I’ve been thinking about the land down under lately. Six years ago, thousands of people in Victoria were driven into the sea and an estimated billion animals were killed in wildfires. Here in northern California, the worst wildfire in the state’s history, which incinerated nearby Paradise and killed nearly 100 people, still casts a long shadow.
Now, with heat domes over Europe and North America this summer in the northern hemisphere, microcosm has become indistinguishable from macrocosm.
However, the refrain I heard from an Aussie rings hollow: “A global transformation in consciousness is happening through innumerable citizen movements where local areas, cities and other citizen-led groups are leap-frogging over their national governments to make transformational changes.”
Another person in Australia’s capital, the founder of a well-known contemplative church, echoed the sentiment: “I absolutely agree about the necessity for a global transformation of consciousness, and feel that this is in fact underway through the renewal of contemplative prayer in a whole range of contexts.”
Such wishful thinking comes almost entirely from western progressives, people who espouse a global view rather than a nationalistic one.
Contradictorily, the same people then speak in terms of their national contexts, such as the prominent women’s leader in Canberra saying, “It is my daily preoccupation to find ways to cheer along citizen-led movements in an Australian context.”
Are there Australian, American or African contexts anymore, or just an inadequately addressed global one?
And is a global transformation in consciousness already happening, but it’s just “frustratingly patchy?” Or has it not ignited, and human consciousness is growing darker by the week?
Clearly it’s the latter. So has the fat lady sung on our age? Despite rampant doomerism with regard to the human prospect, much less this anthropocentric age, I don’t feel so.
Whether a transformation of consciousness can actually occur now, or is more wishful thinking, is a crucial question not just for contemplatives and activists, but for anyone who cares about the present and future of the Earth and Humanity.
Hope and hopelessness are two sides of the same coin. Seeing things as they are is not the cause of hopelessness and despair; the refusal to see things as they are and the insistence on seeing them the way we want to see them is.
Clearly, a psychological revolution has not ignited, and to insist that it has, and that simply “more deepening and strengthening of the practice of contemplation and activism is still needed,” is a liberal form of denial.
Online rageaholics say things like: Radical change will not come from stillness. It will come from rage. It will not come from silent contemplation, but from the loud, disruptive, and uncomfortable sound of people. The remedy is not to negate the inherently partial movement of thought. The remedy is to seize the tools of communication, organization, strategy, and use them to dismantle the system that is killing us.
That’s been tried, and it just led to another form of slavery.
It’s true that people cannot achieve stillness of mind when they are working two jobs to afford rent, when their drinking water is poisoned, when their children are being sent to fight in wars for profit. But to speak for the immiserated from the luxury of behind one’s laptop, and believe that one is actually making a difference in their lives, is the height of hypocrisy.
Psychological revolution is not a comfort afforded to those who do not have to fight to physically survive, but the responsibility of those who don’t to bring it about. Because psychological revolution at the core of human consciousness is the only thing that will change the disastrous course of humankind. Otherwise one is just adding to the rage and violence in human consciousness and the world.
So what are people referring to when they say, “a transformation in consciousness is already happening?” They are speaking of their need to believe that human consciousness is gradually improving, that the gains in women’s rights, civil rights and human rights are not being eroded but built upon.
They are referring to a battle between regressive forces and progressive forces in human history, and inflating themselves with a facile rage against the capitalistic system, exhorting that another political revolution will ensue and succeed where all the others have failed to change the basic course of humankind.
Human consciousness is not radically changing and the world is going from bad to worse because enough of us who have the space and time are not questioning and challenging human nature within us. Both progressives and conservatives take human nature as a given, though they can’t or won’t say what they believe it is.
It simply doesn’t cut it to “cheer contemplatives and activists along in an Australian [or any other national or local] context.”
A global revolution in consciousness that puts Australian, American or any other national or local context first is no revolution at all. Doing so under the guise of global citizenship is fooling oneself while operating from the same fragmentary, gradualistic thinking that lies at the core of the human crisis.
Humanity is in a race between the worst and best within us, and it does no good to say we’re winning it when people of insight and intelligence are losing to people adhering to power, greed and tribalism, wherever they fall on the political spectrum.
The match that ignites the psychological revolution that changes the disastrous course of humankind be struck in one place, but it won’t be local. It will be immediately felt by people with awareness in all places because human consciousness is finally ready for it.
Our latent capacity for insight and understanding, without regard to knowledge accretion, is what will save us as individuals and humanity. Self-knowing human beings who are ending division, rage and hate within themselves, people with a true inner life, are the true revolutionaries.
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