From Climate Apocalypse to Mass Metamorphosis?

An initiatory, evolutionary project to transform human consciousness

I want to continue the thought experiment I started in my last essay here, Mycelial Anarchy, on social networks and human evolution.

In my last piece, I considered some metaphors or analogies from biology that might help us understand what is happening to us and through us. I noted that the rapid growth and development of a technological civilization able to communicate across the Earth resembles, in some ways, the process of development in the fetal and infant brain. As birth approaches and in the months and years after birth, the brain meshes together and starts to function holographically. The individual self becomes more coherent, self aware, over time.

We might think of any human civilization as a structure made of technical systems, social systems and a predominant texture of consciousness — a level of awareness. By analogy, this structure/texture could be seen as something like the skin of a snake, which eventually frays and gets replaced. The snake can only shed its skin when there is a new skin ready beneath the old one. Otherwise it will die. Similarly, we cannot abandon the current post-industrial, Capitalist system until we have another functional system.

Of course one of the most common biological metaphors used by people in the “conscious evolution” community is the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. As the caterpillar disintegrates inside the cocoon, a small number of “imaginal cells” activate. They start to multiply. The dying caterpillar’s immune system sees them as a virus and attacks them. This only causes the surviving imaginal cells to become more effective. They quickly take over the entire organism and transmute it. As it goes from crawling consumer to flying pollinator, the butterfly literally discovers a new “dimension” of flight.

In past books, I proposed that humanity has subconsciously unleashed the climate apocalypse to force a mass metamorphosis or collective transmutation. We have created our own initiatory pressure cooker. This was the only way to force a breakthrough. But we then must ask: a breakthrough into what?