The true measure of a civilization is not in its art, food supply systems, roads or scientific innovations—but in the amount of awareness that the general population has about the power of awareness, i.e., an awareness of awareness. I feel that our own era is ready to amplify this special, evolutionary kind of consciousness and enter a new age of bliss.
It might seem strange to describe this time as the beginning of a new magical age, when the worldwide financial system is dying and many have either lost their jobs or are hanging on, overworked and underpaid. Wars rage everywhere and ancient conflicts continue to shed blood, most of them mongered by the corporate gangs who run organized religion. Millions of people live in abject poverty picking for scraps of food on top of the garbage dumps of civilization when there is more than enough to feed everyone. Our perilous relationship with the environment has reached new, dire levels, as was made painfully clear when we stabbed our beautiful blue planet in its Gulf heart and watched as millions of gallons of its rich dark blood poured out and blackened the sea, just as the ancients prophesied it would. “All to make a buck” is the epitaph we seem destined to leave upon an earth that we’ve plucked and sucked clean and dry of all its beauty.
And yet for all it’s back-handed bleakness, our hyper-ironical state is (ironically) the thing that has the best chance of saving our species: our awareness of the ironies inherent creates the connection point for the relentless, post-modern feedback loop to close back on itself. The extreme absurdity of how perilous humanity’s collective situation has become that’s opened up the possibility for us to skip levels. In a strange twist of fate, the things that seem to hurt us the most are also the things that provide secret back doors through which to slip through and escape… Capitalism is perhaps the best example of this—especially in the U.S. Capitalism helped create the notion of individuality but it’s own mass marketing has come full circle and now throws the so-called individual back onto the all-consuming appetite of the masses. We’re left with a dull ache for the cars, clothes and gadgets that everyone else has. The story of who we are is in the watch and shoes that we wear. Individual desires are beaten down and flattened out until all that is left is a frail stump working long hours in order to pay the mortgage on a nuclear family house—the ultimate symbol of the American dream—complete with heavy curtains to block out the rest of the world and a double garage to park your earth destroying cars. One is being constantly torn apart in a harsh and lonely environment while defending a fictional notion of self that we’re told is healthy if it’s kept closed off and whole. We’re made to believe that we are born alone and die alone, without any remaining ritual that we can believe in—politics, sports, art, all of it had been critiqued and analyzed and re-packaged, bought and sold many times over. A new level of absurdity entered the equation as the ironical critique of a product was a part of its marketing—multi-million dollar blockbusters depicted the evil of the Hollywood system—we consumed images of evil looking white guys sitting at shiny board room tables that were created and sold to us by media companies run by a bunch of old white guys. There’s nothing to induct us into a larger sense of self—we’re kept closed off, bitterly competitive neurotic and paranoid. There was nothing real in this reality—not the idea of everlasting love or God or money buying happiness or politicians saving us.
As we suffer from a loss of identity we begin to realize that the whole idea of being a closed-off, “complete” individual was a sham: we realize we have always already been outside ourselves…there is no core, “me”—no essential nugget of self. This realization is the reverse of how we are taught to think—that group consciousness is created by the combination of many individual consciousnesses. The widespread realization of our interdependent interconnectedness enables us to receive a higher frequency that collectively re-calibrates and enables us to take a giant, post-human leap forward for mankind, in which we begin to do away with the distinction between self and other.
