Will We Have a Regenerative Future?

What this upcoming course means to me

One of the core ideas I explored in How Soon Is Now (2016), as well as earlier books, was the possibility that the biospheric emergency unleashed by modern civilization represents an initiation for humanity as a whole. While writing Breaking Open the Head (2002), my first book, I became fascinated with the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin’s perspective on this subject. He saw the First World War as "an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers." Back in the 1920s, he worried that mankind's alienation from itself was deepening "to such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” He also believed that humanity needed periodic rituals to re-sacralize our relationship to the Cosmos: If we didn’t design positive ways to enact this, the rituals would happen destructively, unconsciously, instead. 

I find it kind of insane that human civilization — despite our scientific and technical advances in many fields — remains incapable of addressing the ecological crisis in a systemic way. According to the scientists who study the matter, we are currently plunging over the cliff into oblivion, with the climate due to reach 2 - 3 degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels in a few decades. We are already seeing cascading effects from the climate emergency, including rising prices for basic food items and a growing migrant and refugee crisis around the world. The sixth great extinction is equally threatening to everybody’s future. If the web of life unravels, everybody goes down together. 

One gets the sense that most people have decided to become numb and detached in the face of what’s happening, which seems gigantic, beyond our capacity to influence. Let’s at least admit it is an eerie situation: We are basically letting corporate greed and an economic system wired for predation and exploitation to decimate the entire web of life on Earth, which took billions of years to evolve. It may be that this represents our own threshold of extinction as a species — or perhaps some of the super wealthy will survive (like Mark Zuckerberg who, after poisoning the information commons for his personal profit, is now building a $100 million Hawaii underground bunker), as well as some of the more remote and self-sufficient indigenous communities. 

One of the reasons I feel the need to create seminars and forums like our upcoming Building Our Regenerative Future is that I, personally, yearn for community and connection around these issues — for opportunities to learn and explore what is happening with other, like-minded people, and to envision, call in, different possible options. Even to grieve and vent.

I often wonder if this biospheric crisis is, ultimately, going to force those who survive to make an internal shift from conceiving of themselves as “skin-encapsulated egos,” or citizens of a particular nation or followers of a particular religion, to seeing themselves differently: As catalytic agents of a planetary ecology. What would happen if we all acted in our daily lives, based on our primary identification with the community of life as a whole?

Another idea that fascinates me is that we — the human collective — will inevitably make a transition from the reductive materialist worldview, which is obsolete, to the new paradigm, which could be analytic idealism. Analytic idealism sees the foundational aspect of reality to be consciousness itself, rather than any physical or material projection. It matches the last century of discoveries in quantum physics. It is a game-changer.

Analytic idealism is, I would say, a modern, scientifically informed way of understanding and integrating the basic principles of Eastern mysticism, including Vedanta and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, with its various expressions such as Vajrayana Buddhism and Dzogchen. When we realize the stable ground of a primordial awareness that precedes subjective identity, we can understand our own lives in a different way, whether or not we actively make the pursuit of enlightenment or realization part of our immediate quest. Numinous phenomena like synchronicity, subtle bodies, telepathy, psychic events, and reincarnation all fit comfortably into the analytic idealist worldview.

Materialism, as a philosophy, cuts us off from the universe and from one another. It tells a story in which consciousness is an accidental byproduct of physical evolution. This is why hyper-rational tech billionaires are desperate to find a way to hold onto their subjective, ego-ic identities by extending the physical lifespan or uploading their consciousness into a digital matrix. They are also fixated with getting off-planet. The only frontier they can imagine is an unvarying extension of this one: More material resources, greater wealth, bigger opportunities to express their egos (spaceships instead of yachts). 

Another possibility is that the future evolution of humanity is “down and in” rather than “up and out:” We can go deeper into the investigation of consciousness. We can intentionally explore what Tom Roberts defines, in The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, as the vast variety of “mind-body states.” We can also recognize that everything that happens, every unavoidable event in our lives and our world, gives us an opportunity to attain a new level of non-attached clarity, surrender, and initiatory focus. 

What if contemporary post-industrial civilization is a mechanism we unconsciously created to impel ourselves into this planetary catastrophe to force our own awakening? What if a universal tribulation was the only way to break through our alienation and ego-centrism, to reach a new intensity of communion as a species? What if the biospheric crisis unleashed by our industrial technologies is something like the moment of birth for a new level of species mind?

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit discovered something extraordinary about disasters. Soling visited communities in the wake of major disasters, such as New Orleans after Katrina. We are conditioned by the mass media to believe that people will behave like monsters or criminals when society breaks down, but over and over again, she found the opposite. For the most part, people go out of their way to help each other when catastrophe strikes. “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones,” she writes. Years after a disaster, many people recall that experience as the best time of their lives, when they felt a sense of belonging, compassion, and togetherness. Ironically, before modern civilization, when we lived in organic communities, this was our natural state, going back many thousands of years. 

“Disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collaborative life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own,” Solnit writes. “In a society in which participation, agency, purposefulness and freedom are all adequately present, a disaster would be only a disaster.” 

Our current civilization artificially keeps us alienated and isolated, in competition with each other. The system functions mechanically to benefit those at the top of the financial pyramid, who control humanity through financial structures, mass media and the military, instilling fear and insecurity. We require a breakthrough to a new system not only because of the ecological crisis, but also to express the full range of our humanity—our innate altruism, our empathy for one another.

My hope is that this deepening emergency will force us to access the deep reserves of intelligence, compassion and creativity we need to bring about this metamorphosis. But for this to happen, we need to bring all of it to the forefront of our consciousness, to focus on it, rather than suppressing or ignoring it, as most of us do now—myself, often, included. This is what inspires me about our new seminar, which starts Sunday. I hope you will join.