctions between people (e.g. race, religion, nation, class, etc.). This tendency itself naturally serves a divide and conquer agenda by power holders.

Due to an inability to perceive totalities, this way of seeing handicaps our capacity to learn; we see parts, but not wholes. We have been taught to separate, compartmentalize and isolate what we learn. Fragmentation and reductionism have led to tangled webs of interconnected problems, The kind of thinking that has created these problems is unable to solve them. Instead of seeing connections and a deeper unity -- our knowledge -- and especially the way we perceive and approach problems --- now forms an unintelligible puzzle.

Edgar Morin:

"Fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanized, disjunctive, reductionist intelligence breaks the 'world-complex' into disjointed fragments, fractures problems, separates what is connected, makes the multidimensional unidimensional. This intelligence is nearsighted and often goes blind. Possibilities of comprehension and reflection are nipped in the bud, the chances of corrective judgement or a long-term view are drastically reduced.

"We find ourselves in a vicious cycle of increasingly multidimensional problems, increasing incapacity to think multidimensionally; the crisis worsens as fast as the incapacity to reflect on the crisis increases; the more planetary our problems, the more they are left unthought. Blind intelligence - unable to envisage the planetary context and complex, makes us unaware, unconcerned and irresponsible."

He goes on to say:

"The twentieth century [has been] lived under the dominion of pseudo-rationality claiming to be the sole rationality, which [in turn has] atrophied comprehension, reflection and long-term vision. Inadequate to handle the most serious problems, this pseudo-rationality created one of the most serious problems ever to face humanity. [This] leaves us with the paradox: the twentieth century produced gigantic progress in all fields of scientific knowledge and technology. At the same time it produced a new kind of blindness to complex, fundamental, global problems, and this blindness generated countless errors and illusions, beginning with the scientists, technicians and specialists themselves."

Recent generations have witnessed a fast-forward transition from a "broken-up" world to one which is broken. Immersed in our younger culture life, we find ourselves racing toward a dismal future: one in which the reality of our profound connection to the rest of life has been subsumed into endless shopping enterprises, clear-cutting forests, toxic wastelands, widespread poverty, and pervasive abuse of power. Modern persons increasingly appear like a flocks of zombies entranced by glowing cell phones. Billions of traumatized people perceive this living death as being the normal human existence.

Our thought-habits are not merely shattering our relationship with the external world; we have become fragmented within our own being. Jung spoke of modern humans' "sickness of dissociation." As Glendinning has observed, it is no coincidence that our era of flourishing ecological annihilation is also an era of flourishing mental illness. Personal and ecological problems mirror each other. She argues that an experience of psychic dislocation, exile, and a sense of homelessness is inherent in modern life.

The Alternative - "Interbeing:"

In his letter from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (who King nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize) put it this way:

"I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word 'togetherness,' but I finally came up with the word 'interbeing.' The verb 'to be' can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. 'To be' is always to 'inter-be.' If we combine the prefix 'inter' with the verb 'to be,' the [perspective] of interbeing reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life.

"Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order the manifest - whether a star, a cloud, a tree, or you and me. We do not exist independently. We inter-are."

Nhat Hanh goes on to reflect:

"There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are 'shared, rented, and occupied' by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn't move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought. Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn't be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis."

The Buddhist teaching of "no-self" turns out to be a form of deep ecology. Naht Hanh states: "We cannot separate human beings from the environment. The environment is in human beings and human beings are part of the environment. [Even] the distinction between living beings and non-living beings disappears after meditation."

"This kind of enlightenment is crucial to a collective awakening. In Buddhism we talk of meditation as an act of awakening. [We need to] awake to the fact that the earth and living species are in danger.

"There is a revolution that needs to happen, and it starts from inside each one of us. We need to wake up and fall in love with the Earth. Our personal and collective survival depends on it.

Only when we can touch real love for the Earth, he says, will we have the immense energy we need to make the radical changes necessary to save our world.

The growing interest in meditation, psychological healing and ecological awareness is evidence that intimations of interbeing are growing within the human species.

Our psycho-spiritual rebirth will involve the daily experience of our profound interrelatedness. The deep sense of our connectedness - of humanity as a family - would be the fruit of such an awakening.

Conclusion: A World Waiting to Be Born

As has occurred in many cultures in the past, will we ignore the growing number of prophetic voices until predictable disasters strike or will we do whatever we can to give birth to a renewed human endeavor?

Over time, meditation offers us the experience that each of us is united with the universe in which we live: that we live in an undivided reality like a wave in the ocean. This is the basis for the birth of a new world.

Scott Peck writes:

"I sometimes tell [my patients] that the human race is in the midst of making an evolutionary leap. Whether or not we succeed is your personal responsibility. And mine. The universe, this steppingstone, has been laid down to prepare the way for us. But we ourselves must step across it one by one."

(Article changed on Jan 15, 2024 at 4:41 PM EST)

(Article changed on Jan 15, 2024 at 5:38 PM EST)

(Article changed on Jan 16, 2024 at 2:44 PM EST)