Eyes of the Future
by Bill Plotkin
Lack of personal
meaning and fulfillment is endemic to contemporary Western and Westernized
societies. Why are depression, anxiety, and suicide increasingly common? Social
analysts point to the stresses and strains inherent in modern life. But I
believe the cause has more to do with what we bring - or don't bring - to life
than with what we encounter in it.
My observations of
human nature suggest that, other than socioeconomic
oppression, the primary cause of individual distress is pervasive failure in
human development (in the first three life stages) as found in, and caused by,
contemporary egocentric society. The good news is that, once we understand
this, we can begin to make the changes that lead to a positive future.
In the 1960s and
1970s, American society began making some of these cultural changes, as seen in
the human potential movement and the consciousness revolution, both of which
emphasized achieving nonordinary states through spiritual paths, humanistic and
transpersonal psychology, music, art, entheogens, and social and political
consciousness-raising. By themselves,
these movements did not bring about a lasting or sufficient cultural shift.
Humanity's Sacred
Wound
For billions of
years, billions of creatures
have made a home
on this jeweled planet
of water and
stone. Wild love affairs
- Sun and Earth;
fungi and algae; bacteria
and mitochondria -
preceded and spawned us,
our ancestral
lineage recorded in the original eyes
of trilobites, in
undulating muscle of jellyfish,
in ancient
skeletal minerals sketched first
in the dark heart
of stars.
Peering billions
of years backwards in time,
we probe deep
space and cosmogenesis,
decipher the
unfurling story of life,
yet barely
perceive the future hurtling
toward us, even as
it's shaped
by our ambitious
grasping hands and filled
with the stuff of human
imagination -
however
impoverished or vast.
Billions of
creatures already know
their perfect
place in the cosmic dance -
their specific
genius expressed in relation
to nectar or coral
reef, sequoia or hawk.
Millions of
unlettered species already answer
questions we have
barely begun to ask -
the oldest mystery
school apparent in ones
who commune
without cults, communicate
without language,
migrate without combustion,
or - without
brains or hands - couple with the Sun,
birthing energy
from endlessly streaming photons.
What must they
think of us - hungry ghosts,
hooked up to
plasma TV, gathering faraway food
in packages,
drinking from bottles of plastic,
razing forests for
scented tissue and catalogues,
slicing our own
flesh for pleasure or perfection,
pouring poison
into the faultless bodies of children,
loading the tender
arms of young men and women
with bombs and
guns, exploding their minds
with the
dismembered bodies of their own kind
before they know
how to wallow with a lover
in wildflowers, beneath
the holy Moon
and burning eyes
of the gods, before they know
what genius
smolders in them, awaiting fire,
before they know
how to pluck a columbine
and offer cool
nectar to the lover's tongue?
This is the way
it's always been:
Billions of
creatures co-arising, fading in and out
of the
irreversible cosmic symphony. Do they regret
living as they
must, cued to primal harmonics
of tide and storm,
phytoplankton
and oak, lion and
vole?
And what of us?
In the last green
flash of consciousness,
before we are
swallowed by the great night sea,
will we wonder if
we have left a wake of ruin
or of celebration
- an offering
of reciprocal
magnitude
to the billowing
imagination
and wild cosmic
womb
from which we
first emerged
as spark, as seed,
as a fragile embryo
of possibility?
- GENEEN MARIE HAUGEN, "QUESTIONS FOR CREATURES
WITH FORWARD-SEEING IMAGINATION (FOR THOMAS BERRY)"
At the outset of
this book, I suggested that humanity as a whole has an innate vulnerability, a
"sacred wound," and that this vulnerability arises from our uniquely human mode
of consciousness. This wound predisposes us to getting lost, both individually
and collectively, failing to flower, and getting stuck. Sometimes it
leads some of us to engage in truly deranged conduct, like "slicing our own
flesh for pleasure or perfection" or "loading the tender arms of young men and
women/with bombs and guns," as poet Geneen Marie Haugen writes, or, ultimately,
destroying our biosphere.
Our human mode of
consciousness is self-reflexive, which is to say that we know that we know. In
other words, there's a small part of our consciousness, the ego, that is aware
of itself as being aware. This confers a tremendous behavioral advantage but
also a potentially fatal liability. Although the ego knows that it knows, there
is a whole universe of things that it does not know (especially before
maturity), things that the larger, nonegoic portion of the human psyche does
know and that are necessary for its own survival. These are things like how to
keep a heart beating and how to be a healthy member of the more-than-human
community -- how to make "a home on this jeweled planet/of water and stone."
The immature
(early-adolescent) ego is capable of making conscious choices that are, in the
long run, inadvertently ecocidal and therefore suicidal -- for example,
"gathering faraway food in packages, drinking from bottles of plastic, razing
forests for scented tissue and catalogues." A mature ego, in contrast, learns
how much it does not know and how much it depends on sources of knowledge and
wisdom that come from outside its realm, namely from the deep imagination, the
Mystery, myth, nonordinary states of consciousness, archetypes, dreams, vision,
ritual, nature, and elsewhere. A society with few genuine adults is racing
blind and hell-bent toward a cliff.
Yet, just as is
the case with our individual wounds, there is also an inestimable benefit that
comes with our species' collective wound, a boon made possible by our
distinctive human mode of consciousness. Geneen suggests that this is the gift
of our "forward-seeing imagination." Coupled with our opposable thumbs and our
uniquely human symbolic language, our forward-seeing imagination grants us the
capability to create a viable future, not only for ourselves, but also for all
Earthly creatures. In the twenty-first century, this capacity has become a
necessity for survival.
Others say that
the gift of our collective wound is the ability to consciously rejoice in the
grandeur of the universe, a capacity that might have everything to do with our
collective human destiny. The conscious celebration of the universe might be
"an offering of reciprocal magnitude to the billowing imagination and wild
cosmic womb from which we first emerged as spark, as seed, as a fragile
embryo of possibility."
By recovering and
reclaiming the power of our human deep imagination and our capacity to
celebrate the universe, we render sacred our species' wound. We become Homo
imaginens.
Circle and Arc
Revisited
A more evolved
human or society is not necessarily a more mature human or society - and
vice versa. It's possible, for example, that the human species has been
evolving over the past five thousand years, while at the same time most
individual humans and societies have become increasingly immature. If this is
true, then we have fallen further and further behind our potential, and yet our
potential has grown despite the fact that we have not.
The evolution of
our species - of anything, actually - is an arc, a one-way, nonrepeating
trajectory, while the maturation of individuals within that species takes the
form of a circle, an ever-renewing cycle. The circular pattern, however, is only one frame in a long evolutionary unfolding of circular
patterns of human maturation, each frame lasting perhaps several thousand years
or more.
I suspect that
individual development (the circle) and species evolution (the arc) are
essentially independent processes. The evolution of our species does not force
individuals to mature psychospiritually, and individual maturation, in general,
does not cause our species to evolve. But, in our time, if we do not mature as
individuals (and consequently as societies), the entire arc of human evolution
might soon come to an end. We are in danger of extinction - along with the
extinction we have already wrought upon thousands of other species. The
continuation of our human arc depends wholly on which circle - egocentric or
soulcentric - we embrace.
Global Culture
Change
Most everyone knows
by now that global climate change, resulting from greenhouse-gas-induced global
warming, is the most immediate threat and challenge we face at this time. But
the primary difficulty in responding to this crisis is not technological. The
knowledge and means already exist to reverse the still-escalating increases in
greenhouse gas emissions. What we are lacking is the political and social will
to do it. Reversing global warming requires a transformation in the values and
lifestyles of all Western and Westernized societies, a shift from
patho-adolescent consuming to mature, ecocentric communing. In this book, I've
characterized this necessary change as a change from egocentric to soulcentric
society.
This suggests that
what underlies the crisis of global climate change is a deeper crisis we might
call global culture change, which significantly predates our current climate
crisis. While the latter began only two centuries ago, the former has been in
process for about five thousand years. Global warming is the result of a
millennia-old unfolding in which our human cultures have become increasingly egocentric
and pathological - that is, increasingly alienated from nature and soul.
It seems
reasonable to suggest that global culture change is our bigger and most
immediate crisis - and opportunity. We must redesign all our major
cultural institutions - education, governments, economies, and religions - to
be in partnership with Earth systems. We must learn to raise all children and
teens in alignment with nature and natural cycles. In particular, we must
preserve the innocence of early childhood; we must refashion middle childhood
as a time of wonder and free play in the natural world; we must assist young
teens to be as authentic and creative as they can, with themselves and others.
And we must engender full societal support for late teens (and young and middle-aged
people, as necessary) as they explore and are transformed by the mysteries of
nature and psyche. And we must do this for all people, in all socioeconomic
classes, in all societies.
Is this possible?
No. But let's not let that stop us...
Impossible Dreams
"There is no use
trying," said Alice, "one can't believe impossible things." "I dare say you
haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did
it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast." -- Lewis Carroll
As Albert Einstein
notes, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that
created it." When we're operating in our everyday, conundrum-generating mode,
any real solution, should we encounter one, will seem impossible.
And yet genuine
solutions exist and are often offered to us by our own psyches - often by the
soul or the Muse. These solutions arise from a level of consciousness decidedly
different from our ego's. Unless our own consciousness shifts, the soul's and
Muse's suggestions will seem to us like impossible dreams and we'll dismiss
them out of hand. But these solutions are impossible only from the perspective
of the ego that has not yet awakened to a larger story and a more mysterious
and numinous world than it has yet imagined. All dreams, visions, and
revelations come to our conscious minds from a greater domain.
Humanity - in
fact, the entire Earth community - currently exists in such dire circumstances
that the most significant, viable, and potent solutions will seem like
impossible dreams to most everyone (at first). But this is apparently the way
it has always been in our universe. At the greatest moments of transformations
- what Thomas Berry calls "moments of grace" - the "impossible" happens. Like
it did 2 billion years ago, when a certain bacterium (eukaryote) learned how to
metabolize oxygen (that is, breathe) and how to reproduce by meiotic sex. Or
perhaps like the big bang itself, some 14 billion years ago, creating something
out of nothing. Or the appearance of an Earthling with conscious
self-awareness. More generally, "wild love affairs," Geneen writes, "- Sun and
Earth; fungi and algae; bacteria and mitochondria - preceded and spawned
us....This is the way it's always been."
The idea of a
soulcentric society living by an ecocentric sequence of developmental stages -
to most people, this will seem an impossible dream. In the face of the
mind-boggling casualties and depravities of contemporary Western societies, the
Great Turning, too, might seem like an impossible dream, sometimes even to us
impossible dreamers. Yet at this critical hour, any dream worth its salt ought
to seem impossible to mainstream society and to the mainstream elements of our
own minds. In George Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuselah, the serpent says
to Eve, "You see things; and you say ‘Why?' But I dream things that never were;
and I say ‘Why not?'" Great wisdom, this, from the iconic underworld emissary
- counsel that we ourselves would do well to heed in this hour of radical
crisis and opportunity.
If you consider
the data on such things as current wars, environmental destruction, and
political-economic corruption, there seems to be little hope for humanity and
most other members of the biosphere. But if, alternatively, you look at the
fact of miracles - moments of grace - throughout the known history of the
universe, it will dawn on you that there is and always has been an intelligence
or imagination at work much greater than our conscious human minds. Given that
we cannot rule out a moment of grace acting through us in this century, we have
no alternative but to proceed as if we ourselves in fact can make the
difference - if, that is, enough of us uncover and enact our soulwork. It is
vital that we each believe in and perform our impossible dreams, those with
roots in the Mystery. In the end, I am quite certain, we will not be rescued by
anything other than ourselves. If we are saved by a miracle, it will be the
miracle of enough of us maturing into artists of cultural renaissance and
imaginatively putting our shoulders to the wheel of the Great Turning.
Perhaps the
process of catching up to our human potential will unfold in two steps. First,
we must learn to engender a healthy adolescent society, one in which we take
good care of our environment and each other - largely motivated by our fear of
what would be our own human losses otherwise. A desire to save ourselves by
becoming wiser consumers and more loving neighbors might be enough to stem the
tide of destruction we are currently witnessing, even if this desire is
anthropocentric. A transitional society such as this will be a major advance
beyond what we have now, and I believe we can (and must) realize such a society
in a matter of a few years. The most progressive contemporary trends suggest to
me that we're well on our way - with tens of thousands of visionaries leading
us on.
The second step
will be to make the quantum leap from a healthy adolescent society to one that
is truly mature (eco-soulcentric). A mature society desires a lot more than to
save itself physically and economically. It seeks, for example, to save the
rainforest for the rainforest's sake, not just because it mitigates global
warming or because it might contain plants that could someday provide medicines
for humans. In addition to protecting the habitat of all species, a mature
society has a shared visionary awareness of where we're going as a people and a
planet. As Thomas Berry says, such a society experiences the world not as a
useful collection of objects but as a sacred communion of subjects. This
requires a radical change in the values of our current consumer culture.
Although it might take several generations to grow a mature society, I believe
we are entirely ready to piece together its infrastructure. In this book, I
have attempted to outline what such an infrastructure might look like. It all
begins with the way we raise children and mentor teenagers.
My impossible
dream is simply this: in this century, we each will learn to mature, live, and
love in a way that enables us to succeed as Great Turners, someday regarded as
honored ancestors in the "eyes of the future."
Excerpted
with permission from the book:
 Nature & the Human Soul: Cultivating
Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
by Bill Plotkin.
©2008.
Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
Bill Plotkin,
Ph.D., is the author of Nature & the
Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World and Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of
Nature and Psyche. In his work at his nonprofit Animas Valley Institute -
and around the world - Bill draws on dreams, the natural world, poetry, depth
psychology, and many cross-cultural soul-encounter practices such as vision
fasting, council, trance rhythms, and conversations across the species
boundaries. Visit him online at http://www.animas.org.
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