Kali Yuga, Materialism, and the Dark Mother Archetype

Things are not as they seem

In some recent essays, I have been asking why we — modern civilization, humanity — unleashed this unfolding ecological catastrophe. My hope is that, if we understand the “why,” we can then address the root cause, rather than flailing against the ever-proliferating symptoms. While it is necessary to keep trying to address the different aspects (deforestation, excess CO2, biodiversity loss, etcetera), it seems a bit pointless without identifying the origin of the disease. 

I have read many books trying to answer this question. According to David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous, it was the transition from hieroglyphics to modern alphabets – phonograms with no reference to objects in the world – that caused us to disconnect from nature. As we lost contact with our phenomenological experience, we got lost in abstractions. Riane Eisler, in The Chalice and the Blade, argued for a historic shift from gynocratic or matristic societies that gave women equal status while equalizing wealth to patriarchal or androcratic societies based on hierarchy, domination, and male succession. Some believe the initial mistake was the development of agriculture. This created surpluses that led to different social classes. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, private property was the first mistake, “the origin of all our misfortunes.” In Earth Ascending and Time and the Technophere, Jose Arguelles theorized that the West misunderstood time. We created a calendar disconnected from natural harmony (months, no longer moon-the, detached from the lunar cycle), as a basic error. 

I believe the root cause is metaphysical or spiritual. Initially, there was a metaphysical deviation. This introduced a flaw in society’s source code. We then built a civilizational skyscraper on top of this initial error which became increasingly fragile and unsound. Now we are looking down from the top of a massive high-rise that is wobbling and in danger of collapse at any moment. We can’t hope to fix the structural issues from the top of the building. We actually have to go all the way down to the bottom and start again. 

And what is at the bottom? The materialist paradigm: The wrong idea that consciousness is an evolutionary accident — an epiphenomenon of matter — rather than the correct idea that consciousness is the underlying reality, that the physical world is a projection of consciousness.