Three or four years ago when I began this blog, I used to write about what it was like to be growing up in the Sixties -- the energy, the hopefulness, the music, or the dark underbelly, the drugs and detritus. I always felt that what underlay that entire phenomenon was a spiritual impulse pushing its way through our country and our culture. If that was true, it was probably surging through the world at large but that's harder to discern.
In the fifty-five years since that decade came to an end, I've ever-so-slowly watched the world tip. For a very long time, I felt that the spiritual undercurrent that I picked up on in my teens and early twenties was working silently behind the scenes. Intellectually, I understood that destruction precedes construction. You have to raze the lot and the old structure, wipe it clean, in order to build something completely new. Several human revolutions have begun with that intent, or at least made that claim.
For the past fifty years, the steady toll that the monoculture enveloping the earth has taken upon it has slowly encroached upon the general awareness of the populace. Whole movements have arisen comprised of people whose genuine belief is that we're destroying the planet and are in the full sway of what is called the "sixth mass extinction event." All that is true as far as it goes. Yet it seems to me we're all missing the point: it isn't the Earth that is dying, it's this civilization, in a sloping arc of inexorable, willfully blind, self-immolating, monomaniacal, inhuman self-sabotage. Yeah, I know -- "doom and gloom." But given what I've seen happen just in my lifetime, I don't see how the commercial values of modern society can continue as they are. Not with an ever-increasing population base covering the globe. So, we'll see -- we'll see whether I'm just another crackpot or I'm seeing things as they actually are. (Is that even possible in today's world?)
I've spent much of the past two years trying to understand the gradual evolution of modern humans from, say, 40,000 years ago, especially in Europe, to the present day. I consider that evolutionary through-line to be the lineage of the culture in which I live. To a lesser extent I've looked at, or will look at, India as it moved out of the Ice Age. I'm more concerned with what happened roughly 12,000 to 13,000 years ago as we segued from nomadic hunter-gatherers into early neolithic settlements. It isn't so much that I'm hoping to discover the social evolution as I am the beliefs the people had, the gods and goddesses who populated their mythic minds, because that's the real description of a people's psychology. What did we believe as we stepped out of the tundra and began to settle, to cultivate grains and domesticate animals? How did our gods change? I'm not sure I have the patience to trace the rise and fall of different gods over thousands of years, but I do want to get a general sense of how we became the rapacious imperialists of the past 500 years. Why did we become such desperate materialists? Not so much "how" as "why?" When did we lose our instinctual, indigenous wisdom? That was the real "fall" of the West.
Toward that end I've been doing a survey of shamanism over the past winter. There's something a little repugnant in this for me and I have had to force myself to proceed in spite of some misgivings. Along with attempting to discover this nearly universal belief system, since it shows up in recognizable variations over the entire world, but in the back of my mind I'm also looking at it as a study in cosmology. I'm trying to ascertain the interior structure of our minds, and perhaps the interior structure of the universe itself. There are commonalities to shamanic experience which seem to suggest that, spaced though they are in time and locale, somehow shamans everywhere seem to encounter a similar interior terrain. Whether that may be of the human psyche, or the interior structure of the vertical universe, or both, it's useful to observe and draw the parallels in such experience. It's helpful to have a map or chart of the universe one happens to find oneself in, be that inner or outer. The West has been externally driven for long enough. Rather than continuing to look outward, our current dilemmas would seem to suggest that now is a good time for the West to begin to consider where we have been, why we did what we did, in the manner in which we did it, and to reconsider our approach to life, our modus operandi. Because it's obviously not working well.
The Sixties, at least in America, and to a lesser extent in England and continental Europe, was an almost spontaneous attempt to invent a new culture on the fly. New values, more genuine, more honest, more humane. It was riding on the back of the musical expression of the times. It was also falsely fueled and derailed by the emphasis upon drugs as the avenue to a new consciousness and thus a new culture.
Many cultures have historically used substances as part of their ritual and/or shamanic attempt to make contact with and perhaps have guidance from the unseen spirit realm. It may have worked in the context of a clan or tribal scheme -- a social construct that was perhaps widespread but whose immediate social context was small. Certainly the monolithic religions of the past 5000 years all seem to have made such practices taboo and verboten, in an effort to control the constituency. You can't control what's going to happen in an altered state of consciousness. I think after sixty years of drugs seeping into our culture, we can probably say that they've had a more negative effect than we naively hoped, and they most assuredly haven't changed the culture in any positive way. They haven't made us wiser, more mature, more unselfish, or more caring. To the contrary, they've made us more selfish, self-concerned, and narrowed our scope. They didn't change the culture for the better. We are not more enlightened than we used to be. It's rare for anyone to be sane or clear-sighted nowadays.
The initial impulse may have been towards personal freedom, but freedom without a sense of responsibility towards others is a doubtful boon. Unless we can use such substances with wisdom and intent -- and there is some evidence current that we may learn to do just that -- we'd be wise to rely upon more natural, secondary methods. Meditation, music -- specifically drumming -- and dance all offer a natural way in which to alter consciousness. It sometimes happens in the natural course of following a spiritual path. But the shamanic dimension of the human psyche seems to have emerged once more out of the chaotic collective experience of the past sixty years. That can't be a mistake; we might best look at it as a clue, a possible signpost to the future.
I'm in my early seventies. So I've watched the arc of this culture, indeed, this entire worldwide civilization for over sixty years now. I thought it was crazy when I was eleven. It's far worse now. It's a train-wreck in the happening and doesn't look like it can be stopped. I don't believe it's the end of humankind, but it seems to be the end of the world as we know it. At the very least, it's the demise of human culture as we know it. I don't know what's going to happen or what it's going to look like, but my gut feeling is that it won't be good, kind, or pretty.
The earth will survive, of that I have no doubt. Not all species will, and that may include us in our current iteration, but life and the spontaneous process of evolution will devise something new given enough millions of years in which to do it. I have to admit, I no longer believe that this civilization's course can be corrected. It has resisted all attempts to date. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm just judging by the data of my own lifetime.
Despite these dark ruminations, I'm actually an optimistic realist. I believe the process of existence is ultimately benign, and works for the ultimate realization of all, all evidence notwithstanding. That's a process that spans universes and is in fact, eternal. Time may end for us, and will one day end for this earth, and even this universe but existence will continue in some form or another, working its will towards a final perfection in, of all things, the individual. Who knew?
So know that though the stars may fall, you will endure in some form or another unto the very end, and I have it on good authority that THAT end will make all the suffering you endured along the way seem as though a moment's passing. For some reason, I trust that Existence will redeem itself in the end. That much I've learned in this lifetime. So, despite all appearances to the contrary, I will continue to trust this apparently crazy process called life. And ever onward we go, whether we want to or not.
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