So the metaphor for us to go into this future with dignity and hope – which I think is the only appropriate response – is the metaphor of birth. If you had never heard, if no one had ever informed you, of the facts of life, and you were suddenly to come around the corner and encounter a woman in the act of giving birth, this situation vibrates medical emergency – blood is being shed. Clearly, there's a great deal of physical pain and agony, pleading, a sense of helplessness. It looks as though an enormous tumor is metastasizing out of someone's body. It would be a real leap of faith and understanding to be able to contemplate that for the first time and to know or to guess that this is how nature does it, this is how we move to the next higher level, this is what is happening to us.
Let’s not mince words: we are currently in the middle of a planetary emergency. Eight of the ten climate tipping points have been crossed: the jetstream is broken, fires rage from the Amazon to the now thawing permafrost in the melting Arctic, and global warming is a runaway, with extreme weather, floods, storms etc,. the new normal. Life on earth itself could be extinct in a remarkably short period of time. Our spiritual disconnect has culminated over the long course of his-story in contributing to the ecological apocalypse. And yet, like many indigenous cultures with legends of world ages and catastrophe pray, there can be hope. We need to understand what we are in and what this emergency entails if there is to be some form of emergence. The way forward is through.
It’s said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and through that lens, what opportunity does imminent ecosystem breakdown provide? Well, for one thing, the earth is not a product, not something separate from us. We're embedded within a larger being: the womb of Mother Earth – and she herself is embedded within a galactic ecology, and a universal ecology and all of it is evolving and transforming consciousness through crisis and transformation.
Don’t panic. This is how species are initiated.
The Train Wreck of Modern Civilization
It's like the train we have set in motion we call history is devouring the earth – the entity that is keeping us alive. We're in a runaway suicide pact and our egos, accultured to the simulation of civilization, refuse to see it. We have this cultural dissonance that has for so long allowed us the luxury of denial because even without catastrophe – acknowledging our place in a living Earth would also mean acknowledging our pain and separation.
And yet, the ego that has been separate from and dominator of nature for over 10,000 years… seems to have a plan. We have “progressed” from the First Industrial Revolution mechanizing steam and water for production to the Second Revolution harnessing electricity. In the Third Revolution, electronics, computers and information automated the creation of goods and services that transformed society. And now, the proposed “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is promising to merge the physical world with the digital and the biological worlds. AI and Gaia. Which brings us back to the planet – which has its own plan, y’know.
There's a potential for a huge, societal, sci-fi transformation – and yet – it's all embedded within this ego-separation from the earth. An ego which still refuses to acknowledge that we're not alone, that we're not in control, that we're not what it's all about, anyway. We're just one species amongst many, but we're meant to be in partnership. We’re meant to connect.
You don't have a civilization or a community without shared values and trust in each other and without trust in what you've built to help you survive.
The only reason that humans have survived in the last tens and hundreds of thousands of years is that small bands of humans have trusted each other to support each other to overcome obstacles and survive – whether that's wild animals, the weather, or extinction events. We have survived because we've been able to trust each other, and at the moment, we don't trust each other, so we have this breakdown of trust, which is endemic and indicative of this breakdown of civilization itself.
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The World Ages and Cyclic Time
In cyclic time, civilizations have a rise and fall, and it really seems to me by reading the tea leaves of what's happening out there now, that everything is starting to disintegrate – the trust is gone; people don't believe in the old story anymore. The economy is collapsing, the environment is devastating – and everything we knew seems to be letting go. And all the Sci-Fi dystopias are coming true.
It's like on some unconscious level, we all know that there is a collapse, a point within which we can't continue things as normal. And we put it in our mythologies – we have a rise, and we have a fall. The cycle of death and rebirth. That's what makes us human. That's what connects us to the earth – by acknowledging that we're part of something larger.
You need to let go and rejoin the greater community all around you… With the plants and the earth and the astral ecology – there's all this presence and beingness… but if you hold on, you're shut out and separated and this is coming home, you know – this is the great promise of psychedelics.
Gaia is the Original AI – Ascended Intelligence
So what I really would love to chat about a little bit is good old planet earth, Gaia, and her original technologies, the invisibilized technologies we don't even call technologies, whether they're wind, or water, or sun, or air, or love, right? And yet, I find it hard to create a judgment about this drive towards virtual, machine intelligence and AI. We’ve been inoculated by technology, enmeshed in a culture that has one foot in the planet and one foot in something else.
Planetary systems like the earth have been designed to be in homeostatic balance, and we've fallen out of that balance into the ego. And everything we've done since then is this coping mechanism for our trauma – we're in species PTSD. So then, when we get to this point, we've created all these technologies, which means we can leave the earth, live forever, go through the galaxy and be like the Borg and assimilate because that's what the ego does. The ego is protecting itself from its fear of death because it doesn't know how to live or know what it’s here for.
Henri Bergson was one of the great 19th century philosophers and maybe most famous for saying, “the universe is a machine for making gods.” And I believe that's very close to the mark. That we come down here as human beings in the womb of the earth, and she's nurturing us for the awareness of our divine nature: which is the ultimate technology. It's God-tech. If you recognize your divine nature and you can awaken to your own divine nature, well, you've won the game.
It all comes back to trust – you have to trust that there's a process underway that you're not in control of. Just like you weren't in control when you were born, and you're not going to be in control when you die. There is a process underway that the entire intelligence of life is orchestrating.
It may mean that our physical forms fall away, but I think there's a process of giving ourselves over to whatever it is asking us to do in this awakening.
Which is to trust it.
And to be guided by it.
And to see where it leads. All the way home.
Key takeaways
- The train we have set in motion we call history is devouring the earth – the entity keeping us alive. We're in a runaway suicide pact and our egos, accultured to the simulation of civilization, refuse to see it.
- You don't have a civilization or a community without shared values and trust in each other and without trust in what you've built to help you survive.
- Planetary systems like the earth have been designed to be in homeostatic balance, and we've fallen out of that balance into the ego.
- The ego is protecting itself from its fear of death because it doesn't know how to live or know what it’s here for.
