Market based capitalism is destroying the world. If humanity survives, we will return to an animist existence. Within a century or so industrialised people will either be completely immersed in living in a living world, or dying on a dying one. Possibly the only remaining question is how far we can make that process democratic, egalitarian and non-violent. The answer may be “not very”.
This tumultuous journey will strip away much of what we currently consider freedom, common sense and rationality. Our task is to decide what should and can be saved.
Our main task is to defuse the bomb of our own psyches. Pretty soon we’ll be doing it in the middle of psychic, intellectual and actual war zones. It’s going to be quite a challenge.
Especially as we’ve discarded religious and spiritual belief and a whole load of other stuff central to what human culture actually is. Without them, in all their eccentric and nonsensical glory, we aren’t fully human.
I sometimes wish I didn’t have certain instincts and emotions. But there’s no healthy way for me to eliminate, override or ignore them. That would leave me a hollow shell of a person.
This is what industrialised individualism has done to us.
Our attempts to suppress essential aspects of our humanity are unsustainable. They're doomed to failure. They're what makes our society unsustainable. And yet, all the talk of sustainability barely addresses, let alone undoes this. Suppression doesn’t lead to elimination. It leads to perversion, stalled maturity, pain, discontent and confusion.
We think we’re ever so grown up. We don’t believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. We don’t commune with spirits in the landscape. Instead, we operate as if we believe that the world is inanimate and infinite. We believe we should all compete to use it all up as fast as possible.
But the spiritual, animate aspects of our humanity seep out anyway. Because they’re intrinsic to the real experience of our existence.
Look around you. Do you see all the pseudo spiritual messaging in a supposedly secular culture? Adverts. Movies. Music. Do you know how pathetic they are compared to the majestic mythologies we’ve dismissed as primitive metaphors?
Industrialised people are clinging desperately to the tiny remnants of who we really are. Lighting tiny lights in the ruins of human culture. Deep down we recognise them as the remains of what held meaning in our lives.
We’re the only creature we ascribe true consciousness to on this planet. But we’re more beings of consciousness than many of us like to admit. Check out our favourite pastimes. Drinking. Drugs. Sex. War. Religion. Love. Sport. We seek out anything that changes our consciousness in one way or another. Check out our favourite everyday foods and drinks. Sugar. Salt. Caffeine. Anything that plays with the mind. Next time you’re in a supermarket, imagine them gone. Consider how much smaller the shop would be.
We pretend we don’t play these games with our brains. Meditation is a niche pursuit. There’s a war on drugs, well some drugs anyway. Why not just find better, deeper ways to play?
American mystic Ram Dass made up a couple of quotes about this and ascribed them to Einstein.
"I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind."
and
“The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at."
Can we accept that we have material problems that can’t be solved by material means? That we must try something else?
I am an industrialised person. I was raised without faith. It’s taken me more than half a lifetime to realise the basics of what faith might mean. Prayer, like meditation, is, at the very least, a mode of human thought. Not praying means ignoring a vital way of thinking. It means leaving a tool idle with which I might better access and inhabit my reality.
I’ve been only partially using my brain. And I thought that was being clever.
This is also true of shamanistic or ecstatic altered states. They provide wider options for grappling with the weird wide world and our relations to it.
Consider communication, the business I am in. We limit our understanding of it to something like “passing information”. We allow for the fact that animals communicate with one another (a bit). But most of us don’t understand any of it. We think of it in very simple terms. The dawn chorus is a nice noise. The birds are enjoying the sun coming up or something.
There’s no limit to communication. Life is communication. The hint of a breeze talks to us, if we choose to listen. The wave of the leaf it touches tells us more. The clouds passing by are in constant communion and conversation.
I want to claim back more moments to realise this. To feel it. To shift.
I don’t have to believe I am a lonely individual on an incomprehensible lump of dirt in a void. How does that serve me?
I can be entirely immersed in an endless wealth of discovery and knowledge, rational or not.
I can try something different.
Choice post Andy - on the button bro, we’re awash with distraction and dis-ease. Comfortable is getting the rugpull. Taking this debate mainstream would b cool. i wonder when we’ll b open to chatting freely about our many fingered age of anxiety, it’s precursors and likely end-games, w/out fear or judgement 🙏🏽
I would just like to share the words of a person new to me, Simon Michaux. He brings a glimmer of realistic hope - and a roadmap of sorts.
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/49-simon-michaux