Averaging one generation every twenty years, if we could
trace our personal ancestries back a mere 7,500 generations, the bloodline
of every human being living on Earth today would converge on Ethiopia in
the late Pleistocene era, in the loins of just a very few newly-evolved
Homo sapiens (Latin for "knowing man"). It took millions upon millions
of generations of animal life shaped by natural selection to produce our
ancient ancestors, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelber-gensis and
Homo antecessor – who, themselves, survived disease, starvation, hungry
predators, natural disasters and more for perhaps another hundred thousand
generations before splitting off into modern Humanity. In our scant
7500 generations since, our human "knowing" has allowed us to invent agriculture,
industry, religion and science, to build towering cities, and to devise
machines capable of flying in the air and in space, computers that process
trillions of calculations every second, and weapons so powerful that their
use, in even relatively small numbers, could easily transform our entire
planet into a sunless "nuclear winter" graveyard. In only 150,000
years – roughly 1/23,000th of the time Life has been evolving on Planet
Earth – we have become the first creatures in the history of the world
to not only be capable of making the entire globe uninhabitable for our
own and most other terrestrial species, but to be actively and willfully
engaged in the process of doing just that, through our unrepentant use
of fossil fuels, our pern-icious carnivorism, our never-ending pursuit
of ever more destructive military hardware, etc., etc., etc… After
3.5 billion years of Life's gradual development, we have, in the comparative
blink of an evolutionary eye, through our assault on the natural environment
alone, carried most life on Earth with us to the edge of an apocalyptic
precipice from which we may not have the power to retreat, even should
we develop the wisdom to try…
One of the most compelling arguments against the existence
of intelligent life on other worlds stems from realistic observation of
its development on our own. It's not enough, in the context of this
theory, to find planets "out there" – you have to find earth-like planets,
and more specifically, earth-like planets that have had the same remarkable
luck as our own to remain unmolested by major impacts by asteroids and
comets for the billions of years required for intelligent life to evolve.
On most worlds, it is theorized, animals may arise, but they get wiped
out by natural assaults from space, as did Earth's dinosaurs, long before
creatures exhibiting reflective self-consciousness can develop. On
those rare, lucky worlds chance blesses with relative long term stability,
any intelligent beings that manage to arise must find a way, within the
comparatively brief window of time between the emergence of intelligence
and species self-destruction at the hands of technological overwhelm, to
either strike a sustainable balance with the natural environment of their
home world, or to develop space-faring technology and move out into the
Cosmos. Even those that choose "sustainability" at home must eventually
colonize space if they desire long term survival, since neither suns nor
planets, however well cared for, last forever. If such combinations
of luck, wisdom and foresight were common in our 12 to 20 billion year
old Universe, much of our galaxy would have long ago been colonized, and
we would have detected signals from or encountered the undeniable artifacts
of such advanced civilizations "out there" by now. Since that hasn't
happened, so the theory goes, intelligent life on other worlds must not
exist.
Despite its suggestive title, this is not a chapter about
UFOs, "ancient astronauts," the potential involvement of extraterrestrials
in the genesis of the human species, or any similar such 20th Century pop
culture memetic space-age icons. This final Key Question concerns,
instead, the luck, wisdom and foresight of 21st Century Humanity as we
raise our collective vision for the very first time toward the greater
physical Universe "out there," as seen through what we can now consciously
recognize to be the rapidly closing window of our own evolutionary rise
and fall here at home. Whether the theory described in the paragraph
above bears any genuine relevance to life on other worlds remains to be
seen. But when we turn its speculative lens on ourselves, right here
on Earth, the final key to our own personal and planetary awakening is
revealed:
Our long term freedom to unlock our personal potential, to achieve spiritual awakening, to transform global culture, and to reclaim the promise of Humanity's ultimate cosmic destiny is wholly dependent on our short term ability– today, tomorrow, in the next few years and decades – to refrain, as a species, from blowing ourselves up, irreversibly poisoning our land, air or water, or otherwise engineering our own physical extinction.
Unless we take individual and collective action today
to begin consciously creating a future worthy of our highest potential
as human beings, chances are good that we'll unconsciously manifest our
lowest potential, instead. If we do not begin making choices and
planning actions today based on serious consideration for the long term
survival of the human species, odds are that, in at most a few generations,
there won't be any Homo sapiens left to consider, or to do the considering.
Can we live with that?
In the history of Buddhism, the earliest split into denominational
"schools" occurred soon after the Buddha's death, when some, labeling their
tradition Theravada ("venerable teaching") Buddhism, chose to focus on
individual enlightenment and personal escape from the "wheel of birth and
death" as the goal of the teaching, while others, calling themselves Mahayana
("great vehicle") Buddhists, set their sites on the liberation of all sentient
beings, choosing to forego complete personal nirvana in exchange for the
opportunity to reincarnate again and again as bodhisattvas, Dharma teachers
dedicated to sharing the tools of enlightenment with every generation,
their hopes for individual freedom sublimated to the achievement of final
liberation for all.
Minus the sentimental memetic padding surrounding the
bodhisattva ideal, The Simplest Path is strongly Mahayanist in its recognition
that, while we each can surely, by our own efforts, reach a Stage Three:
Individual Awake level of functioning and progress a long way toward realizing
true human freedom, our personal awakening cannot be made complete or permanent
until all Humanity awakens, the collective dream is dispelled, and we cross
over, as a species, into Stage Four: Limitless Frontier group consciousness.
What The Simplest Path adds to the bodhisattva model is the distinctly
unsen-timental notion of a ticking "survival of intelligent species" clock.
We may very well manage to physically destroy ourselves before achieving
a Stage Four level of awareness, in which case we all die, Stage Three
awakened individuals included. All piecemeal, Us VS Them approaches
to our current global ills are destined for failure, because they are based
on the meme-driven illusion that we are separate, autonomous individual
"I's," objectively capable of competing against one another, of personally
winning while others lose, of stockpiling what's "mine" at the expense
of what's "yours," etc. "I" is the central deception around
which our individual and collective dreams form, the core misapprehension
memes exploit in order to enslave us. All procrastinating "wait and
see…," "let others do it!" and "maybe things aren't as bad as they seem…"
strategies are equally sterile, because the approaching global storm of
social and environmental consequences of past human activity is not hypothetical.
Thrashing violently and carelessly in our self-centered, meme-induced sleep,
we have ignited a real-world fire that only an enlightened collective Humanity
can extinguish. Should we fail to awaken together, we will surely die as
one, dreaming to the end that no inferno surrounds us, or that it's somebody
else's problem, or that the dream-cavalry – Cosmic Christs, Final Buddhas,
world messiahs, extraterrestrial rescuers, legions of angels, etc. etc.
etc. – are bound to ride over the hill at any moment and whisk us away,
just in the nick time…
Are we alone in the Universe?
It won't matter if the only mark we leave on cosmic history
turns out to be a footnote in the chapter on extinct civilizations.
If intelligent life exists beyond the Earth, will ETs scanning our little
solar system 150,000 years from today find only a string of lifeless rocks
hurtling silently around a minor star? Or will they discover signs
of a vibrant cosmic human civilization emanating from every solar planet
and coursing though the ethers from ubiquitous interstellar Earth colonies?
This is the ultimate choice before us. The "survival of intelligent
species" clock reminds us that the temporal paths to each of these starkly
contrasting futures are by no means of equal length. It may well
take seven, seventy, seven hundred, or even 7500 generations to firmly
establish Humanity among the stars, and to claim our full measure of cosmic
immortality by way of human colonization of space. But, following
our present sleeping, meme-controlled course, we stand poised to reach
the opposite goal – extinction by way of humanly-engineered warfare, famine,
disease and environmental degradation – within the lifetime of every individual
reading these words, or, in the very best-case-scenario, in the lives of
our children or grandchildren. If we fail to significantly alter
our behavior toward each other and toward Nature, globally and soon, there
won't be a seventh generation, let alone a seventieth or beyond.
Our individual achievement of Stage Three awakening, however personally
gratifying, will have been for naught if our species dies in its sleep.
For an awakened, Stage Four: Limitless Frontier Humanity,
on the other hand, the very nature of the question "Are we alone?" changes
dramatically. If it turns out intelligent life abounds in the Universe,
collective awakening will have prepared us to meet our cosmic contemporaries
face to face, as they truly are, without filtering the experience through
the sad Hollywood lenses of memetic fear and hope our present sleeping
culture focuses on all things "alien." We'll be free as never before
to encounter ourselves as we truly are, as well – an experience likely
to be every bit as novel as meeting ET. If we awaken to find we're
the first intelligent species anywhere to have survived the developmental
test of technology, we'll at least be well positioned to, ourselves, become
the denizens of many worlds, making interstellar loneliness unnecessary
for newly emergent civilizations; we can become the "Cosmic Welcome-Wagon"
for our galaxy, and eventually, the whole Universe. If life turns
out to be an Earthly singularity, wholly unique, by design or by chance,
to our own little planet, we'll have heroic-ally saved the one precious
source of biological life in all the Cosmos from short-sighted self-destruction.
Plus, we'll then have the entire endless, resource-crammed Universe to
expand into – what a prize! We may find intelligent life prevalent
"out there," but universally hypnotized, oppressed and exploited by memes
or similar viral mind-predators, in which case we could take on the, by
that time, well-rehearsed role of psychic/spiritual liberators devoted
to awakening all sentient beings everywhere…
Our present high-stakes global predicament is a cumulative
consequence of trillions upon trillions of seemingly-minor, myopic everyday
choices made by many billions of sleeping, meme-possessed brains over the
course of thousands of years. Building a limitless, space-faring,
awakened human future will require trillions of choices more – the kind
of clear and conscious choices that are available only to meme-free minds.
Like Buddhist bodhisattvas, we must work simultaneously toward both our
own and the world's liberation, recommitting ourselves daily to the unweaving
of our personal meme-dreams, then acting boldly in the world to reshape
human culture, day by day, in the image of our increasingly awakened vision.
As walkers of The Simplest Path, we must also be constantly mindful that
we simply do not have forever in which to achieve collective transformation.
We must boldly pursue personal and planetary awakening without fear or
apology, in a spirit of unfettered diligence, passion, dedication and urgency.
We must start today, and work without pause or distract-ion until the transformation
is complete.
It's hard to imagine any negative outcome to Humanity's
breakthrough to Stage Four Limitless Frontier awakening. The price
of continued global sleep is clear. Our path to freedom is well-marked.
The clock is ticking.
_________________________________
KEY QUESTION EXERCISE #10
“Become the Change"
Look back in your notebook to the five dominant roles
you identified as central to your current definition of "I" when you completed
the Role Play exercise attached to Key Question #3, Who Do You Think You
Are? in Chapter Nine. Explore each role at length in writing again,
but this time, rather than merely identifying the characters you are already
unconsciously playing in life, your task is to consciously redesign the
attitudes, values, personal characteristics, etc. each role would exemplify
had it evolved in a human society whose most important social priority
– before material success, before maintaining or passing on Tradition,
before self-aggrandizement of any kind, or even individual self-preservation
– was assuring the long term physical survival and cultural advancement
of the species as a whole. How would fathers or mothers who take
responsibility for the quality of life on Earth in fifty or a hundred generations
raise children today? What parental knowledge might sons or daughters
value if tasked to preserve the natural environment for children born a
hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years from now? How might teachers
teach and students learn when genuinely pleased to feel the intellectual
weight of countless future generations balanced on their shoulders?
How does the long view impact the love expressed by husbands, wives and
lovers? What roles might vanish altogether (victim, oppressor, bully)?
What roles, never before imagined, might evolve?
Take as much time as is required to carefully work and
rework each of your dominant roles to your satisfaction, in light of the
primary value of taking personal responsibility for the long term survival
and cultural prosperity of the entire human species. Become intimate
with these ideal characters you are creating. Get to know them well,
write stories about them, hold conversations with them in your head.
Run your real world, daily challenges, large and small, past them, and
test their responses. Adjust your designs accordingly. Flesh
out your redesigned roles in as many dimensions as possible (emotional,
intellectual, philosophical, moral, etc.), until they feel completely real
and natural to you, like characters in a favorite book or movie.
When you are satisfied that you have created, within the context of the
specific social function each role serves in human culture (father, mother,
son, daughter, teacher, student, etc…), fully-functional, effective personalities
capable of preserving and advancing collective Humanity ad infinitum –
step into the roles.
In working with Chapter Nine's Role Play exercise, you
have already experienced the illusory, interchangeable, memetic nature
of the "I's" currently fulfilling the core social functions of your life.
Now, let those go. Drop your old ways of being a father, mother,
son, daughter, etc., wholesale, and adopt in their place the new characteristics
you have designed to better fill those functions. Don't worry that
you might "lose the real you" or that, in donning your new roles, you are
"just acting" or "not being authentic." You were being no more authentic
and no less an actor before. The only real difference between the
old and new "you" is that your old ways of being in the world were constructed
from unconscious, random influences, most often held together by egoistic
hopes, fears and self-serving fantasies, while your new ways have been
consciously designed – by you, so they already naturally reflect what was
best about you before, while excluding what was worst – from carefully-selected
sources, in service to the specific, common human goals of long term physical
species survival and continuous cultural renaissance.
Mahatma Gandhi is famously quoted to have said, "Become
the change you wish to see in the world." The social roles you have
consciously designed in service to Humanity's brightest potential enduring
future are that change. Become them. Change the world.
In Key Question Community Groups, work together to accomplish
the same transformation you fashioned for yourselves in the first part
of this exercise, only, this time, for your local community. From
the perspective of your unique Key Question Community group, what five
broad, cultural "I's" most impact the quality of life where you live?
Is it the power of specific political offices or parties? Is it governmental
or social systems, like the military, welfare, or educational establishments?
Is it religion? Science? TV? Art, music, or literature?
The power of specific employers, or of corporations in general? The
possible influences shaping diverse communities all over the world are
far too numerous to even begin to list fully here – but take time, in extended
conversation as a group, to whittle the factors in your specific locality
down to the five concrete cultural "personalities" your group identifies
to be the chief architects of your city, town or neighborhood identity.
Come to a consensus on the five influences your group perceives to have
the broadest social impact, the handful of collective "I's" in your community
which, if redesigned, would provide the swiftest positive transformation
of your local contribution to our common global future. Re-imagine
each in the same light as you did your personal life-roles – How would
this political office or party, social institution, broadcast media, form
of expression, corporation, church, etc. work if it had evolved to serve
all Humanity's long term physical survival and cultural development?
Add to this the secondary exploration, How would this social "I" function
if it were run by enlightened Stage Three individuals devoted to triggering
global, Stage Four awakening?
Redesign each communal "I" just as you did when completing
the individual exercise above, investing as much group time and energy
as required to successfully re-vision every imaginable aspect of each identified
cultural influence, in light of the stated goals. When you are satisfied
that you have reshaped your community's five foundational "I's", on paper,
into truly visionary institutions capable of serving perpetual human survival
and unending cultural progress – bring them into being. This is not
the same thing as merely protesting against or otherwise working to "bring
down" your present community institutions. All such efforts amount
to meme-wars that can only bind your group more deeply to the dream.
Work, instead, to either infiltrate local institutions and creatively transform
them from within (imagine if all the Democrats, Independents and Greens
in your community joined the local Republican Party and began advocating
for platform changes and moderate candidates, or members of your Key Question
Community group won a majority of seats on the local school board, etc.
), or to build innovative, new institutions like alternative political
parties, churches, arts councils, schools, clubs like the Free Masons,
Rotary or Kiwanis, etc. devoted in all their activities to ensuring global
Humanity's long term survival and evolutionary success. Just keep
in mind at all times that, exactly as was the case with your individual
"I's", neither the old community structures nor the ones you design to
replace them are real in any objective sense, so don't get caught up in
energy-wasting arguments about who is "right" or "wrong" concerning specific
details of belief, values, morality, etc. Being "right" is inconsequential;
only effectiveness matters. You have set unambiguous, critical goals,
for yourself, your community and your species – are they being achieved?
All social institutions are inescapably memetic, in that
they are far less real things unto themselves than they are psychological
constructs, ritualized sets of behavioral rules and agreements people consent
to be controlled by while in each other's company (and, as always, psychic
control = memes). The all-important difference between the old institutions
and the new ones you'll create, however, can be seen in their disparate
objectives – while the old constructs support sleep, self-centered dreaming
and the domestication of human minds for convenient exploit-ation by memes,
and because of it, our ultimate physical extinction, your redesigned institutions
will serve the dissolution of the dream, acute awareness of our shared
global destiny, and the liberation of individual human minds in service
to the ultimate goals of collective escape from meme-slavery, the achievement
of Stage Four Limitless Frontier consciousness, and the physical, long
term transformation of Humanity into a space-faring, collectively immortal
cosmic species.
That's a huge difference!
It can be argued (and will be, from a slightly different
angle, in the second volume of the The Simplest Path series) that, when
we work to change the circumstances of the world around us, we are simply
seeking to move "dream stuff" from point A to point B, wasting precious
psychic energy on efforts to remodel the empty illusion of the dream instead
of laboring to awaken from it. It is exactly this notion that gives
religions like Buddhism and Taoism their, as a rule, pejorative reputations
for "quietism" and "pacifism." Why change anything if it's
all a dream, anyway?
The Simplest Path is neither quiet nor passive, and makes
a clear, twofold distinction on this point:
First, the physical Universe is not an illusion.
The Earth is physically real. We are real, biological creatures whose
physical actions take a physical toll on the real physical world around
us. That our minds are deluded, and so we do not understand the profound
impact our actions have on the natural world we are a part of is the central
reason systems like The Simplest Path are necessary, to awaken the mind.
Though our bodies, the Earth, and the infinite starry Cosmos may look very
different to our newly-opened eyes once mass awakening is achieved, they
will all still be there, as will any damage we have inflicted on those
systems while tossing and turning in our fevered slumber. All redesigns
to our present delusional dream-institutions that can guide Stage One and
Two sleepers toward consistently less destructive real-world behavior are
good, even if they are themselves equally illusory, even if they only buy
Humanity time to work toward achieving the ultimate goal of mass Stage
Four awakening. Time is good; we need all the time we can get.
Secondly, all of our present social structures contain
predatory cognitive "hooks," built into them by the memes and memeplexes
they serve, that keep us perpetually focused on and embroiled in the dream,
continually dragging our attention away from awareness that we are, in
fact, asleep and dreaming, and redirecting us, instead, toward submersion
in ever-deeper levels of psychic somnambulism. By creating social
institutions that are free of such memetic "hooks," and further, which
have been consciously constructed to continually remind us that we are
sleeping, that awakening is both possible and necessary, and that every
moment we are alive is a precious opportunity to work hard toward achieving
that goal, we can transform the collective dream itself from a parasitic
prison into an engine of enlightenment. By intentionally building
alarm clocks into the very substance of the dream, by creating social institutions
that make collective awakening, species survival and global cultural vitality
the bedrock justifications for all our actions and interactions, we can
reverse, on a grand scale, the self-centered value system by which our
collective memetic hypnosis has been maintained for millennia. In
skillful hands, the dream itself can be employed to shake off the "hooks"
that bind us to the dream. This, to quote the Christ-like lion, Aslan,
from C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe, is "…a magic deeper still…," the workings of which will be explored
in much greater depth in the second volume of the The Simplest Path series.