What we feel collectively right now at this point and time in human history is pretty well summarized in a poem that was written more than a 100 years ago by an Irish poet, W.B. Yates.
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi…
Doesn’t that just feel like our time?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
We feel this way so often as we watch helplessly the daily mass shootings in our nation, the raping of our planet earth, the fury of effects of climate change, mass extinction of species and their ever shrinking habitats. Maybe our universe is spinning out of control.
And nobody seems to know how to work with it as we watch our congressional leaders in constant disarray.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We once used to expect our leaders to uphold truth, honesty, integrity, kindness, goodness, rule of law and democratic values. What galls me is their utter shamelessness of some of our elected leaders. I feel like Judge Judy who says to a claimant who is putting wool over her eye, “Don’t pee on my leg and try to tell me it’s raining.” We have to wonder, are we in some kind of collective psychosis, some sort of pathology as a nation that leaves us immobilized, morally numb, and catatonic? So many instances of reporting distress, suicides, and escalating violence of children in schools. What is going on?
It gives us the sense that this isn’t just a garden variety of human neurosis acting out. We are in the presence of something that we have forgotten how to talk about: EVIL. Are we in the grip of collective evil? If it is then what is it?
The spiritual wisdom tradition of all faiths is first and foremost practical. It’s sooner than later with the question of what can we do and how we do it. When you are floating down the flooded river holding on to a floating tree with dear life from tsunami is not a time to ponder the nature of water. Something more immediate is needed to respond to the existential threat to our planet that we are utterly dependent for our own survival. The big picture is not coming to a perfect understanding of evil but to ask a more urgent question: What is God or the Universe asking us to do in this time and place we find ourselves?
I think with these concerns percolating just beneath the surface of a boiling stew of dark elements plaguing our society, the time is more than over due to gather our hearts and minds to address this collective shadow with sobriety. If you want to look at where humankind is right now in our evolution of consciousness, I think we are at a major cusp of death throes of the mental structure that has dominated the Western Civilization for the past 2500 years. We need something much deeper and wider. We need to upgrade our conscious software. There have been signs in the past 100 years that this whole thing is cracking, fracturing, splitting, and disintegrating. It really does feel like neck and neck of the tipping point in our planet where the Universe is crying out to intervene before we lose it all.
There is both the good news and bad news to where we find ourselves. The good news is that this cracking is opening a space for something new and stronger and vital to emerge to replace the old mental structure that is leading us down the wrong path. A Turkish Proverb says, “No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.” If we have any hope left in our bones then this is where the hope comes in. This really might be the birth pang of the next epiphany that will transform our collective consciousness. This is still continuing to be discovered and playing out in our collective dialogue in the market square between the old that doesn’t want to be replaced and the new that wants to replace it.
The dicey thing is, is it going to take the whole planet with it before the new life comes out of the birth canal? Because there are births that kill the mother. When we watch the scale of systematic rape of the planet and the harms that it’s causing to both humans and animals and the environment, we anxiously wonder are we going to make it? It feels like we are running out of time and hu-man species are in mass denial.
A call to adapt new human collective consciousness is pressing upon us. This is more than just lack of collective will. It is a lack of direction that we don’t know how to best mobilize our resources to re-verse the destructive path we are on. May God help us.
John
