On the Verge of Despair
Little by little, the realization sinks in: Nothing seems to make things better: not the new year, not the new administration, and not the vaccines. Living on the fast-track simply isn’t working anymore. It hasn’t been working for the past year, and it seems like it isn’t going to start working anytime soon. And the more we realize it, the more we become despaired.
The answer is in plain sight: If we go against nature and keep thinking as individuals, we will have no future and no solution will work. If we think as an integral humanity, which is a part of the integral planet, we will succeed and our plans will work.
There is a good reason why it seems like the world is running out of gas. Since time immemorial, our fuel has been the search for the next pleasure, the next thing to gain, or the next advantage over others. We’ve been running on a fuel that boosts the ego; where the ego saw no benefit, we had no fuel to work. Over the past year, our egos have had so many let downs that many are beginning to doubt whether the ego is really the king we should be serving. Perhaps the futile pursuit of pleasures, which we stop wanting soon after we obtain them, has exposed its inevitable pointlessness. After all, if you already know that once you get what you want, you’ll soon get tired of it, what’s the point of getting it in the first place?
Our time is a time of recognition of the truth about our motivations, our civilization, our values, and ultimately about who we are as human beings. The picture that this realization exposes is not pretty, but it is very sincere, and from a point of sincerity, healthy growth begins. This is why I think our time is so amazing, for all its difficulties.
We are in a time of a great shift; we are shifting from perceiving the world as individuals to perceiving it as an integral system of which we are all parts, and in which we are all one. Perceiving the world as individuals compelled us to seek only our own benefit. However, this put us at odds with the direction of nature’s development. Nature is evolving toward increasing complexity, interdependence, and reciprocity. When you’re trying to go in the opposite direction to all of reality, bad things are bound to happen. This conflict between nature’s trajectory and our trajectory has been the root cause of all our misfortunes, especially since we’ve begun to accentuate our individualism, early in the 20th century, but it has picked up pace tremendously since the turn of the century.
As long as we continue to go against nature’s trajectory, everything we build will collapse. This is why these days, nothing seems to work: The vaccines are here but so is the virus; the election is over but no one is calm; and most of all, no one feels confident about the future, and no one knows what to do about it.
Yet, the answer is in plain sight: If we go against nature and keep thinking as individuals, we will have no future and no solution will work. If we think as an integral humanity, which is a part of the integral planet, we will succeed and our plans will work.
In truth, I am very hopeful. I see how nature leaves us no choice but to rethink everything. Unity is the clear direction of our movement, since this is where all of nature is evolving, and we are not excluded. The only question is how much we will agree to suffer before we go along. The end is good for sure; it’s the road getting there that worries me.