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Actions Taken Now May Well Determine Humanity’s Future
- Daniel Pinchbeck
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Welcome to Healing From Within. I am your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit Answers for Healing and Infinite Love which shares stories that illuminate the reality of life in all aspects and ways to utilize healing energies, intuition, and our higher selves to create a healthy prosperous life for ourselves and others and am delighted to welcome Daniel Pinchbeck author of How Soon Is Now? who will show us how the ecological crisis we are experiencing now can provide an opportunity for a rapid evolution of human society on all levels.
As listeners of the show over time have come to expect, my guests and I share intimate stories and insights in the hopes of once again remembering who we are as spiritual beings having a physical life with the hopes of balancing the best of our connections to each other and our physical world, to create health, prosperity, balance, compassion, love and a unified humanity and world.
In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” Daniel Pinchbeck who is also the author of Breathing Open The Head and Notes From The Edge Times and other books, covers everything from energy and agriculture, politics, media and ideology, in order to understand the nature of the soul and the future of our current world.
Thinking back to his childhood Daniel remembers the many creative talented people who his parents as artists living in New York City were associated with and lived in a very open liberal mindset and creative artistic community of ideas social philosophy and gifted people.
That brings us to the world of today which is much different than the thoughts and expectations of that time in Daniel’s life. Many of us are busy trying to understand how our world has gotten to be on the brink of an ecological mega crisis and how we must begin to think of ways to change what is obvious to so many at this challenging time in our national and world history. This is not fantasy but true.
Postmodern civilization is already a pseudo—utopia. Over the last few centuries we have constructed an artificial paradise of consumer good—the society of the spectacle—for those with the resources to enjoy it. Unfortunately this artificial paradise is built on excessive waste and ecological destruction. It has created misery for those on the margins, the victims of famines, wars and genocides. By addressing its flaws we can realize the next manifestation of our genius as a species and perhaps achieve in comparison a true utopia. I don’t think a dieback of the human population is inevitable, perhaps, I refuse to believe it. But the longer we wait to re-launch our societal operating system, the more difficult it will be to avert planetary catastrophe. We have already waited too long.
In his book Daniel tells us of the philosopher Ken Wilber and his model called spiral dynamics which Sheryl found most interesting. The philosopher Ken Wilber tracks the evolution of consciousness through a model called spiral dynamics. According to his analysis the leading edge of consciousness since the 1960’s has been the post modern worldview characterized by terms like diversity, inclusion, pluralism, but also moving towards individualism and relativism. The post modern worldview rejects hierarchies and absolutes, and believes in equal rights for all. Unfortunately the negative pole of this worldview leads to the belief that there is no privileged position and no independent truth.
When all truth is seen as entirely subjective and contextually contingent there is no reason to believe anything at all…Sheryl says “This could be a problem.” Taken to extremes, the postmodern worldview collapses into narcissism and nihilism. The extreme right identified the flaw in this worldview. They weaponized its extreme relativism—which Wilber calls “a perspectival madness—to dismiss all evidence—including scientific evidence on climate change—that contradicts their beliefs as fake news.
Wilber thinks we must differentiate between rigid hierarchies and what he calls holarchies where the advancing edge of consciousness doesn’t reject or dismiss earlier stages of development, but transcends and includes them. At our current stage of development, most people are still trapped in limited worldviews ruled by self-interest, or they identify with a particular ethnicity country or belief system. While a natural part of development in a time of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change, we must find a way to help people evolve through it.
Daniel says he finished writing How Soon Is Now? in the months before Donald Trump won the US election and does not find Trump’s rise to surprising. In a hyper mediated society Trump provides a hypnotic entertainment spectacle. Daniel says that although he believes Trump accelerates everything in the wrong direction, his bellicose extremism has revealed the cracks in the system. This is opening up the possibility of a collective awakening. A mass rising up could lead to a thorough redesign and launch of the new operating system for civilization outlined in this book. Sheryl agrees and says that Trump is a light force to expose what has long been hidden or unattended and is the spiritual component necessary for the massive changes needed at the present time here and worldwide. President Trump is a facilitator and motivating force for progress. Ironically the polarizing extremism of our current situation can catalyze a global movement in the right direction towards truth empathy and participation.
Sheryl says… “I believe the past forty years have lead us to the point we find ourselves now, as governments, corporations and social media, that although they have been concerned with economic issues, still poverty and disease, abuse of women and children, and entire cultures, and religions in third world countries. have not been helped by all the technological advances.
In January of 2016 before the November election I did a reading on Donald Trump as I was extremely disturbed by the many problems that had become apparent in the last few years of Obama’s administration. I intuitively knew that if Clinton became President and we continued the way we were going, the country would be irreversibly further damaged. It was shown to me by the many qualities that President Trump possessed that ultimately we would be on the road to bring about the social changes Daniel is talking about in his book. Sheryl saw Trump as a light house with light streaming to all parts of the world illuminating many issues that had been overlooked for too long and how his intense scrutiny would allow for more attention to be focused on many issues. Trump is the change-maker that Obama promised to be, but was unable to accomplish. While Obama did raise the national debt to ten trillion dollars more than all the last 43 presidents combined, we had little to show for it: war in the Middle East escalated, North Korea was on the brink of nuclear war and terrorism was worldwide. On top of that our nation’s infrastructures were failing, an aging population and medical expenses were overstretched , our military depleted and our boarders overrun by migrants. That is the country and world problems one man-- President Trump inherited from a poorly run political structure incurred over a long time. From my reading I knew he would win the election as he was spiritually in place to be part of “the spiritual revolution” that is happening now. The last message I received in Trump’s reading was, “He was to get everything in place and do the work now.” A few weeks after this reading, I read that Trump was establishing an extensive list for Supreme Court Justices and was working hard to prepare for what was ahead.
Some projects and initiatives that give us reason to take action to protect our environment and may turn things around are mentioned in your book. One that you mention is ocean acidification which is one of the worst problems facing us now. The oceans absorb a huge amount of the excess CO2 we produce inhaling it like gigantic lungs. This is leading to a breakdown of the coral reefs which harbor marine life diversity. Scientists estimate that if we turn 7 percent of the oceans into kelp farms the fast growing seaweed would leech all of the excess CO2 out of the water solving this crisis. Kelp is also a terrific food that provides many essential nutrients. Of course this is a massive undertaking but we do have the capacity to accomplish this.
As robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) develop they provide potent tools to reduce waste and pollution. These technologies could support humanity’s rapid transition to a regenerative society on a planetary scale. A former Goggle engineer has for instance developed drones that can plant millions of trees reforesting desolate areas. New approaches to agriculture include vertical farms, vat-grown meat to replace animal farming and the use of augmented reality to help farmers maximize efficiency and care for crops. New energy technologies convert biomass into gas plastics into fuel and kinetic energy into electricity.
Since the book came out there has been an explosion of interest in blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. A distributed ledger system where every exchange is permanently recorded and verifiable, blockchain is still in its infancy. Blockchain may provide the basis for global direct democracy or liquid democracy, where everyone on Earth gets equal opportunity to participate.
Another crucial development along with Trumpocalypse and the blockchain explosion is the #metoo movement incited by Harvey Weinstein and an endless procession in sex scandals in media government and corporate life. The #metoo movement gives voice to a deep evolutionary process happening in the consciousness of the collective. The oppressive regime of patriarchy depends upon the fear and silencing of women who have been victimized for thousands of years. Because of our connectivity as well as the freedom women attained in the West, patriarchial power can no longer operate in the old, opaque ways. We have not however healed the underlying wounds or reasons for such behavior or addressed its source. We must also remember that core issues around love and sexuality as the most political issues that our society is not able to bring up to consciousness and address. When we look back on our nomadic history and our primate prehistory we discover that the current social form based on the nuclear family and conscripted monogamy is a recent innovation. Probably we can’t completely heal the divisions between men and women, until we address the unjust oppressive nature of our economic system as a whole
The foreword for How Soon Is Now? is written by “Sting” who suggests that Daniel’s book seeks to address the enormous disconnect between our current activities as a species and the Earth’s ecology.
Sting says our distant ancestors would never have left the sea if there hadn’t been some sort of ecological crisis that forced them over generations onto dry land. In fact when we review the histories of our species it seems apparent that we only evolve through crisis. Individually as well as collectively we only make progress when we find ourselves out of our comfort zone. The evolutionary record is full of short-lived species that could not adapt to change.
According to many scientists who study global warming, we are quickly approaching the point of no return. We must move past blame and move towards solutions and it is though the threats to our existence on this planet that we may come together to act as one and isn’t that the Spiritual Plan that evolution and the creative force of the Universe expects us to discover and bring into existence.
Russell Brand who mentions Pinchbeck’s 2010 documentary, “2012 Time For Change” like Daniel Pinchbeck have come to understand that we need a revolution of consciousness and a profound transformation of our social systems if we want to avert short term regression into the primitive authoritarianism with which we are now threatened..This is not just about changing our political or economic system: the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
This is something that the traditional left still doesn’t get. The natural tribal leaders of the left are atheists and they see socialist or post capitalist future as inescapably godless. Since the last century there has been a belief that religion devotion and any idea of God must be discarded. However once we have abandoned any sense of a sacred relationship to the earth or cosmos we are left with nothing but a flat depressing reality. The nihilism inherent in our worldview leads to addictions egotism and other manias.
Sheryl says, “I have sought an understanding through philosophy science spiritualism and religion of the many questions I have had since childhood: “Who are we? Where do we come from? and What is the purpose of Life? As I asked more questions, teachers and experiences lead me to energy healing and ways to deeply feel other people’s emotions illness sorrows fear and hopes and dreams. I developed into a hands on healer and medium and in following that path learned the greatest truth: Beyond this life is eternal life and the circle of learning and sharing with those we love is the process by which all life evolves.”
in my book “The Living Spirit” I wrote, Throughout the amazing journey that followed I learned several truths. The first is that there is indeed an afterlife: the second is that the separation between the worlds or realms of eternal life is not a thick impenetrable wall but a thin veil that allows our loved ones in spirit to communicate with us and we with them. We are never alone but are guided by those loved ones and others at all times. They assist us in making the choices in this life that prepare us for the next dimension, in that world. The assistance received from spiritual influences will be in proportion to our wish for help and to the effort we expend in our self growth process in this lifetime. I also learned that everything in the universe—including our physical bodies is made up of pure energy and that working with this energy can affect a healing that repairs our bodies and allows our souls to move toward greater levels of awareness and expansion.
The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller in 1969 said, Humans now faces a choice, oblivion or utopia. Through a new embrace of spirituality we must prioritize our connection to one another and the planet over other lesser goals. Buckminster Fuller succinctly outlined what ought be our collective objectives: to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. Isn’t that simply sensible considering the ever-increasing power of our technologies and the new communications networks that link humanity together instantly.
Daniel says that most of us in the post-industrial West have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. As a people we live without a unifying myth. As the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell has pointed out our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths. In this book Pinchbeck offers some elements of a possible new mythic structure and a blueprint for the future. His ideas have been drawn from tribal shamanism, quantum physics, as well as evolutionary biology, and developments in fields like energy sustainability and industrial design. He envisions a system based on cooperation rather than competition that will allow our children and their children to live in relative peace and harmony without further annihilating the earth’s fragile ecosystems as we are now doing.
Sheryl say, “Like you Daniel I have become increasingly comfortable through an exploration off yoga and meditation to accept a mystical view on the nature of reality. Like you, I believe that as we wake up we have an opportunity and even a responsibility to deal with people as if they are divine—knowing that within them ultimately there is a divinity. The Christian mystic Emmet Fox wrote, Regardless of another person’s behavior the Christ within them is calling out to you. Christ represents the archetype of the higher self which we all have individually and which our species as a whole possess. Daniel in light of that thought suggests. “We should have compassion for corporations that even though multinational have been incredibly destructive, they are part of our evolution and could be repurposed for the good. The spiritual counterculture and New Age movement of the last decades focused on the power of presence, the awareness of presence and while good , we now need to go further. We can focus on the great task to make the world comprehensively successful for all.
Although we don’t realize it we already live within successive cycles of revolution that are occurring faster and faster. The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years: the Industrial Revolution took hundreds: the Technological Revolution took tens. The Spiritual Revolution is here now and we only have an instant to act.
Recently a client of Sheryl’s came in for an intuitive reading and energy healing session and told her about the Burning Man in Black Rock City. As soon as Sheryl started to read Daniel’s book she saw that as a journalist he had gone there initially in 2000. Daniel told Sheryl that he didn’t have great hopes for what he would find there. It seemed a self-congratulatory hippie-ish thing. But when he visited Black Rock City he realized the festival far excited what he had imagined. He was able to expand his sense of what humanity could become as he discovered a huge supportive loving community focused on self-expression direct experience and personal freedom…all the elements of the present spiritual revolution on its way for improving humanity. At that time Burning Man held a place for Daniel as crucial as the Paris Commune of 1870 was for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seeking a new society. The essential political insight from Burning Man was our capacity to reorganize society around different principles from current ones. But then Daniel saw that perhaps this celebratory spectacle was distracting us from the true and somber reality we needed to confront. Burning Man was a temporary autonomous zone which showed us what was possible but it diverted our energy from the hard work of changing the system—from confronting the powers that be..It was a cultural rebellion not social transformation. Burning Man had turned into a culture of its own which made people obedient and complacent.
Daniel says he has felt fury at our failure as a species to overcome the system—the military-industrial complex, Wall Street the corporate mega-machine. This system was not only corrupt creepy and hypocritical, but was also destroying the biosphere and with it our shared human future. Waves of protests and rebellions –the Arab Sprig Black Lives Matter Occupy Brexit—reveal the ire of the masses. We live in a post-colonial empire which uses violence—drone strikes, bombing raids, assassinations, military invasion, extraordinary rendition—to impose its will on the world as well as employing sneakier techniques like the ballooning debts that countries across Africa South America and Asia must pay their European and American overlords. The even worse problem is that our industrialized civilization has unleashed an ecological mega-crisis. We are threatened with an imminent planetary cataclysm that could drive us to extinction.
What happens next when it comes to the future? You say we suffer from a severe lack of direction. And yet we can say a few things about the future .
By 2050 without some drastic, as yet unimaginable intervention, without a radical globally orchestrated program to reduce CO2 levels through conservation and sequestration—the Earth will be considerably hotter than today. With Climate change quickening now, by then the planet could be two three or more degrees warmer. Accelerated warming might cause sea levels to rise with disastrous effects. Damage from so many recent storms are signs of what is to become more and more of regular events. Moving away from the shorelines, inland as many of the world’s low-lying cities including New York City could happen in a controlled or chaotic fashion.
Let’s assume the current political system finds a way to stay in place despite panics and paroxysms. In that case a tiny elite will still maintain control over the vast preponderance of the world’s wealth and property. They will employ private armies, killer drones and government surveillance to guard and protect their privileged status in a disintegrating world.
After returning from New Zealand where I attended a futuristic conference organized by two tech geniuses who dropped out of Harvard ten years ago to build a massive data-processing company they sold for a fortune. With the proceeds they acquired 2,000 acres of Kiwi forests and dairy farms. They are integrating the most up to date methods of organic agriculture , food forestry and solar powered villages assembling a dream team of yogis, Reiki healers, premaculture designers and software engineers. They chose New Zealand after surveying the options as the most likely place in the world to survive runaway climate change, global social breakdown, and everything else that’s coming.
It’s inevitable that the melting of the mountaintop glaciers that provide fresh water to several billion people and other drastic changes in climate and weather patterns will induce unending droughts. Famines could be endemic across much of the world. With these cataclysmic changes along with spreading disease, we might undergo significant severe population die-offs. These conditions will lead to regional wars over resources the scape-goating and persecution of many minorities, as well as the collapse of many nation-states.
Mass panic would force a decent into martial law. People would be electronically tagged and under surveillance. It would be a hotter more despicable world.
Another scenario could be an eruption of methane. Methane is roughly 30 times more potent as a heat trapping gas than CO2 While methane only stays in the atmosphere for ten years, CO2 circulates for over a century and there are huge amounts of it frozen in the oceans. A sudden eruption 250 million years ago when 95 percent of all life on Earth went extinct within a few decades…We know that once warming passes an unknown tipping point the Earth can heat rapidly becoming a biological desert in half a century.
EVEN SO DANIEL BELIEVES THERE ARE MANY GOOD REASONS TO HOPE
If we rally ourselves and redirect civilization along a different path we can do it quickly…Sheryl says Sounds like President Trump who always has that optimism and hope for change for the common man. Daniel mentions Richard Heinberg author of As Peak Everything who writes, “ In order to save ourselves we do not need to evolve new organs, we just need to change our culture. And language based culture can change very swiftly as the industrial revolution has shown. Similarly Alexis Zeigler writes in Culture Change, “The solution to changing the Western lifestyle is the simple impossible act of creating social networks that build social support outside of the mainstream in the context of a truly sustainable society.”
Materially we can shift global practices in farming industry and energy production within a few decades. We can reforest the planet. This would put a massive amount of excess carbon back in the Earth. But along with the material industrial aspects of this transition we also need to undergo a shift in our values, beliefs, and habits. In other ways we need to change our technical and industrial base our politics and economic system as well as our consciousness and our culture—our way of relating to the world.
Daniel Pinchbeck would like readers of How Soon Is Now? to take away with them after reading this prophetic scientific social political ethical and moral study of human history and the choices available to us now the following:
Daniel writes, Right now I believe we are in transition –in the birth canal—approaching the next threshold of our awakening, the next phase of life as a species. In quantum physics, for example, we are realizing the union of Western science with Eastern metaphysics. In the Middle Ages modern science emerged out of magic and alchemy. Science began with observation of the physical phenomena we observed outside of us. It has slowly turned inwards. Mysticism starts from the other direction. It begins with our subjective experience—the phenomenology of perception—and opens the world in its totality. As we approach the end of history, the edge of the abyss, these forms of knowledge fusing together merging and unifying. I consider this to be part of the prophetic shift we are undergoing. Carl Jung saw the world as a projection of the psychic, a parable of the imagination. This is true. The imagination is not just a faculty. William Blake considered it to be human existence itself. We are living a fable devised by one underlying source, pure consciousness.
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing From Within” we have been fortunate to speak with Daniel Pinchbeck a truly enduring and enterprising Vitruvean man who offers an overview of the many critical challenges facing our physical and spiritual worlds, along with the hopes and efforts of so many who work in alignment to Spirit as evolution proceeds. We all have many choices to consider as the world appears to be turning on a dime, and we need to use our intelligence and heart based energies to return to a merging of life as we have known it throughout eons of evolution. We must embrace the possibilities of our eternal soul nature to advance awareness of higher self and consciousness as well as to live in a physical world that can through cooperation, rather than extreme competition, offer all living entities opportunities for success and a healthy life cycle. It’s like the saying the Marines have, “NO Man left behind.”
Daniel wrote, “ When I was a child I remember feeling certain that a great secret was waiting to be revealed to me. I felt the whole world trembling with this mystery that lurked behind the surface of ordinary reality. It was hidden under the sidewalks of New York City within the windows of the apartment buildings that stared out at me like ten thousand unblinking eyes. It was whispered by the wind that blew teasingly through the leaves of the trees, causing ripples across the Hudson. I was sure this mystery waiting to unveil itself to me was the core of existence. When I found it, I knew my purpose and mission and became a whole being. I assumed all adults had passed through the portal of unfathomable event. I believed this must be the secret subtext of their conversations, which otherwise seemed nonsensically dull and boring.”
Daniel and I would have you know that the souls of each of you listening today have chosen to be on this planet at this crucial and important time in human history…Nothing is random and the creative life force of love and compassion encourages with hope and trust for the choices that must be made by a collective consciousness of good will, prayers, and the creation of a new mindset to bring us past the many real problems we face here on Earth. Please participate with joy not fear.
