Incredible article! I’ve read a number of your previous posts (I began following your page two-ish months ago) and this one seems to integrate/synthesize everything you’ve been writing about the most seamlessly. Or maybe it just speaks to me that way based on where I’m at in my own journey... Either way, great piece of writing!
I must say, though, as much as I find your diagnosis of the problem to be spot on (i.e. this collective state of spiritual immaturity combined with immense technological power) I do worry that your optimism is too, well, optimistic. I tend to think -- not exclusively, but predominantly -- that the opportunities of the coming decades (if the human experiment indeed survives that long) will mainly reside at the individual level. In other words, I’m very doubtful we’ll be able to bring about this sort of *society-wide* rebirth of wisdom, spiritual integration, etc etc, and think that on the whole it will be a minority of individuals who decide to pursue this path and live as wisely and consciously as they can within the larger context of an increasingly insane, alienated, unwise society. To me, the forces (technological, economic, etc) driving this societal path have taken on something of a life of their own, and humans no longer have as much autonomy/control as we used to/as we like to think we still do. Techno-capital has its own telos, as it were. It will not be an enlightened humanity that rises up from the dark night of the anomaly, but a new kind of being, one driven by a synthetic intelligence far beyond the capacity of our monkey minds.
I may have lost you there -- no worries. It may boil down to the difference in worldview between a “capitalist” like yourself and a ... someone more intellectually influenced by critical theory/“anticapitalist” thinkers?
Either way, and to wrap this whole thing up (I did not anticipate writing such a long comment), I do respect your optimistic take. Don’t get me wrong there. Indeed, you may end up being right -- I’m pretty open minded about where this whole “situation” is going -- and, if you are right, I think you’re very correct that this beautiful future for humanity will hinge to a large degree on a rebirth of responsible “psycho technology” (love that term!) usage. I’m glad there are people like you who understand this and are working towards bringing it about, and honestly, I hope to join you in that effort one day. Thanks again!
Thanks BC. You’re hitting on a fresh idea for me. From my current learning, I understand that if you believe you have psi, you will. Which is what the myths teach us. But the psi is possibly a distraction from the end goal: how to become differentiated and integrated. Then you can tip the whole system as a series of individuals. Hence we need to believe it’s possible, to be deliberately optimistic, in order for salvation to be possible. Or something like that. I’m still fleshing it out!
Tom, your emphasis on that v-curve and its variations, have been useful metaphors. Therapeutic in fact. I want you to know that.
On descending into chaos, the biggest mistake is to try crawling back up the cliff we fell from. To restore that old sense of comfort. Individuals and even countries can get lost in these restoration projects. We ‘refuse the call’, because we want to believe there must be some shortcut to get back up. Some quick hack that fixes everything. Ironically, we end up spending tremendous time & energy in looking for these shortcuts. Decades can fly by. All the while our present situation keeps getting worse and worse. It’s waiting for us to understand and embrace it.
Nostalgia may be useful in our evolution, but it is also a tremendous burden. There is a lot of freedom in realizing that we must ‘burn the boats’ and embrace the suffering. We can get back to the river, but never to the same river. We can go back physically, but there is no going back mentally.
Perhaps you have written on this, and I have missed it. Would appreciate your thoughts on this.
Glad to hear that PM! Thanks for the comment. Funny enough I LITERALLY DID IT. I left my job in banking, spent 3m passively on the counch waiting for "the universe" to provide. That, sadly is not how it works. So I panicked and went back into a more abstracted version of my old job. I spent 11m there and they were categorically the worst of my life. Not due to the job in isolation, due to the fact that my psyche punished me savagely.
Thanks for this amazing article. Fascinating seeing all these familiar names pulled together. I'll be reading your recommendations further. I'm a new subscriber off your Perspectiva profile.
Some are trying to move the initiation process forward in different ways. For example, the movement to increased consciousness as we have not imbued the necessary mental tools in our society to deal with uncertainty. And without these tools, we have entropy hit everyone’s minds or what we now label as mental illness.
Incredible article! I’ve read a number of your previous posts (I began following your page two-ish months ago) and this one seems to integrate/synthesize everything you’ve been writing about the most seamlessly. Or maybe it just speaks to me that way based on where I’m at in my own journey... Either way, great piece of writing!
I must say, though, as much as I find your diagnosis of the problem to be spot on (i.e. this collective state of spiritual immaturity combined with immense technological power) I do worry that your optimism is too, well, optimistic. I tend to think -- not exclusively, but predominantly -- that the opportunities of the coming decades (if the human experiment indeed survives that long) will mainly reside at the individual level. In other words, I’m very doubtful we’ll be able to bring about this sort of *society-wide* rebirth of wisdom, spiritual integration, etc etc, and think that on the whole it will be a minority of individuals who decide to pursue this path and live as wisely and consciously as they can within the larger context of an increasingly insane, alienated, unwise society. To me, the forces (technological, economic, etc) driving this societal path have taken on something of a life of their own, and humans no longer have as much autonomy/control as we used to/as we like to think we still do. Techno-capital has its own telos, as it were. It will not be an enlightened humanity that rises up from the dark night of the anomaly, but a new kind of being, one driven by a synthetic intelligence far beyond the capacity of our monkey minds.
I may have lost you there -- no worries. It may boil down to the difference in worldview between a “capitalist” like yourself and a ... someone more intellectually influenced by critical theory/“anticapitalist” thinkers?
Either way, and to wrap this whole thing up (I did not anticipate writing such a long comment), I do respect your optimistic take. Don’t get me wrong there. Indeed, you may end up being right -- I’m pretty open minded about where this whole “situation” is going -- and, if you are right, I think you’re very correct that this beautiful future for humanity will hinge to a large degree on a rebirth of responsible “psycho technology” (love that term!) usage. I’m glad there are people like you who understand this and are working towards bringing it about, and honestly, I hope to join you in that effort one day. Thanks again!
Thanks BC. You’re hitting on a fresh idea for me. From my current learning, I understand that if you believe you have psi, you will. Which is what the myths teach us. But the psi is possibly a distraction from the end goal: how to become differentiated and integrated. Then you can tip the whole system as a series of individuals. Hence we need to believe it’s possible, to be deliberately optimistic, in order for salvation to be possible. Or something like that. I’m still fleshing it out!
Tom, your emphasis on that v-curve and its variations, have been useful metaphors. Therapeutic in fact. I want you to know that.
On descending into chaos, the biggest mistake is to try crawling back up the cliff we fell from. To restore that old sense of comfort. Individuals and even countries can get lost in these restoration projects. We ‘refuse the call’, because we want to believe there must be some shortcut to get back up. Some quick hack that fixes everything. Ironically, we end up spending tremendous time & energy in looking for these shortcuts. Decades can fly by. All the while our present situation keeps getting worse and worse. It’s waiting for us to understand and embrace it.
Nostalgia may be useful in our evolution, but it is also a tremendous burden. There is a lot of freedom in realizing that we must ‘burn the boats’ and embrace the suffering. We can get back to the river, but never to the same river. We can go back physically, but there is no going back mentally.
Perhaps you have written on this, and I have missed it. Would appreciate your thoughts on this.
Glad to hear that PM! Thanks for the comment. Funny enough I LITERALLY DID IT. I left my job in banking, spent 3m passively on the counch waiting for "the universe" to provide. That, sadly is not how it works. So I panicked and went back into a more abstracted version of my old job. I spent 11m there and they were categorically the worst of my life. Not due to the job in isolation, due to the fact that my psyche punished me savagely.
Thanks for this amazing article. Fascinating seeing all these familiar names pulled together. I'll be reading your recommendations further. I'm a new subscriber off your Perspectiva profile.
Thanks so much for reading Jasen- if you ever fancy connecting let me know!
Some are trying to move the initiation process forward in different ways. For example, the movement to increased consciousness as we have not imbued the necessary mental tools in our society to deal with uncertainty. And without these tools, we have entropy hit everyone’s minds or what we now label as mental illness.