Time Changes - Remarks on Current Events

This post originally appeared on Astra Natha's Magickal Meditations blog. Images and links have been omitted due to Evolver's sensitive spam filter. To see this post as it was originally intended please visit Time Changes. A list of the mentioned references follows this post.
If you’re alive and on planet Earth today, you probably know that, though less than halfway over, 2011 has seen more unexpected changes and daunting developments than most decades did a century ago. It's the only thing on the news, but talk to nearly anyone on the street and you'll hear it there too; times are changing, systems are collapsing, new ideas are struggling and nobody knows if they or anyone else will be able to keep up with the pace. Conscious beings look for patterns -- the ability to distinguish signals from noise is what makes us conscious. So in a torrent of unpredictable changes, we naturally incline to suppose that there is ‘something bigger going on,’ some underlying change taking place of which all the various global crises are just symptoms. But what force could be so vast as to affect the whole world, and yet somehow itself remain undetected, perhaps hiding in plain sight? One thing is for sure: currently we are unprepared to handle what’s happening to us.

We don’t know our own position (how many of us can honestly say that we fully know why we are here right now?) and are blind to the force which, beyond any of our individual wills, guides world events in a particular direction. So we are caught in tidal-waves of change, borne out to an unknown sea, horizon-to-horizon with possibilities, and we don’t even know which direction we are being carried. We need a way to orient ourselves to the idea animating world events if we are going to be positive actors in its unfolding. By participating in that growth we heal ourselves by again becoming healthy, cooperative cells within the body of the Earth’s life. But how do we know where to start? Let’s look at some of the major crises affecting the world this year, particularly those focused on by the media, and see if we can spot the thread running through them.

Revolution: People just won’t stay oppressed anymore. In parts of the world that the West frequently imagines to be backwater, hopelessly sectarian and ignorant, hegemonic regimes have collapsed under the pressure of smart, determined masses hungry for freer lifestyles [1]. Thanks to global media, anyone anywhere can see the way the most priveliged people on the planet live, and it’s only so long before they realize they’re getting a raw deal and demand something better. Thanks to the internet, activists don’t have to rely on hierarchical methods to organize, which can be shut down by the government, but instead can plan their protests through amorphous, ad hoc groups that, like hydra, lose a head to form a thousand more. The effectiveness of these demonstrations, thanks to a new wave of change-agents that are self-empowered and technologically-coordinated, has sent a shot of panic into the hearts of governments everywhere. Look how quickly they will move to diminish our sense of entitlement and our new found strength.

Destruction: In the first four months of the year, 2011 experienced as many natural disasters and earthquakes (especially ones magnitude 6 or greater) as most entire years do. Many view the increase in natural disasters as the result of human’s effect on the global climate; but regardless of whether or not the world climate is changing, it’s obvious that our civilization is becoming more sensitive to subtle changes in the environment. Regardless of whether or not the rate of natural disasters is increasing, it’s clear that our vulnerability to them is. It only takes one extremely powerful disaster striking an already fragile human system to unleash a cascade of destruction, especially when we use dangerous technologies beyond our means to fully control [2]. The environmental and human cost of such cataclysms can be tremendous. We intrinsically feel we have a right to harness the sources of power we have uncovered; but when we rush technology in it’s infancy into use, or worse, ignore common-sensical precautions and cut costs in order to maximize profits for the richest, we have tethered ourselves to a powder-keg. Yet at the same time, such disasters, when they remove us from the tech-obsessed culture and thrust us back into bare survival conditions, also reveal our deepest humanity. Without the idol of hyper-connectivity and relentless progress, we are able, if only while the lights are out, to remember a slower pace of life, to listen the wind in the trees, to stand breathless at the sun rising over the sea -- even if we’re ankle deep in brackish tide. We’re able to reconnect with our neighbors, in the flesh, and pull through the hurt as a single human family. Disasters rock our world, but they are opportunities to demonstrate we still have humanity.

Exhaustion: The creation of that technological society, of unprecedented abundance and therefore personal freedom and power, has been entirely fueled by our consumption of energy reserves which took the Earth’s entire history to create. The discovery of readily available, densely concentrated fuel essentially gave the human economy an unlimited infusion of free capital, and the economic explosion and vastly reshaped world of the past two-hundred years has been the result of our growing capacity to harness and leverage that unearned energy, not of any increase in humanity’s inherent productive capacity. That free energy source is very nearly expended [3]. Let’s look at the big picture. Most life-bearing planets, one would imagine, have chemical methods of storing the energy of their suns in a long term fashion and, if such planets develop conscious beings such as ourselves, most planets will go through an extremely dangerous and transformative phase where the inhabitants uncover and utilize the planet’s energetic reserves. Presumably, it is what those civilizations do with that free energy while they have it that sets them apart. It may be that the most common course of action is that they believe their energy reserve to be truly unlimited, and so recreate their world in the shape of long held dreams, completely covering and potentially mangling it in the process. When the power running the wish-fulfillment carnival is exhausted -- lights out, shows over -- their children are left for millenia to wander the abandoned husks of cities like hollow, decaying monuments and wonder, perhaps with pity, at the incomprehensibly bright and naive mania of their forebearers. This seems to be the outcome we are on course for, and many are even currently advocating a conscious and willful return to pre-industrial society, as if human’s desire to manifest their dreams can be left satisfiable but unsatisfied. Another possibility in such cases, and one which we seem to have narrowly avoided in the last century, and is staged for a comeback, is that these civilizations will use the free capital of their planet’s energy reserves to completely destroy or irrevocably maim their world. All possibilities exist in the dream-space of the conscious soul, even dark, destructive fantasies of revenge and domination. Our hatred of one another, our ego-maniacal lust for power and attention even through being despised, and our desire to maintain control at any cost mean that we can use the virtually unlimited power we are given to completely remove our world’s hope for life. It’s only natural, it comes from our animal heritage; biological life functions through continual creation and destruction, many living beings have a natural urge to kill and consume in order to stay alive. It’s equally natural that such beings, when given just barely enough awareness to figure out how to tap into the power of their planet, but not enough to grasp the deeper truth, could become confused and apply that same destructive instinct to everything. While many may imagine such doomsday scenarios as relics particular to the politics of the 20th century, it is a persistent threat in advanced technological societies. The destructive power of nuclear weapons can be dwarfed, even, when civilizations in the later stages of industrial development based on fossil fuels develop hyper-sophisticated, self-reproductive molecular phages, perhaps intentionally or perhaps as an unexpected consequence of trying to gain control of matter on a nanometer scale, and thus, rather than merely poison the ground with nuclear winter, could consume the atmosphere or turn the planet’s surface into a uniform sludge [4]. A large percentage of advanced planetary civilizations, particularly those carrying around painful baggage, may end their careers this way, and it may be we can expect no better for ourselves. A final possibility, and perhaps the least likely, is that through the burst of energy, given to them as a gift by their mother planet, a people will overcome the need for the idea of ‘exhaustion.’ They will use the relatively small window of super-abundant resources to quickly reconfigure their planetary structure, perhaps by using energy reserves to create devices to obtain power directly from their sun or geo-forces, or perhaps by means unimaginable to us, in a way that is able to sustain itself and so are able to continue in their exuberant abundance. Such civilizations are able to truly affirm their lives, by not being destroyed by the gift of power nor being so irresponsible as to have to relinquish it, but instead by using it wisely can permanently establish a better way of being for themselves and their children. Only such civilizations will be able to create a world in which all dreams are fulfilled and all live in happiness, abundance, and peace. Only such beings will people the stars. If this is an unlikely outcome, and certainly the one requiring the most effort to achieve, it is also the most positive outcome, and the one we should at least hope for.

Corruption: While the people try to mobilize to recreate their world, either with words or with weapons, governments resort to more and more desparate measures to bring them under control and maintain power. Perhaps people have seen through the myth of the need for hierarchical control, and can imagine, however unclearly, a social order based on the same amorphous, ad hoc direct democracy that coordinates their protests. But age old power structures bound up in nationalistic identity and state hegemony refuse to give up without a fight. So when people start resisting their leaders, other nations are quick to catch the scent of death, and are sure to help topple a failing regime [5], if only to be sure to install a government friendly to their economic interests [6]. When individuals who are tired of the hegemonic world order stand up to resist, working either with horrible violence [7] or with beautiful art [8], they are equally ruthlessly hunted down. Yet such individuals, whether working to destroy the system or recreate the system, are at least in some sense sublimated by the act of applying their individual will to the whole world, to the pages of history. Yet they, like all influential people in history are merely fore-runners of the dawning time, where everyone has enough of what they need and so everyone has a chance to demonstrate their greatness. The current generation of world governments, which has persisted as an unusual sort of cohort since the start of the industrial revolution, are all based in an equal degree of lip-service to governance by the will of the people, and all are equally insinuated in old money and resource monopolies such that the frequently meaningless binary distinction between political parties or candidates means that any sort of democratically expressed political desires get directed to the same end; more power for the few, more subordination for everybody. Yet, in a world in which technology furnishes each individual with unprecedented access to information and interconnectivity, it is not long before a person in particular and people in general recognize that the old system of nation-states was created for a different world, a world of disconnected ethnic and cultural groups enthralled in ceaseless struggles over limited resources and control. Such institutions are obsolete in a world in which everyone has the chance to become capable, self-actualizing individuals, but such institutions are also aware that the very thing that feeds them -- the capabilities of their citizens -- erode their power, and so turn to more and more extreme means to control the mass [9], even using the same technology which gives people power to rob it from them [10]. In the emerging world, there are no benevolent dictators and stupid, unwashed masses. Such unbalanced and unhealthy relationships are only able to form when there is an extreme poverty of resources like food, education, and technology. Our world is a world of abundance, and in our world everyone has the opportunity to become a self-sovereign autocrat. What we will do with that awesome potential and responsibility remains to be seen.

Explosion: While the foundations of post-modern civilization are undermined, ‘progress’ as our recent ancestors have understood it, continues seemingly undaunted. An endless stream of new technological gadgets pours onto the market, continually becoming smaller and faster, but also more useful and integral to our lives. While the continual developments of productive capacity since the industrial revolution have been fueled by a glut of free energy for which we can claim no credit, they have enabled the continued development of another trend in human societies; the formation of the concept of ‘information,’ and it’s increasing importance to our civilization. The miniaturization of computerized technology has transformed the way we think, learn, communicate and discover much more radically over the past thirty years than industrial processes have changed how we work and produce. The continued miniaturization and computational power increases have been the result of a remarkably smooth exponential increase in the computing power of information technology [11], a trend which can be seen to extend back hundreds (and maybe even thousands, or more) of years [12]. World wars, political turmoil, global terrorism, economic meltdowns and natural disasters have all been unable to do so much as put a dent in the relentless growth of information technology, dragging the world forward unawares to some unknown end. It is this explosive redoubling that has given people the opportunity to be so self-sufficient; beings who already know quite a lot, can find out anything instantaneously, and can communicate anything to anyone anywhere with just the thought are very difficult to keep in the dark, or keep quiet. ‘Information’ is itself a very elusive and vague concept, and really just another label for a much older, more familiar idea, but an in-depth exploration of it’s implications is beyond the scope of this posting and will be the subject of a later Meditation. Suffice it to say that most people experience the modern world as one of an acceleratingly overwhelming overflow of information, and most people’s nervous systems are quite taxed to interface with all the computerized information sources trying to tell them about everything. Information is like food for the mind, it helps us grow in awareness and capacity, but right now we are locked into a binge-and-purge relationship with it, and are more anemic as a result. And, many wonder, how can the exponential growth of information technology go on forever? Ignoring the energy crisis, isn’t there some final possible achievable state in terms of the complexity of information, after which comes an inevitable, and quite possibly fatal, crash-and-burn?

Connection: Related to the growth in information technology, but a distinct phenomena of the new world to which people struggle to adapt, is the rapid expansion in the use of information technology to make people more and more connected. It’s pushing us to a psychologically toxic relationship with our personal networks, where we are caught in a state of hyper-vigilance over our status, and are kept perpetually on stage in front of a mercilessly scrutinizing audience [13]. We spend hours preening our little virtual shrines to ourselves, hoping to use flashing brightness to attract ego-sustaining attention, which is as vapid and ephemeral as clouds on a windy day. We even imagine that by encoding our social interactions in digitally-preserved symbols, they are somehow more real, somehow last beyond us. We are constantly plugged into a overstimulated hive-mind in which the only commodity of value is attention. Thanks to technology, we have the capacity the ancients dreamed of, to communicate with anyone anywhere with a thought -- but we become furious when we aren’t able to make that instantaneous connection, and at the same time feel exhausted when we are constantly pulled away from what we are doing to pay attention to someone miles away. Constant redirection of attention divides us even from ourselves, even in the attempt to harmonize with others. We suffer, as a species, from the so-called ‘Hedgehog’s Dillema;’ we yearn to eachother, we even truly love eachother, and so we instinctively want to merge our divided selves into a single, all knowning, all loving, all being omni-self, and yet we also love our individuality, our uniqueness, our freedom, we fear being forced into a mold, we are afraid of the properties in others we don’t seem to share, and so, like lusty hedgehogs, the more we try to come together the more we impale eachother on our spines. In the emerging world, technology has highlighted for us the conflict of the ages; the war/dance between the self and the world around her.

Abstraction: The most important change the world is undergoing, and also the one most easily missed due to it’s ephemeral nature, is a fundamental shift in value away from the concrete and to the abstract. Tools are less useful than skills, possesions are less desirable than experiences [14], states are less interesting than patterns, objects are less meaningful than ideas [15]. Crucially, not only are tools worth much less than the skills of their operator (which was not always the case; consider hunter-gatherer society’s intergenerational tool-sharing, or the value of a worker versus a machine at the start of the industrial revolution) and experiences more valuable than objects (consider the cost of a tropical vacation versus that of even very extravagant technological gadgets), but, as society continues to educate itself and orient itself toward information and ideas, abstract things become increasingly worth more than concrete ones. This leads to a dramatic shift in the energy distribution; the wealthiest countries expend most of their productive energy performing services or creating cultural artifacts, which converts economic capital, itself theoretically a token for human biological energy, into an abstract idea from which it is not even in principle possible to reclaim that energetic value. When physical energy is exchanged for information (of which even things like experiences and skills are composed) it is in some sense lost, poured out into the aether. This causes problems when the richest nations hit economic hard times and are suddenly unable to supply themselves with the basic materials to faciliate such an intellectual lifestyle, while the poorest people struggle to convert their hard labor into abstract objects like skill training or entertainment experiences in principle, since they exist only as information, could be given to them freely. Humans are inherently mental beings, and once our basic needs are met it is our very nature to increasingly forget them in favor of subtler pursuits, but when three-quarters of the world is still locked in a day-to-day struggle for basic survival, such refocus creates an energetic imbalance that makes everyone dissatisfied, and the whole world sick.

Inaction: And yet, despite these concerns, people remain hopelessly attached to the status quo. Human beings are creatures of habit, they thrive on conditioning and socialization, and will almost always prefer to remain in a pattern than to change, simply because it is easier. For most of human history, an individual lived as her parents and grandparents lived; her children would live the same way. Today, societal changes requiring complete reconfigurations of behavior happen on the scale of decades or years, not centuries or millenia. Biological evolution simply has not furnished us with the skills to adapt to a world changing as rapidly as ours is, and cultural evolution has done little to close the gap. Those who try to rouse the world to a new way of being are either not heard, or are silenced, or after they are gone their message is woven into a new veneer for the same-old-thing. It is a very unfortunate state, observable in the mentally ill, when a person becomes so fixated on a compulsive pattern of behavior that they shut out any external stimuli telling them what their doing is no longer functional or appropriate for their environment [16], and instead continue to act as they have been acting, as if their behavior alone exists and has meaning [17]. There is a certain exquisite sadness in the idea of a person who has fallen so in love with the ritual they stubbornly believe will make everything better that they are no longer concerned with the problem and are nothing but the belief in their chosen solution. It is beautiful, in a way; for such people are truly free in their own hearts, have truly overcome the crisis for themselves, and are no longer able to be dragged down by the world. The tragedy is visible only to those who are watching from the outside, as the obsessed person descends into madness, helpless to respond to anything actually happening around them. If there is no better help, perhaps it is best to leave such people to their dreams, chasing their own windmills, believing that going the way they are going will make everything all-right and oblivious to anything else. Maybe this would not be so bad a fate for humanity -- to go down partying, believing that we will eventually get where we are going by throttling straight ahead and, choosing not to see the ‘road ends’ sign, punch the gas and laugh loud as we sail over the cliff. This is certainly the course of action we have chosen so far. When the whole world is sleep-walking to doom, who, however large a loud-speaker they are suddenly provided with, could shout loud enough to wake them up?

Resolution: So what is the single force that causes the oppressed to rise up, the destroyed to rebuild, the exhausted to find new strength, the controllers to lose control, the ignorant to learn, the divided to connect, the thing to become the idea, the inert to become the active? Moreover, what is it that is causing that force to act upon us at an accelerating rate? The answer, I think, is closer to home than we realize. Consider that the Universe existed for billions and billions of years before solid planets were able to form, that the Earth existed for two billion years before life formed, that it took life a billion years to become multicellular, and a billion more to gain nervous systems, and hundreds of millions thereafter for nervous-system bearing life to begin to cooperate social groups. It took only 50 million years for those social animals to completely dominate the planet, and give rise to a species which not only interacted socially but thought deeply enough to develop tools. It only took a couple million years for those tool-users to develop spoken language, only took about a hundred thousand for those speakers to spread across the entire planet and develop agriculture and writing, only about ten thousand years for those farmers and writers to develop industrial processes, only about two hundred years for industry to give birth to information technology, and only about twenty years for information technology to completely reshape the planet and bring us to a point where we actually have the capacity to either fulfill the dreams of our ancestors, or end the whole experiment. What has been steadily increasing in pitch across the entire life of the cosmos is consciousness, and, as it is defined by self-awareness, it grows by recursively drawing upon it’s own self-hood to become stronger, multiply itself without end. We are that consciousness, or rather, the most conscious expression of the universe being aware of itself we are yet aware of, and so all the crises of our world are animated solely by the crises of at last having to confront our own awareness of ourselves. It is a drama that has been building in scope and impact since the dawn of time, in which each being has participated unknowingly merely by being alive, and at last it has so inflamed itself by itself that it has reached a critical tipping point. So what does consciousness do when it reaches this stage? Does it at last accept itself and harmonize into a new mode of being conscious in which it is no longer conflicted with itself, or does it self-detonate in one last orgasmic spasm?

I don’t know. All I know is that I am alive, and I love being alive, I am on the Earth and I love the Earth, and so I want to survive, want my sisters and brothers to survive, want Her to survive. The underlying problem seems to be hidden in the recursive property of self-awareness. I have self-awareness, so the problem exists in me also. The only way I know to address the problem is to first become quiet and go within, to observe the simple sense of being self and the wide-ranging will, in order to understand, in order to gain a measure of mastery, in order to prevent it from further damaging the world. The purpose of these magickal meditations, and of the course in magick, is to help both you and me become still enough to commune with this mystery. It is the first step to freedom.

References:
[1]: 2011 Arab spring
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010-2011_Middle_East_and_North_Africa_prot...
[2]: Fukushima reactor meltdown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
[3]: Peak oil crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
[4]: Existential threat of nanotechnology
http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm
[5]: 2011 Libyan civil war, NATO involvement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Libyan_civil_war#United_Nations_interv...
[6]: Mediterranean Alliance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranian_Union
[7]: Death of Osama Bin Laden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#Beliefs_and_ideology
[8]: Imprisonment of Ai Wei
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei#2011_arrest
[9]: Technological surveillance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_surveillance#Privacy
[10]: Privacy concerns in the internet age
http://www.pbs.org/nbr/site/features/gurvey/060210_gurvey/
[11]: Growth of information technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
[12]: Law of Accelerating Returns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
[13]: Psychological effects of Facebook
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/24/social-networking-site-changing...
[14]: Service economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy
[15]: Information economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_economy
[16]: Schizophrenia, Obsessive Behavior
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive-compulsive_disorder#Compulsions
[17]: Solipsism syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism