man has to abandon the secure, the trusted, and - for his present moment - the ultimate. At each stage he has to struggle with the denying force of inertia. He has to surmount a mental obstacle as once he had to surmount biological obstacles. If he succeeds, he learns more, understands more, gets closer and closer to participating. It may be that he is now required to confront - and accept - the mechanism of his own evolution.[i]
And this is where we now find ourselves, both individually and as a species: confronting a transition stage in our own evolution. Further, the choice we have to make is whether we accept – and participate – in the mechanism of our own evolution. It has been a long journey, punctuated by starts and stops; by catalysts of numerous kinds, from revolutions, wars and conflict, science and the arts, innovations and communications. In other words, for a new global-social order to emerge it is necessary to first go through a series of transformative pulses, including periods of chaos and collapse. Not only is this necessary, but it may also be welcome. After all, you can’t fill a bottle of vinegar with new wine when it is already full: first you need to empty before the new can be introduced. And the Earth too, as part of the solar family, has her own cycles that require this periodic ‘cleansing’. So within the long-tail of evolutionary time there are periods of upheaval that serve cosmic purposes (to put it simply). And most of the time these upheavals create havoc for the creatures resting upon the skin of the Earth. Only very few are those who have in times past been aware of these cyclic occurrences. To the general masses these are often seen as times of craziness when war and strife seem like everyday madness:
There are periods in the life of humanity which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge.[ii]
This release of knowledge that comes with upheaval can be utilized to help civilization push through to a higher level of functioning. Information is itself a catalyst for rapid evolutionary change. Evolutionary progress appears to operate through various ‘release’ and ‘gear shift’ mechanisms in that physical chaos provides the release of energy and information necessary to fuel a leap or ‘phase change’ in evolutionary development. The problem in the past has always been that these transitions sometimes leave a bit of a mess in their wake. However, to be forewarned is to be prepared. Such transition stages can be best navigated when the participants (namely ‘us’) can be conscious and aware of the coming changes. The bottom line is that there is never an end - there is always a further transformation. So the world is not coming to an end, despite what some soothsayers and doom-mongers predict. What these upcoming times foretell is a period of accelerating evolutionary change. And importantly, what the coming transformation requires is that we, as individuals, consciously participate through our own creative and positive energies.
1 comment:
Destruction and creation work hand in hand, such is the Tao. Excellent, thank you.
Post a Comment