Future Timelines

Where are we now and where are we going?

The Aztec Sun Stone shows the five “Suns” of Aztec cosmology. According to the contemporary Nahuatl shaman and author, Sergio Magana, on May 26, we are entering the Sixth Sun, which he characterizes as a “Sun of Darkness,” based on information he has received from his teachers.

In The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky wrote: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” He looked at the role of public intellectuals in the 19th century — and all the way back to Ancient Greece, where Socrates was executed for questioning the status quo. Chomsky contrasted “value-oriented intellectuals” — wide-ranging thinkers who take principled moral stances on various issues — with intellectuals who accept rewards from governments and institutions that protect power and privilege, tacitly supporting wars and other forms of exploitation: 

“Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are considered responsible, and value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated. It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records.”

I tend to see myself as a “value-oriented intellectual,” promoting ideas that run counter to the mainstream. When I published Breaking Open the Head (2002), I feared I would get stopped at airports and arrested or otherwise targeted for writing about my psychedelic journeys. The subject was so taboo at that time. 

In my second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), I chronicled the personal and philosophical adventures that led me to a new understanding of reality — one that was mystical, shamanic, Jungian. After I published it, I was mocked by The New York Times and Rolling Stone. I could no longer write for mainstream magazines and newspapers. To this day, the mainstream media remains trapped in a rigid materialist worldview, dismissing mystical experience and psychic phenomena out of hand. It is the same in colleges. 

Having spoken my truth, I found myself outcast from the establishment. At the same time I saw many of my peers get celebrated, lavishly rewarded, for work that I found to be shallow and calculated, complicit with the corporate and State machinery. This took a toll on me, financially and psychologically. 

A focus of my work has been the ecological emergency. “The consciousness of modern humanity and the planetary crisis mirror each other,” I wrote in my first book. I found it amazing how the urgency of the ecological emergency was hardly discussed — either in the news or by people I know in daily conversation. 

Until this day, a powerful subliminal agreement exists among most people — even educated, spiritual or “conscious” ones — that there is no need to discuss the ecological emergency, even as conditions get worse. We collude silently, agreeing that what is most essential and important for our own and our children’s future should be avoided, unspoken and unaddressed. 

People don’t discuss the ecological emergency because it seems so overwhelming. We feel powerless. It seems there is nothing we can do about it. We go on with our lives, shadowed by this sense of impending doom. For this reason, I appreciate Extinction Rebellion, which uses mass civil disobedience to provoke government action on climate change.

We all know the basic problem: We have built a global civilization entirely reliant on massive amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels, based on an ideology of limitless material consumption and endless growth. Roy Scranton writes in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: 

“There’s no “reset” button for civilization, and no viable plan for transforming global infrastructure, agriculture, and energy networks in the next ten to twenty years. And while smart, dedicated, and thoughtful people fumble with political machinery that doesn’t work, such as carbon-pricing markets, protests, and the United Nations, all of us in the Global North go about our business, driving, flying, leaving lights on, running heaters and air conditioners, eating meat, charging our devices, living unsustainable lives predicated on easy consumption.”

Years ago, I realized that it doesn’t help to talk about the ecological crisis unless we can point to, as Scranton puts it, a “viable plan,” a comprehensive alternative. That is why, as a generalist, I offered one in How Soon Is Now (2017), my third book. I saw that we needed a full-spectrum model, a set of solutions encompassing energy, industry, social structures, economy, philosophy, spirituality, and so on. It took me ten years to put together all the pieces. I drew inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s system design approach, Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, the Gaia hypothesis of Margulies and Lovelock, among many sources.

Perhaps what is most original in my approach is that I integrate mystical, esoteric, and anarchist principles into my systemic alternative. At the same time, I challenge conventions and stereotypes found in the post-New Age spiritual culture. For instance, in the “consciousness community,” one article of faith is: “You create your own reality.” According to this belief, when we focus on anything negative or depressing, we draw that possibility closer to manifestation. I find this a privileged, escapist position: An overstatement, based on a willfully convenient flaw in understanding. 

We obviously exist within a great deal of reality we had no part in creating and that we cannot change just because we want to. We are limited by gravity, space and time, our sensory organs, language, by the need to eat and sleep, among many other constraints. At the same time, I understand there are occult, paranormal dimensions. The invisible or subtle realms seem to operate according to principles or “Laws,” that we do not understand, as of yet. 

I believe we are the expressions of a unified field of consciousness — as Vendanta says “I Am That” — which is limitless, infinite and unbounded. But when it comes to this physically embodied, ego-based existence — this particular dream within a dream — we possess limited powers as well as a limited scope of knowledge and understanding. 

There is hubris in the assertion, “You create your own reality.” It reflects the hyper-individual, entrepreneurial culture of late-stage Capitalism (like Nike’s “Just Do It,” etc). Instead, I see wisdom in the Biblical adage: “Not my will, but Thy will, be done.” That seems closer to the attitude we should take. 

Perhaps we can change certain aspects of our reality. Perhaps we possess transformative abilities beyond what we know as of yet. But to “will the transformation,” as the poet Rilke put it, requires tremendous focus, force, and humility. We have to simultaneously surrender and work diligently at it.

It is likely, as we face ecological catastrophe over the next decades, we will rediscover our humility as a species. This could be a wonderful outcome, assuming we do survive. The Coronavirus pandemic foreshadows this, revealing our fragility as well as our interdependence. We also see how quickly society can adapt when facing a collective threat.

Scranton believes our extinction as a species is likely. As an intellectual with an irritating fetish for the truth, I agree with him that the future looks dicey. Even so, I prefer to envision a pathway out of the crisis. It is still conceivable that we can safeguard our human community while restoring the biosphere back to health. Or course, such an outcome will not happen on its own. We would need a shared understanding, a field of coherence, about what must be done, and perhaps a miracle or two. As I propose How Soon Is Now, we need to raise collective consciousness, to unify humanity around a new paradigm based on planetary service and stewardship. 

When I look toward the future, I toggle between a range of scenarios — branching timelines — for what will happen in the next ten to fifty years, based on what we know today.  Of course, what will actually occur will be different from any of these, and may combine elements from all of them. Here are some future scenarios:

1. Debacle

Over the next decades, we undergo the collapse of the biosphere along with the continued expansion of technocratic, anti-Democratic controls. The social credit system that China has implemented gets exported to the West via Central Bank-issued digital currencies. These give opaque, centralized institutions powers of total surveillance and control over most of the human population. As the ecological emergency worsens, we undertake last ditch efforts to “dim the sun” by pouring sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere. These not only fail, but turn the sky brown. 

Our technological safeguards collapse as we run out of cheap fossil fuels and rare minerals. We face mass starvation, mass refugees, mass war. When methane erupts from the thawing Arctic in vast quantities, global temperatures jump four degrees Celsius warmer in a handful of years. The oceans rise three or more meters, flooding coastal regions and forcing inland migration. Rising temperatures make agriculture impossible in most regions. Some scientists — like the bracingly depressing Guy McPherson — think all of this will happen in the next two or three decades.

As the forests burn and the ocean plankton expires, the Earth no longer produces enough oxygen for humans to breathe. Some ultra-wealthy groups build enclosed biospheres and underground complexes for a few to survive over the next thousands of years. Some indigenous communities living in remote mountains are able to eke out an existence. But the vast majority of humanity dies off. (I admit I am not immune to darker conspiratorial ideas, but as I lack proof, I will table them for now).

If this occurs, the moral seems clear: Humanity must be punished, destroyed by the Gods or by Fate, for our heedless arrogance and thoughtless assault on Nature. Those who endure through this period of desolation become mute witnesses of unimaginable horror. Our human world breaks apart with a shared sense of failure and futility. 

Such a catastrophic terminus could be dignified with a sense of meaning and even necessity, if we acknowledge occult phenomena such as reincarnation, other dimensions, and astral realms. If humanity were to burn out like this, many of us would feel that our work on Earth was tragically incomplete. We would integrate lessons into our soul’s continuity after death. Our collective karmic evolution might continue on other planets, in future incarnations, where, hopefully, humanity finally gets it right.

Or it might be that such a catastrophe would simply reveal that the universe has no purpose and is meaningless. We would be left with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, or Nietzsche’s nihilism, as the ultimate truth. 

Or it might reaffirm core ideas of Buddhism: That progress and evolution are illusions. There is only endless karmic recycling into various Bardo realms. According to the Buddhist perspective, the only possible escape from the Bardo is realization with Nirvana and the Void during a precious human existence, extinguishing the persistent illusion of separate identity and duality. This possibility emerges whenever Samsara produces human-like consciousness, and so it will occur again and again. (However Buddhism holds a paradox: Bodhisattvas postpone their entrance into Nirvana until all beings attain enlightenment. This suggests an eventual end point to cosmic history in a universal realization). 

2. Miracle

Something that we create or discover, or some force that arrives from outside, saves our situation. We are able to continue living on the Earth with a large population, even under radically different conditions such as rising ocean tides. What are the main candidates for such an intervention?

One option would be a slew of technological solutions. For instance, if we can develop technologies able to pull massive amounts of CO2 out of the oceans and the atmosphere quickly, we could counteract global warming. At this point, this probably would not stop the momentum of the melting glaciers, so we would still experience several meters of sea level rise. We would have to adapt to that. So far, technologies able to remove carbon at the scale needed (we pump an estimated one million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere ever hour) do not exist. 

Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster offers an overview of existing technologies and technologies currently in development. Reading it, one does not get the sense that we have the answers at hand. In fact, quite the opposite. While our situation is already dire, Gates reminds us that countries like China continue to build coal plants: “As of mid-2019, some 236 gigawatts’ worth of coal plants were being built around the world; coal and natural gas are now the fuels of choice in developing countries, where demand has skyrocketed in the past few decades. Between 2000 and 2018, China tripled the amount of coal power it uses.” This doesn’t seem to be trending in the right direction. There doesn’t seem to be any purely technological fix on the horizon that will allow us to keep living as we do now — but perhaps something will emerge all of a sudden. 

One partial salvation could be the dissemination of zero point or free energy technology, based on the structure of the vacuum. Many believe this technology already exists, but it has been suppressed by governments and corporations. There are said to be a number of “over unity” devices already functioning. Other energy sources could also be game-changers, such as Cold Fusion, if it materializes. 

The convergence of Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology could, conceivably, unleash transformative potentials that we can’t imagine as of yet. I suppose, if we can’t stop runaway climate change, certain kinds of genetic engineering might be possible. Perhaps we can change ourselves biologically to survive on a much hotter, de-oxygenated world without plants or animals. The Singularity vision in which we merge with Silicon-based technology is another possible culmination of the human experiment. 

Another candidate for miraculous intervention and salvation is extraterrestrials, who presumably possess forms of technology we cannot yet access that might be able to clean up the mess we have made. The evidence for some kind of ET presence is increasingly persuasive, as I have written about elsewhere. The problem is that it is difficult to determine if this ET presence, if it exists, is benevolent, or if ETs possess their own agenda. It seems possible that there are different ET factions with different agendas as well as ethics. Some may want to help humanity; some may seek to exploit and use us for their own purposes; some may observe while maintaining a code of non-intervention. It is hard to predict.

Another miraculous outcome might involve acceptance of our psychic or Psi abilities, and then a kind of “Manhattan Project” to utilize Psi on a large scale to transform our geophysical conditions before it is too late.  Dean Radin has proposed that we could be at a stage in our exploration of Psi phenomena akin to where we were with electricity in the late 18th Century: We know it is there but we don’t know how to channel, store, or transmit it. Once we learned how to use electricity, we transformed our world profoundly in less than two centuries. It is conceivable that Psi is exponentially more powerful than electricity as a transformative energy source. It functions according to entirely different rules and principles, which we would have to learn. 

Other, even more fanciful ideas could be considered: Spontaneous mutation or transmutation of reality. Time begins to run backward or sideways. We discover we can overcome the “laws” of physics, as we learn, following Rupert Sheldrake, that these seeming laws (gravity, the Speed of Light, entropy) are actually only patterns in the morphogenetic field which we can change with our collective beliefs and conscious intentions.

Perhaps a small contingent enters a state of exalted Christ consciousness where they are able to bend the presumed laws of physics, performing miraculous healings, turning loaves into fishes, moving mountains, and so on. This might precede a collective movement into the “New Jerusalem,” which is perhaps a different state of consciousness and a slightly different condition of matter. This would accord with Aztec lineage-holder and author Sergio Magana’s prediction that we are entering the “Sixth Sun,” a new psychic reality, this year (2012 - 2021 was the transition).

The problem with many of the Miracle scenarios is that they allow us to evade responsibility for this disaster. Therefore they seem like a short circuit. While I would take them over Debacle, any day of the week, I think that the most likely path to our “salvation,” softening collapse and averting extinction, requires active engagement.

3. Crucible

This is my preferred option, proposed in How Soon Is Now. The ecological crisis acts as a collective initiation. We survive by undergoing metamorphosis. We consciously work to transform our society to attain, eventually, a new, Noospheric state of unified consciousness. We rediscover the values of indigenous cultures, such as long-term stewardship and interdependence, and integrate these principles into our culture of scientific and technological progress. 

On the material plane, we redesign our global economic system to reduce financial inequality and support regenerative practices that rebuild the health and diversity of local ecosystem and local cultures. We transform our social and political structures to support local communities, living in harmonic balance with the biosphere. We integrate psychedelics, meditation, Tantra, and other esoteric approaches into a new comprehensive worldview, learning to utilize psychic energy or Psi as a transformative and evolutionary force.

How can this happen? 

As our collective crisis deepens, more people become aware of what is at stake. Many realize that the current worldview and competing ideologies, ranging from free-market Capitalism to Christian salvationism, are delusional. They work against our capacity to create a sane and thriving world. As things get worse, new possibilities emerge in response to the crisis of consciousness and values, as well as the ecological crisis. New initiatives focused on liberation and ecological restoration — beyond what were previously condoned or imagined — start to spread virally. As the poet Allen Ginsberg envisioned in the late 1960s, society reconfigures to support “‘lifestyles of ecstasy, for whoever wants them.”

We accept that we must live with less — less gadgets, less opportunity to travel, less food diversity. As people reduce material consumption, however, they rediscover deeper values — such as the value of being part of a community based on shared purpose, the value of meditation and prayer and connection. In fact, the more people restrict consumption, the more they find themselves liberated and happy. This builds stronger communities and strengthens commitment. 

At first, the existing structures of governments and the global economy try to adapt to the changing conditions. Eventually they become obsolete in many respects. New social systems — anarchic, volunteer-based, decentralized — emerge, almost organically, through social networks, to supersede the old ones. This process is analogous to what happened as bourgeois society superseded the old aristocracies, which continue to exist, a bit like vestigial organs in the collective human organism.

Confronting the threat of extinction, we start to use our communications technology and media to establish systems for continuous coordination, re-education and training in the new skills required for the new planetary culture. We unleash planetary initiatives, implementing regenerative technologies that scale, rapidly and exponentially. These includeBiochar, composting programs, initiatives to replant forests, and ocean aquaculture on a vast scale.  Massive undersea kelp farms leech industrial CO2 out of the oceans in vast quantities while creating an abundant source of edible food. Such initiatives combine large-scale job programs with hyper-sophisticated use of drones, robots, and AI.

As we reckon with what industrial civilization has unleashed destructively, we establish new creative syntheses — of futuristic technology with primal technology, science with religion, socialism with capitalism, emancipatory movements based on personal freedom with corporate systems based on hyper-efficient supply chains. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution itnegrates permaculture principles, units for composting and biochar are mass-manufactured around the world, using 3-D printing. 

The transition seems gradual and almost imperceptible at times. At other times, change is sudden and drastic. Inevitably, the world shifts toward self-sufficient, autonomous localities meshed together in bioregions. The ecological pressure-cooker forces a pronounced shift in contemporary culture from an “I” focus to a “we” focus. It is no longer cool to incessantly promote one’s self, or to make ostentatious displays of wealth of status.

Our human community chooses to change many of the values and ideologies underlying the last two centuries of modern progress. In the past, Modernists and Futurists saw the countryside as a boring wasteland. They marketed an urbanist ideology in which all the action and excitement happened in densely-populated urban areas. Over the last centuries, young people migrated to the cities in vast quantities, seeking opportunity. Now we reverse this trend.

A global initiative resettles masses of alienated urbanites back into the countrysides. They take up regenerative farming practices, restoring top soil and replenishing local ecosystems (a prospect dramatized in the documentary, The Biggest Little Farm), bringing CO2 back into the earth. Project management and geo-mapping technology help us socially engineer a global transition back to an agrarian, community-based social structure. Most people find this far preferable, eventually, to alienated lives in densely populated, polluted cities. Particularly as they still maintain connection to the latest currents in culture, style, and philosophical inquiry.

Perhaps this seems farfetched. The reality is that nothing prevents us from accomplishing it except the accumulated baggage from obsolete ideologies and outmoded systems. Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.” We can wait passively and dream of a miraculous intervention, as the Earth burns to an ash heap around us. Or we can reimagine what is possible, re-educate ourselves as systems thinkers, and work together to bring about this transformation. It seems at least worth a shot.

My recent online lectures and courses are now available via The Liminal Institute. Please check them out. This includes lectures on Rudolf Steiner, ETs/UFOs, my course on Breaking Open the Head, and the eight part seminar, Building Our Regenerative Future.

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