Butterfly or bust

What kind of transformation is coming?

In past books, I advanced the hopeful idea that humanity is undergoing an evolutionary mutation, like the amazing phase-transition that turns caterpillars into butterflies. According to biologists, the caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings in its cocoon. Instead it undergoes an intense transformation, melting down into a kind of biotic goop. As the caterpillar approaches death, a small number of "imaginal cells" activate. These imaginal cells contain the program for recreating the dying caterpillar into a brilliant butterfly. They are initially seen as a viral invader by the dying caterpillar's immune system, which attacks them. As a result of this attack, the imaginal cells become more resilient. They start to replicate until they have taken over the whole organism,  and then bring about its metamorphosis.

I don't know if some kind of transformation like this is humanity's destiny, but I kept thinking of this metaphor as I watched the US military and police forces brutalizing peaceful protestors across the country, during the Black Lives Matter protests. The display of military power seemed absurdly excessive and overwhelming. The sense is of something worthless - a moribund system of power and privilege, with imbecilic con man Trump at the top - that needs to be defended at all costs, for fear it would be revealed as having no value whatsoever. 

It does seem that humanity has been on an accelerated evolutionary trajectory over the last few centuries, as if we were on an exponential curve. European imperialism led to Capitalism, which crudely meshed the world together into one globalized market, crisscrossed by trade routes. Steam power gave way to coal, oil, nuclear as well as solar energy, which kept impelling our momentum. The human population also grew exponentially, from two billion at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to eight billion today. Electronic media like radio and television helped to homogenize human societies around the consumerist paradigm. Then the personal computer and Internet appeared, allowing us to communicate instantly across the planet, to share our thoughts, ideas and stories via social media. This has all happened in a mere blink of time, from a planetary perspective. 

From a macroscopic viewpoint, the human species can be seen as a giant collective organism, in symbiotic relationship with the Earth as a whole system. In a sense, the development of a globalized civilization, the development of electronic media and the Internet could be seen as similar to what happens as a baby develops into a child, gaining the capacity to control its limbs, interpret its sensory inputs, orient itself based on them, and act upon its ideas and thoughts. This at least suggests the possibility that, rather than a disintegration, we are on the verge of another evolutionary development or species mutation.

At the same time, we have been heedlessly devouring the finite resources of our planet, to the point where we have reached the point where our continuity as a species is severely in doubt, even in the short term. I never know how hard to drive this depressing point home. The fact is that we are on the cusp of causing our own extinction. The situation may already be far worse than the last projections of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change and other such scientific bodies. We are seeing forests burning down around the world which provide the oxygen we breathe. The Amazon rainforest is in immediate peril. Methane is starting to erupt from the Arctic, with temperatures in Siberia reaching 100 degrees. I could list the flashing red danger signs and grim feedback loops we have unleashed. Probably you already know some of them. I hope you do.

The caterpillar also devours all of the resources in its cocoon on its way to turning into a butterfly. At that point, it becomes a fluttering pollinator rather than a leaf-nibbling consumer. It attains the new dimension of flight. Similarly, the baby in the womb needs to be pushed out into the world before it threatens the life of the mother. 

 If we aren't going extinct as a species, is there a new dimension we can attain? I tend to believe so - but it doesn't involve physical transport. We don't have to bother settling the inhospitably barren orb of Mars, or traveling in claustrophobic tin cans to other star systems. We would, instead, take a plunge into the depth dimensions of consciousness, integrating intuition and rationality to access the morphogenetic fields of the imaginal realms and astral planes. In this pursuit, we would lose interest in material acquisition and status power games. As a byproduct of this evolution of our dormant psychic capacities, we might discover we can also transform the material realm in a way that also allows for our physical survival and species continuity. 

I know this sounds like a long shot! It is entirely possible I am wrong, of course. I borrow from, and elaborate on, ideas from thinkers like Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles. Their visionary philosophy was also informed by psychedelic experiences that reveal subtler dimensions of reality. However we do not know what would happen if society, as a whole, was to turn in this direction. We might rediscover a numinous dimension of reality which is hinted at by ancient sites like the Great Pyramid, Palenque, Teotihuacan, or Stonehenge, which remain beyond our understanding.

In fact, anything might happen in our human world. Few could have predicted the impact of the coronavirus on the planet, bringing the seemingly overwhelming momentum of industrial civilization to a complete stop. What is at the periphery and what is considered important, the center, can suddenly switch places. This has been happening with psychedelics over the last fifteen years. Before that, you couldn't even speak of LSD or mushrooms at a New York media event without getting ridiculed. Now they are all the rage as well as the cutting edge of research into mental health and creativity.

What the human species needs to do now is buy ourselves some time by stopping the ongoing destruction as soon as we can (immediately if possible). We must work together toward defining and transitioning into a new harmonic way of living that reconnects us to the Earth and one another. We need to make use of our technological and creative powers for the purpose of building a regenerative society, where all of our effluents and waste products can be reabsorbed productively to enhance biodiversity and ecosystemic health. This is a big task - but it is also the only game left for us to play. 

To help us make this shift, Rory Spowers, director of The Regeneration, and I are launching a new webinar this Monday: Building Our Regenerative Future. We want you to join us. For that reason, we are offering 20% discounts on tickets for those who use the coupon code, WEGENERATE, before our first session begins. We are also giving deeper discounts and full scholarships for those in financial distress. Please send us a message through our website, www.regenerativefuture.net, and tell us about your situation. We will have eight live sessions in the areas of food, health, community, culture, economy and consciousness, every Monday and Thursday. We will also offer a written exam for those who want a Certificate of completion.

We have many amazing people coming together for this — and hope you will be one of them. Our list of guest speakers/experts keeps expanding. We are working with Amanda Ravenhill, Director of The Buckminster Fuller Institute; Gabriele Donati, founder of TimeRepublik; sound healer and DJ Scarlett De la Torre; Itzhak Beery, author of Shamanic Healing: Traditional Medicine for the Modern World, and Tiokasin Ghosthorse, New York radio host. Please check www.regenerativefuture.net for a complete roster.