21 December 2012 - End of the World?

Thinky thoughts today about 21 December 2012 – the end of the Mayan calendar. And thinking about something my dad said when I was over visiting him in Adelaide this weekend. He said to me during one of our many philosophical conversations: “I think there’s something in it. People all over the world are boiling over at the injustices. You can’t have 5% of the people in the world owning 90% of the world’s limited resources, while everyone else goes hungry. Things just can’t go on like this much longer.”  I paraphrase very slightly, but that’s the gist of it.

I’d never heard my dad talk like this before – of change in the wind, of injustice and people the world over being ready to address it. I’d never heard him talk about positive change. Mostly my dad has been a ‘the world sucks and that’s just the way it is’ type of guy. Mostly what I’d heard as a kid consisted of ‘it’s each man to himself…  money makes the world go around…. don’t be idealistic’. So to hear him talk about it in this way – only days after another friend of mine and I had a similar conversation, which was only days after my hairdresser started talking to me about related issues quite unprompted by me – got me to thinking.

There’s change in the wind. There’s no doubt in my mind.
Everywhere I go I have conversations with people that point to an awakening.

This may seem counterintuitive because everywhere I look I can also see people yelling at each other, talking past each other, being angrier than they’ve ever been, abusing each other, nay-saying, fearing, dismissing, being generally unhappy about things and also being sure that it’s completely someone else’s fault.

So how to account for those conversations. Conversations of empathy, of seeing that something is very wrong (or perhaps finally very right for change), of noticing that something’s got to give. Conversations of people finding their own path and figuring out how they can make a difference in the world. Conversations that point to a desire to create a better future, and not just that, but the certainty that the better future is within reach and in some ways utterly inevitable.

I could point to lots of ‘evidence’ and eloquent articles about how our current paradigm – the way we’ve structured things – is in the middle of a serious decline and disolution.
Articles like this one:  http://paulgilding.com/discussion-papers/scream-crash-boom-2

But for me what’s most ironic is that it is being enabled by the very thing that is now in the process of forming into something new – the principles that led to the industrial revolution which saw the emergence of widespread public education. The industrial revolution is in many ways I think partly responsible for the social revolution that has followed in its wake. A social movement that has seen many people rise out of poverty, women’s suffrage and the right to an education and a vote, a civil rights movement, the formation of unions and worker’s rights, the rise of the secular state, the rights of the child and banning of child labour, international bodies of cooperation like the UN, the banning and dismantling of slavery in Britain and the US, human rights charters, the incredible rise of environmentalism, LGBT rights, the Arab spring, corporate accountability, and the rise of a generation of people who are not religious but who are defining their own personal spirituality based on empathy and civic responsibility. Even Pussy Riot – a group of young feminists taking it to one of the most patriarchal societies in the world – and the outrage in the US over the GOP’s misogynistic platform points to a much-needed re-emergence of feminist thinking.

If you picture this all as a big bang, with its germination in the incredible intellectual progress and in many ways spiritual crises of the late 1800’s, we are only now starting to see how it is reframing and redesigning our world; and how it is beginning to impact even the most conservative countries and cultures. By anyone’s definition, the last 150 years have been privy to the most incredible social revolution and evolution of human consciousness that the world has ever seen.

Sometimes we get lost in the microscopic view of what is happening right now, and of the short-term rises and falls on a longer path. But pull out a bit and suddenly the bigger picture comes into view. You start to see that the change that began with the rise of the unions and the vote for women is still ongoing and that we are the generation stuck between what was and what will be.
That we are the generation  that gets to decide where to from here.

Yet how do we account for all the negativity. How do we account for Syria, and Putin, and the industrial-military complex, for the Tea Party and the rise of the extreme right. How to account for the corporate criminals and Wall Street greed, for the Andrew Bolts, Alan Jones’s and Tony Abbott’s of the world who feed and live off people’s fear of the unknown… who sow the seeds of division. How do we account for the two world wars, for Vietnam and Korea, and Afghanistan and Iraq, for 911.  For Israel and Palestine. In many ways this warfare and greed is not new – it’s just the same stuff of centuries past, repackaged into a convenient 24 hour news cycle.

(Although did you know, we are the most peaceful generation of humans in the history of our species: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)  

In any case, to understand this on an archetypal and meta level, I look to Jung and his description of the Shadow. When talking about the Shadow, Jung wrote: "Everyone carries a shadow… and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

According to Jung (and Wikipedia) the shadow is instinctive and irrational and prone to projection. (That is it is good at turning a personal moral deficiency and inferiority and reflecting onto someone else).

But Jung also believed that while the shadow might be the dark and sinister part of a human being, it was also the seat of creativity and represented “the true spirit of life”.

For Jung the only way to deal with the shadow was to first see it and accept it in its entirety. That is to bring it out into the light for examination. In fact, he considered encountering the shadow as crucial to evolving consciousness and the breakdown of the constructed ‘persona’.

Putting it into my own words then, it seems to me that on any journey to become a more conscious, aware and empathetic person, we must first look at our shadow side – that part of us that we project onto others because it is too painful to admit it in ourselves.

Look at the way conversations between right-wing and left-wing people run in the online world and you will find ample evidence of projection. Both accuse each other of moral deficiency. Both accuse each other of intellectual-inferiority. Both accuse each other of hypocrisy. That is no accident to my way of thinking. We are mirroring each other… which is shadow-projection in practice.

I think that what is happening culturally now on a super-narrative level is the bringing of the shadow into our conscious awareness. If we are seeing an explosion of light and awareness and empathy, we are also seeing an explosion of fear and negativity. And it is no coincidence in my mind that we are seeing both at the same time.

Rather I think it is evidence that the old structures and belief systems around us are starting to finally dissolve and as they do human fear and negativity is hitting a high. It is everywhere to be seen and everyone can see it. People are finally starting to ask the question – why are we so afraid… and they are discovering that the answers lie often with ourselves, our belief systems, and the stories we are telling ourselves.

The only question then remains for me, what beliefs, stories and structures are we going to replace them with, and that in my mind is far from decided.  We are still writing that part. That is still vague and shrouded in future mist.

Martin Luther King once said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

I would say that maybe we are on the far-end of that arc now – a moment of technological, social and spiritual revolution. A time where the old structures are finally coming down. That what looks like destruction, is actually the communal shadow being integrated and bringing with it a moment of genuine creative potential.

I think that’s something worth celebrating.

Just a thought.

Why the environment?

Thinky Thoughts today on environmentalism and the question of why. I know a few of my friends have asked me why I’m so passionate about the environment. What is it that makes protecting this natural world of ours so important to me. Is it the koalas or the kangaroos. Is it cute fuzzy animals. Is it because whales are beautiful to look at or because baby seals are so sweet.

No to all of that. At least, that’s not the real reason. Yes, whales are beautiful and majestic. Yes, baby seals are like balls of cotton wool with big, black, earnest eyes that make you want to pick them up and schmoosh them. (Side note: one of the most endearing images for me of sheer guts and compassion is of Paul Watson, the Captain of the Sea Shepherd, carrying a baby seal in his arms and running away from a massive seal-hunters ship coming up behind him. This man is now being hounded by the legal systems of three countries because our law has been shanghaied by the corporates. That’s justice for you.)

My first environmental act was when I was seven or eight years old. I read a story in my mum’s Woman’s Weekly magazine about sealing. They had photos in it of a seal that had been clubbed to death. To this day, I’m not sure how such an important article got in Woman’s Day but there it was. I was horrified. My eight year old brain couldn’t understand why anyone – anyone – would do this to a helpless creature for any reason. What possible reason could there be for this violence?

I cut the photos out and pasted them in a letter. I used big red arrows to point to the pointless violence visited on this poor creature and I sent it to then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser with the words ‘Why Prime Minster? How could you let this happen?’

I got a letter back. It was a standard form letter – we support the regulations and guidelines set by Canada – but to this day I wonder about the public servant who ripped open my letter and read it first. Did he or she feel something? Did it move them? Did they for a moment consider doing something different from what they did every day?

I’ll never know.

So why environment? Is it really about the seals?

No. It’s about us. Scientists haven’t entirely figured it out yet, but they’ve figured out enough to know that we need the environment for our survival. I’m not just talking about for food, air or water. I’m not talking about the economic rationalist justification for why would should care. That insidious paradigm that dictates we must whittle everything down to a dollar value so that we can understand its worth.

I’m talking about our spiritual wellbeing and our health. We still don’t fully understand this communally, but the violence we visit upon our natural home is violence we visit upon ourselves. Every time we commit an act of terror on a species or creature or another human being, that chips away at our collective soul. The natural world exists in a balance and we are part of that balance. Were all the trees to go, and big open-cut mines to take their place, we couldn’t last long ourselves after that. Not in any form most of us would care to live in.

To see the price we’re paying for the path we’re taking look around you – look at our indigenous people and the wisdom we’re ignoring, look at our native fauna and flora, look at our dilapidated rivers, look at our polluted skies,  look at our acidifying oceans, our disappearing fish populations, our endangered wildlife, look at our bloodied and battered whales, look at our dead baby seals, look at our disappearing rainforests, look at the dismal, apocalyptic waste-land that is the Alberta Tar Sands. And don’t stop there. Look at our corrupt politicians, look at our broken political system, look at our culture ‘wars’ (yes, even here we must war with each other), look at our apathetic population (count me in that mix, because I could do more than I am), look at our cynicism, look at our societal obsession with beauty and passing, meaningless fads, look at our epidemic of depression, look at our suicide rates, look at our obsession with 'finding' happiness, look at our obsession with reality TV. (Christ! Look at that!)

Look at all of that and ask yourself – is it worth it? Did we get a good return on our investment for what we paid for with our priceless and irreplaceable treasures? Who’s profiting from this? And then ask yourself why we should allow individual profit to trump communal good. Does that really make any sense at all?

I don’t want to leave this on a sour note though, so I’ll go further. Because there is a further.

Look at the community groups that have sprung up all over the world to speak truth to power, look at the courage of the woman who’s been up a tree in Tasmania for months protesting – putting her life on hold for what she cares about, look at the scientists who are discovering new and renewable ways to power our lives, look at the technological advances we are making that promise a cleaner and better world. Look at our scientists and our healers, look at our children and their optimism and dreams, look at the Mars Rover, look at our artists. Look at the women and men out there creating, solving, caring about each other, working to save our trees, our lions, our elephants, our monkeys, our rivers, our tigers, our koalas, our Tasmanian devils, our poor, our needy, our sick and injured. Look at our doctors and nurses, look at our carers, look at our families. Look at the fact that for every selfish person there are ten of us who are not, look at what we’re capable of.

Look at what we’re capable of and ask yourself – why can’t we have the world that most of us want? What’s standing in our way? Is it them – those faceless men in power who have corrupted our system and each other? There’s less of them, more of us.

Look at our planet then turn and look at them, and ask yourself – as I am doing today – who will stand up to them if not us? Are we really going to let these bullies dictate what the rest of us have to deal with, pay for and put up with? Really? Bollocks.

Now one final thing – look at our favourite story heroes. The ones you always wanted to be. The Han Solos. The Luke Skywalkers. The Leias. The Frodos and Sams. The Aragorns and Gandalfs. Look at the Thors and the Iron Mans and the Xenas. Look at our Atreyus and our Harry Potters. It’s fiction... right?

But wait – we have things to defend and speak up for don’t we? Why couldn’t that be you and me?

Maybe the only thing that stands between the world we know we can create and the reality of creating it is you and me.

Just a thought.