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.