ecospirit

Labels: 100% renewables, Caron Ideologies, Jacques Ellul, Joanna Macy, moral anaesthesia, Ned Ludd, technique, Thomas Berry, Ugly American, William Vollman, WTO, zeri emmissions

Labels: Big Bounce, covenant, Craig Dilworth, EO Wilson, Great Filter, Hindu rocketry, hot spots, Joanna Macy, Robin Hanson, Thomas Berry

Over the past year, the self-censorship of climate scientists has begun to thaw, and the timid predictions of  the IPCC are being questioned ever more robustly.  Academics from allied fields peering into the abyss are no longer fearful of losing their careers, and elder scientists no longer fear losing their grants. Catastrophic climate change either has already begun (see accompanying firemap), as some researchers argue, or it will be upon us in a matter of scant years. The popular article announcing this sea-change is the recent NYT Magazine piece, “Losing Earth.”

In this richly researched piece, focusing on a few key figures (James Hansen and Rafe Pomerance are the good guys; John Sununu their chief nemesis), Nathaniel Rich argues that “we” had a chance during the pivotal decade for climate science and public policy (1979-89), but blew it. He sums his argument with this: “Human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties, or as individuals are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations.” It seems we are wired to "obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the longterm out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.”

Naomi Klein, the brilliant and passionate ecosocialist journalist, replied furiously that it was the neoliberals who “lost the Earth,” not the royal “we” of Rich’s piece, because the masses are disempowered, even in so-called liberal democracies.  Climate research arrived at the moment between two political and economic paradigms, with the remnants of the New Deal, augmented by Rachel Carson,  Earth Day and the Nixon Congress, replaced by neoliberalism.   Any “deals” on the climate, would have to work within the new framework, viz carbon trading, carbon taxes, and that ugliest of terms, “ecosystem services.” Klein’s analysis - see her full-blown argument in This Changes Everything-  is astute and well-researched, though her solution to the climate dilemma – a global socialist revolution by 2019 – is a progressive’s fantasy. 

Though neoliberalism arrived during the Reagan presidency, it continued into the first Bush presidency, Clinton, and the presidents serving since the pivotal 2000 election.  The Republican Party remains its primary champion, but it has captured the political elites of all sides and in all countries. I remember the amazement with which I read a short newspaper piece reporting on an Asian economic summit where Bill Clinton called the Market a “force of nature.”   Here's an excellent history and critique of neoliberalism.

Peter Sawtell, whose Ecojustice Notes is a welcome weekly invitation to ecospiritual dialogue, also challenges Rich’s assertions about human nature, linking to a rich series of articles from the liberal press.  More than one of them points out that, whereas Rich tries to show that some Republicans in Congress were ready to act on climate even before their Democratic colleagues, and that Exxon did early research which corroborated the claims of climate scientists, the Republican Party, above all other political forces on the planet, and the Big Fossil oligarchy, headed by Exxon, have done more damage in the political climate wars than any other players. 

So, are Klein and Sawtell et al correct, that it is social, political and economic structures at work here, rather than something called “human nature?”  From a broadly Marxist perspective, they are. But I’m afraid that both personal psychology and social behavior are aspects of the all-too-human.  Industrial capitalism, which has extended its reach beyond liberal democracies to the state capitalism of China, has magnified the terrifying power of our crafty minds and vastly extended hands. Yes, Naomi, just as the necessary conditions for grappling with the dreadful awakening of the Climate Beast (Tim Flannery) came together, the perfect storm of the neoliberal inflection of economics, industry and politics arrived as well.  

In This Changes Everything, Klein makes the case for a simmering global socialist uprising, which is the only thing that can save us.  She is arguing for structural change, and she’s talking non-violent revolution.  Precisely.  The powers that be, even if they have a vise-grip, remain in power only as long as the masses tolerate them.  Change must be born in the hearts and minds of human beings, which are immensely malleable, however noble their capabilities at the highest range. My mentor Joanna Macy has identified the key problem, which is that the self-reflexive consciousness that humans and a few other big-brained mammals have achieved, has not broken through to the level of social systems.  We do have “esprit de corps” in various organizations, though it’s probably declining, and orators can stir mass passions  - for good or bad.  But the whole social system responding as one to all the feedback necessary for survival has not happened yet.  The history of consciousness is full of such breakthroughs at the level of the individual personality, all the way to God-consciousness. Joanna suggests that the current crisis for the survival of higher life on Earth could be what engenders “self-reflexivity on the next holonic level,” that is at the level of social systems.  She wrote this twenty years ago.

Rich’s focus on individual personalities satisfies our hunger for and identification with the hero’s quest – and James Hansen, who I have met twice, is one of mine.  But this model is inadequate for the terrifying global moment in which we stand.  As Larry Rasmussen says, we cannot solve anthropocene problems with holocene tools of imagination and morality.  Some of these are part of the problem, especially our enduring tendency to measure everything in terms of its effect on humans alone, rather than the whole Earth community.

A perfect storm stopped effective climate action just as it was crystallizing. It was more than just “human nature” that caused humanity to miss the chance in the 80’s to prevent climate catastrophe. Neoliberalism both 1) undermined the devotion to social welfare of a world order where Keynesian constraints (“embedded liberalism”) reigned in unfettered capitalism and 2) led us more fully into the all-too-human characteristics of procuring as much as we can for ourselves and our tribe.  Indeed, the “end of history” now has the ironic ring of the end of global civilization, rather than the triumph of the capitalist West.

However, underneath political and economic theory, anthropologists and primatologists have identified patterns which make escaping the endgame of civilization unlikely, and the exhaustive polymath Craig Dilworth has written a longterm history coming to the conclusion that we are Too Smart for Our Own Good (and too Dumb to Change), which I reviewed in this blog. Though it’s not fashionable these days, there is something one could call human nature, rooted in the genetic and behavioral matrix of the primate order.  Evolutionary breakthroughs which might refine that nature may be more frequent at moments of great stress, but it’s getting awfully late in the game.

After the Flood, the Unnameable made a rainbow sign in the clouds signaling his covenant  “between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come,” to preserve Creation (especially to not send the floodwaters again).  Generations have felt comfort from these words in Genesis (12-16).  But with the oceans beginning their now inexorable rise, anxiety creeps in among the faithful who pay attention to Creation, and dread certainty among those of who are awake.  We have broken our end of the covenant, upon which the theology of stewardship has been built.  But this is not the end of the story.

Labels: "Losing Earth", Anthropocene, catastrophic climate change, Exxon, Genesis Covenant, James Hansen, Joanna Macy, Naomi Klein, neoliberalism, Republican Party

J.L. Schellenberg is an analytic philosopher and a religious skeptic. But because he takes evolution seriously, he recognizes the vast potential for future development of the process of “reflective intelligence” which began for us, and from the perspective of Thomas Berry, the universe itself, roughly 50,000 years ago. Though a skeptic with regard to specific beliefs and their truth-claims, he is an imaginative being with a wide-open sense of awe and wonder, which he correctly recognizes as the basis for faith, but not necessarily belief. In the current argument between “scientistic” atheists and creationists, Schellenberg prosecutes both sides for being immature and premature in their judgments, “rationally unsustainable.” (64) “Because we are immature, belief is premature.” (49) But if belief is unwarranted, so is the attack on the very possibility of ultimate reality by militant atheistic writers such as Richard Dawkins. And he criticizes naturalists (Barbara Forrest), who “ regularly overestimate the accomplishments of science and underestimate the potential of religion.” A “beliefless faith“ supports that potential, which he feels is huge over the billion-year future evolution of complex life on Earth. As opposed to the systematic universal doubt of science, Schellenberg argues for an “evolutionary religious skepticism,” that remains open to continuing revelation of the divine over that vast period.

Labels: Advaita, beliefless faith, Evolutionary Religion, George Fox, Joanna Macy, Krishna Prem, Permian catastrophe, philosophy of religion, Quakerism, Richard Dawkins, Rmana Maharshi, sixth extinction, Thomas Berry

So let me tell you about how Evolutionary Religion led me back into the land of Hope. My last post on hope, “Letting Go of Honest Hope,” grounded me in the biblical hope that was at the core of the still-incomplete Quaker renewal of Christianity. Evolutionary Religion moves that hope from the heavenly kingdom to the vast prospect of a billion years of religious evolution, many of whose basic tenets have already been addressed by Friends' peculiar spirituality.

Labels: cosmogenetic faith, Darwinian revolution, deep time, Evolutionary Religion, human extinction, Joanna Macy, Quaker renewal of Christianity, Schellenberg

Honest hope. I have insisted upon it for several years now, ever since reading Dianne Dumanoski, who finishes The End of the Long Summer with a short chapter by that title. “In times of danger, bitter truths serve us better than sweet lies.” Blind hope kills, whereas honest hope accepts the immense uncertainty of the survival of civilization, even higher life, in an era beset by accelerating climate disequilibrium, which is offset by the tremendous capacity for adaptation and resilience shown by human evolutionary history.

Labels: Anthropocene, Apocalypse, batah, climate change, Collapsing Consciously, cosmolgical faith, elpis, End of the Long Summer, geo-engineering, holocene, honest hope, Joanna Macy, technofixes, Truth Mandala

Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton's Requiem for a Species is both deeply sobering and salutary, in the sense that it awakens us not only to the climate war we have shrunk from engaging, but its likely result if we do not. As the climate data gets more and more alarming while the international political response remains gridlocked, he states what many of us deeply sensed at the time, that Copenhagen December 2009 was the “last hope for humanity to pull back from the abyss.”

Labels: Active Hope, Bill McKibben, climate denial, Copenhagen, death of the Amazon, geo-engineering, Joanna Macy, Requiem for a Species, Rolling Stone, Six Degrees, will to power

Two traditions have anchored my personal spiritual practice since laying down college teaching at the millennium, returning to Appalachia to work for the healing of the earth – and myself. The first set of practices clusters around enlarging my field of awareness to honor the entire earth system, Gaia, as a divine whole and in her particulars, both saying thanks for participation in the exquisite natural world in the Southern Highlands and in grieving what we are losing here and elsewhere. This practice, which still feels like an apprenticeship after 10 years, grows out of my encounters and training with Joanna Macy and her process of accepting the despair which we all carry for the earth, then moving through it to empowering our place in healing the earth. All of this is framed by prayers of thanksgiving, both for what the earth gives us, and for the opportunity to speak and act on her behalf. Joanna Macy's training is in Tibetan Buddhism, which honors the natural world and a host of divinities who embody natural forces and characteristics. It incorporates elements of Himalayan shamanism as well as pre-Buddhist India, both Vedic and animistic. Though the modern term for this approach, following Arne Naess, is “Deep Ecology,” I name it as shamanistic: practices that honor the divinity shot through all of creation, mirroring each aspect through our own consciousness and ritual. The second set of practices grows out of Advaita Vedanta. Historical circumstance threw me into the midst of a religion that accepted and accommodated every practice in South Asia, including yoga, animism, as well as priestly brahmanism and polytheism. Though I was taken by everything about the Hindu culture in 1968, it was self-inquiry as taught by Ramana Maharshi that affected me most deeply. He took the ancient practice of the jnana yogi, neti, neti – which recognized the ineffable quality of the divine by saying “not this, not that” to every experience or formulation of God, turning it into the simple inquiry, the vichara, “Who am I?” For every experience, including the customary practice of dividing experience into body-mind (the “self”), the world, and god, is at root only the emanation of the Self, (Brahman), the ultimate creator, sustainer and destroyer of the universe. The I thought is primary, and no other thought or image is possible without it. This primal thought itself arises as an epiphenomenal miracle from the Self, which is all that exists. After a couple of years of intermittent practice as a young adult, I quit, frustrated with my lack of progress. Then, a few years ago, I discovered, virtually in my backyard, a community that trains folks in the Maharshi's self-inquiry. Turns out that the practice which the ashram authorities forbade to be transmitted at the Maharshi's ashram in South India has been taught since 1978 in NC, first in Greensboro at a storefront, now at a rural ashram near Asheboro, home of the NC Zoo. The center calls itself AHAM (Association for the Happiness of All Mankind), and its training in self-inquiry is authentic, augmented by a highly supportive structure for thoroughly incorporating the teaching in one's life. Since re-encountering self-inquiry through the AHAM community, I have prioritized this practice. As the Maharshi said, one must always come to this in the end, no matter what practice one follows initially. But I sense that I am not sufficiently honoring the Tibetan-shamanistic practices I learned from Joanna. I am not moving through despair to an affirmation of the essential joy of our true creative nature that the Maharshi says is our natural state, and which I usually re-experience when I do the deep ecology exercises. Instead of using the sympathetic identification of shamanism, I merely glance outdoors and retire to my meditation cushion, where I struggle with the endless stream of thoughts. They occasionally cease long enough to dive within to the questions, who's experiencing, who's thinking, to the gateway question, “who am I?” There is rarely very much energy in the process (maybe I should do more yoga first, or pranayam {breathing exercises}, I ask myself). I struggle to get beyond a deadening apathy, stalked by despair over the state of the earth that I hold at bay long enough to engage in the effort at meditation. Occasionally this works, ending despair by letting it in, going through it, and simply cutting off the feeling by retracing the I-thought, undoing karma. Despair, and any other feeling or thought, is totally destroyed as soon as one asks, “who's thinking ..who's feeling? But when the vichara is working, even with the eyes open, the world feels unreal, like an image, a mirage. When the shamanistic practice works, on the other hand, I enter into identification with the world as plant, creature or natural feature, and what starts to feel unreal is experiencing myself as a separate entity. The practice takes me outside of myself, beyond experiencing that self as encapsulated in my body, breaking down boundaries, rendering them more fluid. I expand my identity, beginning to experience what Naess called the ecological self. So it feels like the two practices are moving in opposite directions. It is true that each of them moves beyond the ego, the little tyrant who converts everything to his dominion. Shamanism moves beyond the ego through identification with wider and wider circles of being. I am that too. Advaita, especially through the Marharshi's self-inquiry, moves beyond the ego by going through it more deeply within, moving into identity with the Self who creates the world, including Gaia in all her multifaceted being. The “I” disappears into its source, like waves into the ocean. I am only That. I deeply honor both of these practices, and have had remarkable experiences using each method. Shamanism feels closer to my experience, because I am an embodied being. But Advaita feels fundamentally true, however fleetingly I experience its core: I am that I am. To choose one over the other feels fundamentally wrong. What eludes me is integrating them. NEXT: Thoughts about integration of the two practices.

Labels: Advaita, AHAM, Arne Naess, deep ecology, Joanna Macy, Ramana Maharshi, self-inquiry, shamanism

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
-James Baldwin

A few weeks ago at our small rural Friends Meeting, I spoke on the theme of the fading dream of humanity living gently on the earth. A dear friend had requested that we sing “I Dreamed a Dream” - an iconic song of innocent hope. When we got to the line, “The dream fades...”, I thought of our present dilemma, caught under the towering tsunami of climate change. The songwriter moves from fading dream to present vision, but my heart did not. After we settled into worship, I spoke about this feeling, recounting a brief history of climate change public opinion and politics since the wake-up occasioned by “An Inconvenient Truth.” I noted that many, including some sitting in our lovely meeting house, have gone back to sleep, and, given the present alignment of Congress and a weak Executive, the window for ordinary political action has closed.

The Meeting had recently supported my civil disobedience and arrest at the White House over the tarsands pipeline. I acknowledged this, and called for folks to join me. I did not speak from a place of helplessness, but owned my sadness, and the sense that this Woodstock era song felt dated. Feeling pulled into the maw of despair, I fumbled a bit to recall words from another time, when I spoke of the need for “honest hope.” But in the end the power of the song, still ringing in my heart, took over, and I heard my last words as I sat down, that sustainable life on earth was a “fading dream.”

I have been speaking in churches for almost a decade now, and learned from my early experiences in the pulpit that people need hope even more than they need to face the facts of our present predicament. So I tend to end all my messages on a hopeful tone, which for me, consists in a deep faith in our Creator, a faith that extends beyond the present universe into the depths of Her power to create anew, no matter how badly we may fail as stewards in this one. But this time I did not end on a note of hope.

If matters had been left there, with the words “fading dream” still reverberating as we closed meeting, I would have failed in my role as a faith leader in my community. Fortunately, traditional Quakers do not have ministers who control the liturgy and the pulpit. So, at the end of Meeting, two Friends rose to speak. One recounted recently hearing the Dalai Lama speak, who reaffirmed hope even in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems. As a teacher of religious studies at a Quaker secondary school, he added that hope is the wellspring of all religions. The second simply affirmed George Fox's statement, to look for that of God in everyone. So the collective ministry of the Meeting ministered to the congregants' need for hope.

Though I have clerked two Quaker meetings and served many years as clerk of Ministry and Nurture for yearly meeting, I have been eldered more than once for being too despairing. After all, it is our task to wait silently until we clearly hear the voice of God prompting us to speak. Given God's infinite potency, God's speech is not a message of despair. We may despair before the vision of God in the Whirlwind, or the Tsunami of Climate Change, but God within these powers and visions works thus to awaken us. What I want to acknowledge is that despair is a sign of honest awakening from the torpor of apathy and denial. If love is the first motion, then awakening to the recognition of our sin – being cut off from God and Her Creation - is the beginning of the motion back. Fox, in his journal passage prior to the famous quote on that of God in everyone, spoke of his prolonged experience of the Ocean of Darkness that leads to the Ocean of Light, if we have the courage to cross it.

So I reaffirm the need to face the facts of the present human and planetary condition, not to deny or gloss over them. If we really take in the depth and scope of our predicament, we may well despair. I also reaffirm that a practice such as Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment is critical in keeping our hope honest. We need to go into our despair, not avoid it, which only leads to a deadening, quickly becoming apathy. Into it and through it, either with the help of a trainer like Joanna in the context of group wisdom, or through a well-grounded personal spiritual practice. On the other side of despair, one frequently experiences a heightened sense of creativity and energy to deal with our dilemmas. If we block negative emotion, we close down the full range of response that unlocks our innate evolutionary creativity, opening the door to honest hope.

But is “honest hope” a non-sequitur? In the sense that hope is boundless, yes. And if we interpret honest hope to be a synonym for rational odds, then we're not talking about hope. On the other hand, innocent, untested hope has blind faith that our “unnegotiable” way of life, our capitalist religion, will save us, even in the face of a climate catastrophe whose parameters are being set more deeply every day. Hope for this world is always incomplete, ultimately a lie. The ultimate hope is in the Lord, the Creator, wherein dwells the possibility of the Phoenix Universe beyond this one. And that is where my ministry, even as it traverses the Ocean of Darkness that dominates our present world, needs to rest.

Labels: An Inconvenient Truth, collective ministry, George Fox, Joanna Macy, Phoenix Universe, tarsands action

Though the millennium has passed, and we’re still here, an apocalyptic mood remains. Small wonder. We are in a global recession, the worst since the Great Depression, multiple conflicts contradict the German left’s pronouncement that war is “obsolete”, and climate change threatens the world as we know it. Christian fundamentalists still speak of End Times and the Rapture, including some inside the late unlamented Bush administration. Radical Muslims are in continual jihad against Western civilization and its elder brother Abrahamic faith, a desperate battle which will not end until industrial civilization ends. And now the Mayan prophecy, computed on independent calendars, of the world’s end December 21, 2012 stares us in the face.

Another camp, following mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, has translated the whole business of the singularity, occurring at the event horizon of the visible universe, into the human realm, as Stewart Brand explains in The Clock of the Long Now. The rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, throwing off the constants figured in the first half of the 20th century. Similarly, the rate of technological explosion is accelerating, and our ancient primate and mammalian encoded genetic make-up struggles to cope. Vinge thinks this isn’t just sci-fi, but that our consciousness is rapidly approaching singularity, something like a Black Hole, which, once entered, will feel like being pulled like a piece of taffy, infinitely, or until we change states. If you resist it, you’re torn apart. “Society itself could be dismembered, as some people ride the breaking wave of ever-new technology over the event horizon into invisibility while others lag behind, feeling the immense gravitational pull of still–accelerating tech, while no longer able to see it” (Long Now, 21).

The consensus date for this techno-singularity is 2035. What happens beyond that point is “unknown and unknowable.” The crest of the wave of humanity disappearing into the singularity is the new age tech version of the Rapture. Inventor Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near, 2005) speaks confidently of these highly skilled techno-surfers as becoming asymptotic to God, who would thus be the chaotic attractor within the Black Hole.

This leaves us a long way from the blueprints in our archaic genetic makeup. I have long been troubled by loose talk about “conscious evolution,” something you can go study with Andrew Cohen, or pursue as a higher degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Classical biological evolution has never been “conscious”; it is driven by natural selection, and the qualities being selected for may be very different from the consequences to the species of the traits produced. I believe deeply, however, in immanence, that the Divine is present throughout the universe at every level, and that all outer evolutionary traits express an interiority that is purposeful. Call me an adherent of Intelligent Design if you will, but I am not talking about a grand Wizard/Puppeteer, staging this whole thing from some archimedean point outside the universe. Divine intelligence is a kind of entelechy working from within, expressed in outer forms which only make sense when one sees the pattern of the whole.

Allan Combs tries to make sense of the different ingredients in “evolution soup” in his book, The Radiance of Being. He distinguishes biological evolution from historical evolution, which has more to do with the progressive development and maturation of the psychospiritual dimension, including progressive structures of consciousness. This is not the place to go into the vast sweep of the historical development of hominid consciousness. But the last step envisioned by Combs’ two theorists of these structures, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, may have the potential to position us at the cusp of the moment of singularity. Gebser called it the Integral stage, when all structures of consciousness work together to re-member the “ever-present Origin.” As in Vedanta, unlike biological evolution, which is seemingly without a goal, the telos of spiritual evolution is to remember that each of us seemingly separate sentient beings is, and always has been, the Origin, God.

My understanding of conscious evolution, as opposed to evolution of consciousness, is that it involves individual consciousness. It occurs after the awakening of the soul to its higher goal of divine fulfilment, throughout the history of the truly human. But lately, in the last 15-20 years, some theorists have begun speaking as if this individual process actually was the laboratory for conscious evolution of the species. As Thomas Berry put it in the Great Work, we are at the juncture where it is necessary to reinvent the human at the species level.

The work of Rupert Sheldrake, among others, shows that Lamarck's ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics may not be as far-fetched as we once thought, opening the door to the possibility of something like conscious evolution at the species level. But it still feels to me like a category error: what is true for the individual is not at all the same as what occurs at the species level. In Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy distinguishes between the transformation of individual consciousness and self-reflexivity on the level of social systems. She wonders if our current global eco-crisis might engender the next step in systemic self-organization, a holonic shift in group consciousness. But if this were to occur, would we call it “conscious evolution” or an evolutinary response from within the Gaian system to preserve interspecies equilibrium?

Theorists of biological evolution point to periods of relatively rapid evolution, when genetic changes happened far more quickly than the traditional Darwinian process would predict. Combs speaks of “emergent evolution” in terms of transforming individual consciousness, rapid quantum-like shifts rather than the gradual development characteristic of “constructive” evolution. There seems to be a collective fantasy for this to happen globally, working at the species level. The leading wave goes into the Singularity, and the rest of us are left behind on an aging terrestrial wreck. This would be something like the triumph of homo sapiens over neanderthalis. In that instance, we proved to be more adaptable to a wide variety of conditions, and technology apparently played a part in it.

Pressured by the immense force of accelerating technological advancement, New Age techies literalize the process of historical evolution of consciousness, observed in homo sapiens on a fortunately-placed planet in a particular solar system in the Milky Way, making it a just-so narrative. For them it is not a matter of analogy or metaphor, an as if scenario. The leading edge, asymptotic to God, will simply disappear into the Singularity. This is the twenty-first century modulation of space colonization, which, however unworkable and morally repugnant, clung to a faint echo of possibility.

This new sci-fi fantasy has power because of our intuitive pull to the immense attractor within the Black Hole. But it remains sci-fi for me, nevertheless. Vinge and Kurzweil make the category error of imagining that spiritual development and technological development, as an extension of biological evolution, are one, occuring on the same ontological plane. It may feel as if the high-flying techies have disappeared, which is certainly the experience I've had trying to be mutually present with some of them. But to actually disappear is another thing altogether. This is true as well of the “gravitational pull of still-accelerating tech.” We would not experience this pull unless we assented to it as a spiritual reality. Archaic spiritual practices still remain valid, for instance those of truly gifted shamans. Those anchored in the Origin are not to be numbered just among the accelerating crest of the tech wave.

Instead of following this Singular crowd, how about looking at our whole enterprise from the perspective of that crusty old nineteeth century discipline of population biology? Placing conscious evolution within the physical constraints of biological evolution might well be instructive. Hence , our next post, which is on to the sobering prospect of population overshoot and collapse.

Labels: collapse, conscious evolution, ermergent evolution, Joanna Macy, mayan prophecy, rapture, Ray Kurzweil, singularity, Thomas Berry