Eden

For the record, I do not actually believe the Chem Trail theory. The violence of the second-to-last paragraph of my last post stems not from belief, but from the nature of the theory and its meaning, if it were true. As an existential threat - one threatening to explode at the very foundation of life - it is one of the more plausible I have heard. If it were true, there would be no point to do anything at all but to make it stop. My words are more like a warning, albeit one without much support from any quarter. But you know where I stand.

And my, my, aren't the existential threats piling up. Every day comes more dire word on the fate of humanity. Seven billion people on the planet. Rising food costs. Global climate change. Peak oil. Nanotechnology and the gray goo. The technological singularity. Failing oceans. The proliferation of toxins. Desertification of the equatorial rainforests. Rising ocean levels. Melting glaciers. Mass specie extinction. Shifting poles. The sun, CMEs and the potential for permanent blackout. The draining of aquifers. Hydro-fracturing. The increasing prevalence of food borne illnesses. A new threat of nuclear proliferation and the danger of aging facilities. The failure of Government. Corporate and Financial malfeasance. The increasing ascendancy of an elite. 2012 and the annihilation of almost everything.

Meanwhile here in America, liberals rail at conservatives, conservatives at liberals, each growing ever more extreme, liberals delusional about the virtue of government, conservatives delusional about the virtue of markets. I've been repeating that old yarn about the liberal being the one who thinks he understands what is in your best interest better than you do, and the conservative doesn't give a damn. Really, which ideology is more responsible for more unnecessary death? Which ideology really takes responsibility for much of anything that is currently going wrong in the world? Both perspectives utterly blind to the balance of opposites inherent in universal porcesses.

What if I said the FDA and USDA were actually much the reason for the prevalence of food borne illnesses in America? What if I said the so-called Green Revolution so championed by conservatives and liberals alike, providing massive amounts of cheap corn to third-world countries and poor and illiterate people living under despots, was much responsible for runaway population growth, and what may very well be impending mass starvation? What if I said they were feeding chicken shit to the cows you eat? What if I said there is a dark energy all-pervading in the world, and you will find that most prominent wherever power collects? If you were a demon or a goddess in her dark aspect, and your goal was to destroy the Earth and all its creatures, what would you do? I'd introduce ideas that eliminate any sense of the divine nature of all things, I'd introduce the idea of a God who sanctions violence and domination, and I'd make as many people as I could rich.

Curiously, despite the evident doom, I've come to intuit that things may not be so drear as they seem. I've been railing at the God and Goddess of late, asking what is the point, how can this mess continue, demanding answers. It is not a sustainable mood; nor do I think it impotent. In fact, the synchronicities have been piling up, some profoundly so, even stupifying, pointing to a far more positive future than I ever considered. At least for me and those closest to me. And of course, extrapolating out, I can't see why that can't be the case for all humanity.

We have all the knowledge, tools and wealth available to provide an eden-like life for everyone on Earth, if that's what we wanted to do. Which of course, would require that everyone start taking responsibility for their life, meaning that everyone stop expecting any government to take care of them; and, that everyone would agree that no human should accumulate for themselves what would otherwise provide a beautiful life for hundreds and even hundreds of thousands of people. I said as much in a comment on a recent post on John Michael Greer's eminently informative blog, @ www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com. His response was, essentially: if pigs could fly. Which is not a helpful attitude. But he does not believe in a game-changing event, a kind of quintessentially epic Black Swan, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Taleb. Which seems to me imminent.

It would seem civilization is on a crash course toward ecological oblivion. It would seem we are very likely to destroy the biosphere on which all life depends. But could it be instead, that we are running out of fossil fuels just in time to avert disaster; just in time to come to a different understanding of ourselves, and our place on this Earth, in this solar system, in this galaxy, in this universe? And could it be, that this change could be part and parcel of a radical transformation in global consciousness? I certainly think so. But I believe in a divine universe. It's also true that the end of fossil fuels will be the epic disaster we expect, if that is what we expect.

I believe Homo sapien sapien was essentially still an ape until one first sampled a mushroom containing psilocybin, about 40,000 years ago. There, consciousness bloomed. And here we are now. I intuit that we are on the verge of some similarly grand evolutionary leap. I don't know what that will look like, but none of us can. We can only imagine. And the more of us that imagine what that eden would look like, the more likely we are to make it happen.

For ourselves. For the whole of the Earth.