John Michael Greer in his estimable Archdruid Report in one of his articles talked about dealing with various aspects of climate denialism a wishful thinking fantasy which twigged a recognition in me.
The North Carolina legislators who are trying to pretend that sea level rise won’t happen, like their equivalents in Texas and Virginia, remind me of nothing so much as six-year-olds who stuff their fingers in their ears, scrunch their eyes shut, and chant “I can’t hear you, la la la” at the top of their lungs. The New Age equivalent is a little more subtle, but after half a century of failed predictions of saucer landings and leaps of consciousness—and let’s not even talk about what happened to the millions of Americans who tried to use The Secret to make boatloads of money for nothing by investing in the late real estate bubble—there can’t be many people left in the scene who don’t know, on some level, that they’re kidding themselves.
JMG hits the nail on the head, and causes me to shift my perception of a certain, large portion of the evolutionary meditative community. There is a strain within the meditative, consciousness raising community which is decidedly millennialist. There is a persistent positive belief in the potential to create a golden age if and when all, or enough, people have psychologically and spiritually evolved to a certain level beyond where we are now.
This is some sort of wish fulfillment fantasy, projected out on the world. Perhaps it is meant to cover a sense of: “Why do we perceive that things are so bad now?” It is as if people who have this view somehow shift the myth of continual progress from the material and technological into the spiritual realm and have it somehow boomerang back into the realm of social and political realities.
To hope in a better tomorrow seems so normal to us. We have a very deep seated cultural meme of progress and the power of positive thinking. I sense it is (or can be) a subtle denial of what is transpiring here and now. If one is serious and scientific about the current situation one sees that we are on the brink of making human life extinct, or at least extremely rare on planet Earth. Some people do not want to look at this. I deal regularly with people in my entourage who have difficulty with impending death and terminal illness.
The spiritual imperative in this time is to live and love as much as possible within the chaotic decline of our physical, social and political structures. There will be times when we need to comfort, or just accompany, people who are dying, suffering, sick and grieving for their losses. This is everyday spiritual practice, seeing the Buddhist divine messengers and dealing with them with compassion.
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