by Molly Brown and Richard Lamb
Introduction
As we two thought together about the Great Unraveling of our society and life-support systems, we found ourselves wanting to address five questions that are often used in psychosynthesis to help individuals explore their lives and their path forward. What if we apply these five questions to the collective life of humanity today? They may help us find a collective path forward in the midst of the Great Unraveling.
- Where are we now in the life of humanity?
- Where have we come from?
- What’s our highest vision for the future? What’s possible for humanity? What is trying to emerge?
- What’s getting in our way, holding us back?
- What do we need to develop in order to move beyond these obstacles towards our vision of what’s possible/trying to emerge?
- Where are we now? (Molly)
So where are we–humanity as a whole–in our collective life as an Earthly species? We have become a keystone species so radically impacting climate and environment that this geological era is being called the Anthropocene (by humans, of course). Some climate scientists foresee that we could become extinct as a species, along with many others, within a few decades–or even years–unless we radically change our relationship to the biosphere in which we live.
Not all human activity, but certainly most of the activity of the Industrial Growth Society (IGS) and capitalism (obsessed with profit above all other values) is effecting the following horrors: the Sixth Great Extinction of species, massive climate disruption, resource exhaustion, over-population, rampant racism and oppression, constant warfare, militarized police, mass incarceration, millions of refugees, increasing income inequality, etc.
Moreover, we are by and large cut off from the legacy of our ancestors and the claims of our descendents. The IGS’s readiness to demolish treasures of the past–and to permanently poison the aquifers that the future ones will need–reveals a pathetically shrunken sense of time and a pathological denial of its continuity. Measure of time, once based on changing seasons and wheeling stars is now parceled out in nanoseconds. Cut off from nature’s rhythms, we have lost time as a biological experience.
It seems we have a civilization/socio-economic system founded on suffering. And suffering arises from disconnection, one of the central features of the Industrial Growth Society (IGS)–disconnection from “nature,” disconnection from other groups of humans, disconnection from one another, disconnection from Self/Soul/Spirit. Disconnection gives rise to competition, conflict, often violence–and it is epidemic in our world today.
And yet, in the midst of all this, many people still live comfortable and creative lives. People still form relationships, give birth to and raise children, have more or less interesting jobs through which they earn sufficient money to buy the necessities of modern life. Many have enough money to engage in recreational activities, travel, and buy enjoyable non-essentials. Many of these folks have no inkling of the threats outlined above, living their lives in “Business As Usual.”
Or at least until the early days of 2020 when a new pestilence, a novel corona virus, began to spread throughout the world, shutting down Business As Usual and locking down whole populations, at least those who had the means to “shelter in place.” The economy and low-wage workers have suffered greatly. Parents struggle to supervise their home-bound children while still maintaining income producing jobs–or not. Through this crisis, humanity as a whole is learning just how essentially we are indeed interconnected.
From a systems perspective, a novel form of feedback has been introduced into an already unstable socio-economic system, causing greater and more unpredictable destabilization. Conspiracy theories abound, some likely somewhat accurate, many not. The “news” we see on television and social media is distorted by the short-term economic and political self-interest of its source. It is very challenging to “sustain the gaze” in these conditions, but right action requires right perception, so keep looking with discernment we must–punctuated with periods of rest and renewal.
II. Where have we come from? (Richard)
We have a pragmatic notion of where we are, warts and all. We see that the socio-economic, cultural, spiritual and psychological structures on which we depend upon are unraveling before our eyes – and at an accelerating rate.
This leads to the the question, “…well, surely there is an origin in which these collective crises are rooted?” From my studies of ancient cultures, of the rise and fall of civilisations – particularly the progenitors of the western Industrial Growth Society model – the roots of our current shared dis-ease are likely to be found in the “deep past,” at a time so distant the planet looked very different from today, and the way we related to the environment markedly different also.
This time extends back to c.11,000 BC; to the very end of the last ice age, where the planet gradually warmed, melting ice sheets and raising sea levels, while life edged its way northward (in the northern hemisphere). However, the planet suddenly plunged into a c.1,300 year “cold snap”, an unimaginably rapid reversal to freezing conditions in a matter of a few years. Temperatures dropping by up to 15 degrees celsius. Evidence of continent-wide biomass wildfires. Mass extinctions centering on the North American continent, cascading across South America, Africa and the entirety of Eurasia. Human cultures under immense survival pressures to adapt.
This 1300-year period of abrupt and widespread climatic and environmental transformation is known in earth sciences circles as the Younger Dryas. A growing body of evidence developed and debated since 2007 supports the hypothesis that the Younger Dryas epoch was brought about by extraterrestrial impacts from a swarm of cometary fragments. The source of these putative cometary fragments most likely emerged from the Taurids (ie. in the constellation of Taurus), a ring of cometary debris the Earth passes through from September to November each year. The ring of fragments is believed to be the remnants of a large comet that has been calculated to have disintegrated within the inner solar system over the last 20,000 to 30,000 years.
Creation-destruction myths the world over speak of tales of sky serpents and dragons wreaking unimaginable terrors on the residents of this planet. Might this point towards a deeper truth: that our daily struggles continue serving ancient scripts born of life-and-death struggles, in a world gone mad with suffering?
What might this mean for the emergence of the IGS over the past 10K years, and of our collective dislocation from harmony with our environment, that now approaches a breaking point (and perhaps, a breakthrough)? This distant epoch ushered in a dimly-lit transition from hunter-gathering, nomadic societies to agriculture-based, sedentary societies of the Neolithic, with increased specialisation and formal social hierarchies. A markedly transformed relationship with the environment is clear simply from the archaeology record.
Some cultures faired better than others in this post-cataclysm world, creating durable, relatively equitable societies. Marja Gimbutas’ hypothesis of an “Old Neolithic Europe” culture founded on equality and matriarchal principles highlights elements of the cultural shifts over the long-term, of shifts in values over the millenia that concretized into the IGS we live within today. Restorative, generative values-based systems and their cultures throughout prehistory no doubt struggled against the “dominator” cultures (see Riane Eisler’s prehistoric investigations into the rise of Domination cultures over Partnership cultures) that arose side-by-side after the subsidence of the Younger Dryas cold-snap.
A way of life and an attitude toward the natural world–that the power of the Business as Usual IGS provides humanity–has accelerated almost beyond recognition. It is worthy of mention that many indigenous cultures did not fall into this pattern, a testament to their personal and collective psychological resilience.
The compulsion to dominate our environment, to bend it and all living things within it to our collective will, is born of a trauma response. In a blinkered, misguided attempt to stave off suffering, a mythical inner narrative took form, a spirit of pain and distorted perceptions we could label as the seed of Wetiko. If we hold the 3 core poisons or dukas outlined in Buddhism – Greed, Aversion, and Delusion – in awareness, then the Spirit of Destruction that is Wetiko may have its origins at the roots of our civilisation. The need to concentrate our dwindled numbers for safety and to focus on a narrowed range of food resources–“starvation food”–in an era of rapid and prolonged reduction in economic choices, led to the storage of food. The environment was seen as no longer beneficent, life-giving. We continue to live-out, compulsively, a collective Survival Personality, one that bears all the hallmarks of Wetiko.
The struggle against, and dominance over, Nature that pervades our civilisation’s IGS narrative can be viewed through this lens of paucity, of basic existential need: the need to survive at any cost. The traumatic narrative dominating our now global civilisation traps us in a perpetual state of fight, flight, or freeze. Imagine c.12,000 years worth of terror and want-driven expectation passed down from parent to child.
The Promethean gift of re-crafting our immediate environment to meet our survival needs came at a very high cost: a fundamental spiritual disconnection from clearly perceiving the environment we share with the rest of Life, our siblings, our family. Again, from a systems perspective, the Great Unraveling may be an inevitable necessity: to dismantle a rigid, aeons-old pathological system of civilisation. From this deep-time perspective, however dark and bleak, we are each and all being asked: do we stand with Life, come what may? That is, what does civilisation serve? Can we begin envisioning and creating a civilisation worthy of the term “civilisation”? Are there supportive psycho-spiritual terms and frameworks that could guide us in navigating the Great Unravelling?
III. What’s possible? What’s emerging? Highest potential for humanity? (Molly)
Based on a fuller understanding of where we’ve come from as a species, and where we are now, our attention turns to what’s possible for humanity. What is our highest vision for our collective evolution? What might be trying to emerge from within our collective consciousness and potential–our Transpersonal Self?
We do well to begin this quest with humility, acknowledging that human dreams have sometimes lead us in disastrous directions. We face, as we always have, a great Mystery, because life constantly re-creates itself in ways our human minds cannot predict or control. Whatever potentials and possibilities we have as humans going forward actually arise from the ever-evolving web of life as a whole, not solely from our human thoughts and plans.
The Work That Reconnects helps people open their hearts and minds to the guidance of this encompassing Ecological Self. Experiential practices evoke feelings and understandings from deep within, so that participants begin to hear the Earth and her Beings speaking through and to them. The Work moves through a Spiral, beginning with gratitude, which opens our hearts to our love for the world and puts us in touch with our pain for the world’s suffering. We honor and express this pain, which in turn opens us to “see with new/ancient eyes” our deep interconnectedness with one another and all of life. From this new understanding of our place in the web of life, we can go forth, acting on behalf of life in whatever ways we are called.
And of course psychosynthesis offers similar experiential practices, helping us connect with and listen to our “higher unconscious” and beyond–helping us connect with and be guided by Self. When we do, we discover our capacity to transform our world, in collaboration, partnership, and solidarity with our fellow humans, with more-than-human beings, and with all the intertwined ecosystems of Earth.
What’s possible for us humans now? What would it be like to consciously partake of the cycle of life and death, collaborating with it, rather than pretending we are somehow exempt from it? The essential impulse of life seems to be to create ever more conscious and intricate forms of life, manifesting ever more complexity and diversity in harmony with the larger Whole. Life sidesteps entropy; it recombines, revitalizes, and resynthesizes old matter. Life continually “pays it forward” into the future. When we leave behind our ego-based and short-term ambitions, we can learn to better cooperate with this evolutionary impulse–and find true happiness and fulfillment.
What would human life look like if we lived this way? What might a collective Ideal Model be? With a much smaller gap between the very rich and the poor, most of us would live at a modest level, with enough food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and transportation to meet our basic needs. Most of these goods would be produced and sold locally and regionally, greatly reducing the demand for trucking and shipping. We would study natural systems in order to replicate them in human systems and technology (biomimicry). Organic farming and permaculture would produce most if not all of our food. Bloated military budgets and weapons manufacturing would disappear, and the people previously employed in the military industrial complex would find work producing goods and services of positive value to human life and honoring our true relationship with this planet.
Children and young adults of all genders would have free access to high quality education, reducing the birth rate and population growth, and bringing the human potential into full flower. Education would include support and guidance (psychosynthesis?) to enable everyone to heal from trauma and to discover and develop their innate gifts, and put them into service for the world. Arts, music, theater, and other cultural expressions would flourish, enriching the lives of everyone.
However, given the extremity and complexity of the Great Unraveling now underway, this Ideal Model can only serve as a vision and guide going forward. It ain’t going to be easy. Along the way we are going to endure enormous existential challenges, collapse of social and economic systems world-wide, with inevitable suffering and loss.
IV. What’s blocking us? What’s in our way? (Richard)
We now have waymarkers to guide us in recognising the often unquestioned, and therefore unconscious, attitudes that guide and circumvent personal and collective awareness and will and the at-root values, beliefs, and concomitant decisions we’ve all been conditioned to accept to a greater or lesser degree.
These blocks to true perception prevent our recognising that which is of genuine value, critically within ourselves. Preventing authentic values-driven decisions; a corruption of personal and collective stages of the will through unconscious Greed, Aversion, and Delusion. Although many know there’s a problem, they simply don’t know what to do about it.
So based on what we’ve covered so far, what could be blocking us in heart as much as mind from navigating the Great Unravelling? What follows are some key themes evident in our current situation.
The driving force behind all the destruction, confusion, and oppression in our world may be what many Native peoples on Turtle Island (the North American continent) call Wetiko: a cannibalistic, hungry spirit that consumes and destroys the very systems that support its survival. Wetiko is an evil spirit that invades human minds, a “virus” of selfishness, a psychic pathogen forcing the victim to feed their insatiable needs as if they were starving. It makes humanity become its own worst enemy, destroying the very life support systems on which we totally depend, in the name of profit, progress, and “growing the economy.”
Aversion as Fear-Driven Control:
Our industrial growth civilisation is a fear-driven civilisation. That’s pretty much uncontestable, given the evidence. When we fear for our basic needs, we act out from a Survival Personality. This deep-seated desire to control our environment is born of a conditioned, inherited compulsion, a need for security at any cost, disconnecting us and undermining our common humanity. Fear-based behaviours create more trauma and reinforce the same conditioned patterns, created in the ancient past, conditioned patterns like state-sanctioned violence, racism and the funnelling of the control of common resources upwards to elites.
Delusion as Co-Illusion;
One of the three poisons in our collective sense-making bloodstream is Delusion. Spawned from Greed and Aversion disconnecting humanity from true perception, the true value of ourselves within our shared environment becomes distorted. The field of our personal and collective conscious awareness and will gets hijacked, distorting in response to the hungry spirit’s demands–“co-illusion” on a species-wide, planetary scale. We lose our relationship to the Transpersonal Self at the level of the sovereign being, as all three dukas are interconnected, each feeding the others.
That mass delusion keeps the human species – the potential Caretaker of Planet Earth – plugged into a network of trauma-based archetypal idiom that maintains the status quo/BaU of the existing civilization. It is through this delusional idiom that the nature of the old system’s psychological structures leads to an avoidance of true, clear perception of our individual and collective relationship to reality, to true knowing. If we step through the veil of our conditioned illusion, we risk social dislocation and scapegoating.
Without going into what we do about that here – see next section – the Great Unraveling can be reframed as an great opportunity to address the unchallenged deeply conditioned, dysfunctional rules that have constrained true perception of our situation for millenia. Imagine Wetiko as a suite of Collective Subpersonalities, split off from the Whole, from Source, from the Transpersonal Self. These destructive archetypal complexes are now fully activated and are acting out on the world stage. Right along with this is the suppression of our instincts–we’ve decoupled ourselves from the natural world within, the inner landscape the founders of depth psychology brought maps back from to share.
That disconnection with our instincts, our personal gateway inwards. Which effectively results in a form of splitting from the natural world; the Great Mother estranged from the Great Father. We need both on-side to align generatively in collective ways. These archetypes are natural expressions of the universe, but their current conditioned distortion in our awareness leads to our inherited disconnection, and Wetiko is present. Great Mother becomes Smother Mother. Great Father becomes Patriarch. Guarded against our own instincts–not listening to that world within–from what we authentically value for own ongoing survival loses a firm basis in reality. We metaphorically and literally cannot see the forest for the trees. Or mountains. Or lakes. Or oceans et al.
Greed as The Meaning of Money – Domination & Concentration of Resources:
As matters stand, our hungry spirit is definitely serving the interests of the few over the many. What began as a must-do-to-survive-as-cohesive-social-groups in a world incoherent through catastrophe, resulted in sedentary groups focusing on storing any surplus they possessed. Dominating those concentrated resources, guarding against outsiders to protect the social group, forming religions anchored in fear of the Other, all evolved into a worldview of lack and paucity. As our ancestors’ social groups recovered, consolidated and expanded, hierarchies became overt, formalised. Power and control concentrated in the hands of those who governed through faith and fear. Those elites who learned over the millenia to do anything and everything in order to be in control of their environment becomes kings. This trauma-driven great imbalance at the beginning of our civilisation could have driven the creation of Wetiko and all that comes with it. The spirit of Domination began its inroads into the territory of the spirit of Partnership, of Relationship, and of clearly perceiving our true needs.
And yet, no society orients completely to a domination system or a partnership system. It is always a matter of degree in what Riane Eisler calls a partnership-domination continuum. But with these configurations in mind, much that seems random and disconnected begins to fall into place – including how economic systems have been developed, as Eisler documents in The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. As we’ve taken a deep look into what could be blocking our species from orienting ourselves adaptively to the Great Unraveling, what might we need to develop?
V. What do we need to develop? (Molly)
What qualities, capacities, attitudes, understandings, and world views do we need to develop as a species in order to move through and beyond these obstacles and the enormous existential challenges ahead? Big question!
Seems like we start with the most obvious and basic understanding of our place in the web of life on Earth. We start reconnecting with one another and with the web of life that supports us. Actually, we don’t have to reconnect; we already are interconnected, as the corona virus pandemic has brought home to us so dramatically. We in the IGS only need to recognize and accept this basic fact of our existence, and begin to act accordingly. We need to become partners and collaborators with the rest of life, instead of invaders, conquerors, exploiters, and consumers.
Awareness and Will
Psychosynthesis teaches that we are most essentially centers of awareness and will. Awareness and agency seem to be intrinsic to consciousness on all levels, from single celled organisms to primates and cetaceans. More complexity of consciousness gives rise to more awareness and agency–unless it is blocked or distorted. Tragically, the consciousness of many humans today has been truncated by social conditioning and trauma. Those of us caught up in the IGS have been actively trained in the three dukas of Buddhist teachings: greed, aversion, delusion.
Self-awareness begins the process of deconditioning ourselves; we have to perceive how we are limited and ensnared before we can free ourselves of these shackles. In psychosynthesis, we learn to disidentify from various roles, concepts, emotional reactions, and behavior patterns in order to have free choice.
As we begin to experience ourselves as Observers, we discover we have the power to choose how we respond–rather than react out of habit and conditioning. We develop discernment, which in turn gives rise to integrity–the capacity to act in harmony with the common welfare of all with whom we share the web of life on Earth–human and more-than-human alike. Our sense of self-interest widens and we begin to consider the long-term consequences of our actions. We develop an ecological understanding of our place in the order of things.
How can we live psychosynthesis in the service of liberating humanity from Wetiko? Can we become agents of transformation–of the evolution of life on Earth–at the same time we act as hospice workers staying present to the death that inevitably accompanies radical change?
Presence
We begin by developing Presence. We acknowledge the suffering that ensues from the Great Unraveling and do everything we can to alleviate it. And we accept the fact that we can’t prevent all the suffering and death that will arise from such enormous change. Knowing that avoidance and denial are classic trauma responses, we choose instead to be with the suffering. We can be present with people in their suffering with compassion and support, especially when there is nothing else we can do to alleviate it. Presence itself can be healing.
Transpersonal Values and Essential Needs.
We reconnect with the transpersonal values and qualities so beloved of psychosynthesists: Joy, Creativity, Courage, Integrity, Dignity…and Love, to name a few. They are available to us in our individual and collective higher unconscious, blocked though they may be by conditioning and trauma. We open our awareness to the “art of the possible,” envisioning how we want to live even while we grapple with what’s in the way.
As part of this reconnection with transpersonal values and qualities, we reevaluate our essential needs and recognize they are shared in different forms by all people. Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” offers a model for this process. Then we seek ways to satisfy those essential needs collectively, knowing that everyone’s well-being is intricately interconnected with everyone else’s. We realize ever more deeply that money is only one means to satisfy those needs, not an end in itself.
A New Story
Humans organize their complex societies and cultures through stories, cultural narratives, and myths. It is obvious that the story of Business As Usual is not serving us well in the 20th and 21st centuries–if it ever has. Instead of assuming this is “just the way things are,” we can disidentify from our story and see it as one of many possible scenarios we can follow. Just as individuals grow and heal by disidentifying from subpersonalities or thoughts or emotions, and beginning to self-observe, so can we collectively disidentify from the cultural narratives and self-observe the effects of those narratives, both beneficial and harmful. We can discern how the structures of our dysfunctional civilization came to be, and begin to deconstruct the narrative and the conditioning that support them.
As we question and deconstruct our stories, Assagioli’s “Psychological Laws” can come into play. They articulate how various psychological functions (mental, emotional, physical, etc) interact and influence each other. Understanding these “laws” can help us not only observe how our cultural narratives are currenting promulgated, but also how we might transform them into stories that promote a more just, harmonious, and resilient world. Assagioli’s formulation deserves close and careful study and application..
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ASSAGIOLI’S PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS
Assagioli, R. (2010) The Act of Will, pp. 38-47.Amhurst, MA: Synthesis Center Press. |
Deep Time
In any new story we create to guide us, it is crucial that we experience our lives within a larger context of space and time, that we tune in again to the natural rhythms of change within our own lives: the rhythms of seasons, tides, moon phases, and diurnal cycles.
We need a deeper appreciation of the evolutionary journey we have been on as a species, feeling gratitude for all that brought us to this moment, for all our human and more-than-human ancestors. This will help us see the crucial role we play in the evolutionary journey forward, evoking a stronger sense of responsibility to pass on a liveable world to future generations. We can begin to experience the Present Moment in a continuum, fed by the past and feeding into the future, both present with us in the Now.
A Deep Time perspective confronts us with the question: What is the purpose of our civilization? Whom or what does it serve? Does our civilization exist to produce great wealth for a few in the short term, while using up Earth’s finite resources and creating massive suffering for all? Could human civilization instead serve Life? We may find some clues by drawing on a more accurate and complete story of the evolutionary journey, not just that of “Western Civilization,” nor even that of homo sapiens, but of Gaia as a whole.
Deep Ecology
Just as those of us conditioned by the IGS need to transform our relationship with time, so must we transform our relationship with our “environment.” The word environment is placed here in quotation marks because there is really no such thing as an environment outside us; we comingle with our environment in every breath we take. What word shall we use? ”Nature” sounds out-there, an entity or system separate from us. Biosphere? The living Earth? Gaia? The web of life? How might we reconnect our language with our lived, embodied experience, with what’s actually sustaining of life?
Imagine perceiving our “environment” as conscious and alive (as some of us already do in moments of heightened awareness). Imagine feeling a sense of awe with Life and our humble place in it. Imagine connecting to the “environment” viscerally, deep within, with a kind of cellular recognition. Imagine seeing the beauty of every detail, without conditioning–a spiritual experience.
Living systems seem to innately seek relationship with beauty (or complexity of expression), without any sense of transaction or expectation of return. As living systems, we humans yearn for this relationship as well, even if we are not conscious of that yearning. [ref Biophilia]
Relationship and Community
It all comes down to relationship, doesn’t it? Relationship with other humans, relationship with other living beings, relationship with beauty, relationship with Gaia, relationship with Death. Somewhere along the line, we all must realize that our lives depend on the support of other humans and creatures, plants, soil, water, air, and so much more.
Clearly one huge step toward the Great Turning is to build relationships among people and communities in which we take care of one another out of love and appreciation of our vulnerability as individuals. We desperately need relationships in which we value other people beyond what they can do for us on a pragmatic, contractual level.
All summer long, I shop at a local Farmer’s Market, even though that sometimes means spending a bit more for produce, eggs, or other food items. I get to know the vendors there as friends and neighbors, so our interaction is different from what I experience when purchasing food at our local grocery store. And even buying food from my locally owned grocery feels very different from buying food at chain stores. My relationships with those people and local institutions nurture me far beyond the food I buy, and that’s worth more than money to me. I also know I am supporting the local economy, that my money isn’t going off to some distant corporation.
Love and empathy are vital to relationship beyond the contractual. Humans have survived because they developed the capability to love. When we care for one another, we help create a culture of mutual care among all living beings. In order to be in right relationship with the natural world that birthed us, we might have to change some of our most basic habits and daily choices. We may need to make some sacrifices, especially those of us living in the IGS. For example, we might need to adopt a diet in the short term that would allow natural systems to regenerate.
We consciously adopt an attitude of personal responsibility as an act of Awareness and Will. We observe how our conditioning is affecting our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in the present moment. We take responsibility for our personal choices and also for the larger systems in which we participate–to see how we can change them. (The idea that “all I can do is work on myself” ignores our embeddedness in relationship, in interbeing.) True freedom requires self-awareness, discipline, and sometimes sacrifice.
The controversy about wearing masks in public to prevent the spread of the corona virus is a dramatic example of personal responsibility vs “rights.” We wear masks primarily as an act of caring for our community, not just for personal safety.
Creativity and Play
Don’t worry, it’s not all sacrifice and hardship. Most of us in the IGS need to develop playfulness and creativity unsubordinated to chores and work (although it may show up to transform chore into craft). True play is amorphous, without predictable form, seemingly without purpose. Purpose seems to emerge from within as we play. Sadly, our IGS culture tries to shoehorn our potential into forms that often don’t fit. It’s like asking a rose to become a beech tree. Play and creativity can liberate us from that shoehorning.
Conclusion
These five essential psychosynthesis questions provide a framework for exploring how humanity can embody resilience, maturity, and integrity within the Great Unraveling. We reflected on where we are now as a global species: in the midst of a Great Unraveling. We examined the roots of our predicament in humanity’s response to global traumas dating back thousands of years. We envisioned what might be possible for humanity now, what might be emerging in a Great Turning to a life-sustaining and just global culture. We explored what is getting in our way, what old habits, conditioning, and systems are blocking us. And we imagined what qualities and ways of living we need to develop in order to move fully into the Great Turning.
We affirm the value of personal and collective integrity in creating and facilitating complex, adaptive, coherent cultural systems that support and enrich Life. As humans, we have the capacity to be active agents of the creative principle of the cosmos, if we can heal from the traumas of our past and embrace our humble place in the family of things.
Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. [source]
End Notes – References and Further Reading
- “Avalanche,” by Richard Heinberg https://mailchi.mp/postcarbon.org/museletter-329avalanche?e=f67134a268
- Comet Research Group: https://cometresearchgroup.org/comets-diamonds-mammoths/#impact-overview
- Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis Library: https://cosmictusk.com/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-bibliography-and-paper-archive
- “The Light at the End” by Nafeez Ahmed; May 11, 2020; YES! MAGAZINE, https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/coronavirus-community-power/2020/05/11/coronavirus-community-power-survival/).
- Riane Eisler. (2008). The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler.
- Roberto Assagioli. (2010) The Act of Will, pp. 38-47. Amhurst, MA: Synthesis Center Press
- Mary Oliver (2004) “Wild Geese” in Wild Geese. Bloodaxe Books.
YouTube of poet reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE