ESSAYS ON OUR FUTURE, EVOLUTION, AND BECOMING A NEW SPECIES
Evolution Ain't What It Used Be
What We Failed to Learn from 9/11
The Death Penalty: A Death Sentence for Evolution
Overpopulation: It’s Time for the Old Species to Die Out
Climate Change: The Gods Are Not Punishing Us - We're Doing it to Ourselves
The enlightened person is a new species. Although he can physically interbreed with others of Homo sapiens, he does not. He lives in a different world. His mental make-up is different from theirs. This is painful for him. He may be attracted to some members of Homo sapiens, but on a soulful level he is not compatible.
You who undertake the path of healing, the path of resolving your deepest childhood traumas, are changed by it. You are no longer like other people. You can relate to them, but they can no longer relate to you, because they have no frame of reference by which to understand you. You will judge them accurately, and they will only misjudge you in return – and label you as the judgmental one. You will breathe outside the box in which they operate.
This will be painful for you. You will often lack for company. You will know loneliness. You will know isolation. You will not always enjoy it. You will want approval from others who will not be able to give it. They will not be able to rescue you.
It is hard to be a new species. Most new species in our planet’s history have died out quickly. Many such individuals do not find mates. They have to learn to be alone. It is easier to join the flock and find your partner within its folds.
But there is hope for the new species. As individuals we live a long time and we are compelled to fight for our way. Perhaps we will catch hold and someday become dominant. Even if we do not breed on a physical level, our ideas can…and already are. This is a wonderful time of psychic change. The world is open. The world needs to hear our message.
••• Evolution Ain’t What It Used Be
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In biologically evolutionary terms the fittest organisms are those that bear the most offspring surviving to reproductive age. Many humans still believe this to be a worthy life goal, even an obligation, and feel they are letting down their species, their culture, their families, and their race if they don’t have children. But how sickening this tribal attitude is! What about the good of our world?
In a world of massive overpopulation, where our human species is in the very process of destroying our planet home, there is nothing evolved about our behavior. It is beyond ironic that our species has mastered the art of survival to the degree that we are driving ourselves into extinction. As such, the whole definition of evolution must be redefined.
It is now the least evolved people who produce the most children. It is easy to procreate ad nauseum, as cats and rabbits have long since proven, but it is hard to be a real parent for a human child. Children are not like little bunnies: they need more than food and warmth to grow to their full potential.
Evolution is no longer about survival of the reproductively fittest. Evolution is now about survival of the fittest in terms of mature, psychological consciousness. It is this consciousness that will save our species, if anything will. The nurturing of this consciousness takes massive work, given the stumbling blocks the insane norm throws in our path.
Evolution is now about freeing the true and perfect self that we all have in our breast. This happens through healing the traumas of our childhood. A person who cannot heal his childhood traumas is a person who is not evolving, a person who is stuck. Such a person is dead – petrified wood on the evolutionary path. He may have ten children, but he will pass on little to them beyond his own limitations – and his pain and suffering.
Our world is crying to evolve, and we have the capacity to make it happen. When are we going to wake up and realize what it takes?
What Did We Fail To Learn From 9/11?
Americans experienced the trauma of the 9/11 attacks the same way all adults experience trauma: through the lens of unresolved childhood trauma. In a country packed with immature people parading as mature adults, we reacted to 9/11 in a far less mature way than we might have had we been more enlightened.
The majority of people in the United States have a highly provincial attitude. We’re out for our own interests politically, militarily, and most of all economically – which is exactly how children are supposed to behave in order to get their needs met. The problem is, we’re not children, and the world is not there to sacrifice itself to us. It’s no mystery that we live our relatively wonderful lifestyles at the expense of others who live in poverty. So it’s no great leap to conceive why others might be angry at us, and why a certain percentage would act this out in disturbed and childish ways of their own. After all, terrorists too are traumatized from their childhoods, and the traumatized cannot, by definition, act from a place beyond the level of maturity where trauma arrested their development.
The 9/11 attacks pierced the grandiosity of the United States, as intended. Terrorists, like much of the world, project the worst of their internalized parents onto us – and on 9/11 tried to kill off that part of themselves by killing off us. Naturally they failed, because no acting out, no externalization of unconscious conflicts, can ever hope to succeed in producing healing, but they wounded us nevertheless. When those planes flew into the World Trade Center they burst our collective denial.
But burst denial, though painful, always offers a prime chance to grow – if what lies under it can be studied. Yet America’s reaction was the opposite: to attempt to repair our damaged grandiosity. And few have developed past this attitude. This is how traumatized children react. In the days following 9/11 people spoke of insane ideas like dropping a nuclear bomb on Mecca, and thank God they weren’t in power. As it was, when the smoke cleared all we could think about was how to hunt down and kill those we held responsible for the attacks. Naturally this wasn’t at all us – or our traumatizing parents.
Although those responsible needed to be brought to justice, attempting to destroy the Taliban and Afghanistan – and ultimately Iraq (not to mention our own economy...and the souls of our soldiers, as war is not cheap either economically or emotionally) – was not the answer. We need to truly nurture our relationships with those in the Middle East. And heaven forbid we learn something from them. We need to listen to what Muslims, and especially the fundamentalists, are trying to tell us. They represent a split-off part of our own collective psyche. They may not be telling us in the most mature way, and sometimes are telling us in the least mature way, but they still are trying to tell us something – something that they consider obvious and something so few of us can see.
For our world truly to grow we cannot continue to exploit others in other parts of the world – much less at home. In the short-run it will fatten our coffers and fur-line our sense of superiority, but in the long-run it will be our downfall. In an increasingly global world where technology and information is becoming readily available to all, it will soon be impossible for us to protect ourselves from outsiders. If we do not welcome all into our national family and begin to conceive of our borders not as the Atlantic and the Pacific but as the Earth and the Sky then we as a nation will crumble.
A true superpower should behave like a good parent, and a good parent does not punish. A good parent self-reflects, and uses this as her basis for nurturing those less mature on their journey toward autonomy. A good parent does not exploit others for her own unmet needs, and use her children as the objects for acting out her own unconscious and unresolved childhood traumas. A good parent shares the best of herself freely and willingly, and in so doing builds alliances for all-time, based neither on promises of future back-scratching nor fears of retribution but on love, respect, admiration, and gratitude. A good parent acknowledges that she herself is limited by the buried damages she carries within, but a good parent holds the ideal of full enlightenment as the beacon toward which she grows. And a good parent turns over the reins of power to those she has nurtured when they become wiser and more mature than she. This, and nothing else, is her reward.
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The Death Penalty: A Death Sentence For Societal Evolution
Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, wrote at some length about his psychic turmoil over having been a key player in the murder of so many Jews. Shortly after sharing this, in 1947, he was hanged in Poland by a war crimes tribunal. His death was a loss to the world, and tells volumes about the troubling dynamics that led society to murder him. Granted, he was as vicious a war criminal as they painted him to be, but by murdering him society committed its own crime against humanity. Rudolf Höss, as sick as he was, remained a human being to his final breath, and thus retained the potential for healing and redemption. But society, in its supposed thirst for revenge – which they mistake as justice – denied him that.
Criminals such as Höss (and Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Timothy McVeigh, Stalin, and countless others) were predestined for their lives as criminals because of the horrors of their childhood. And as long as “normal” people need to deny their own childhood horrors to retain their idealized images of their parents, they will need to demonize some “evil other” to balance out the scales.
On the flip side, one cannot demonize even the worst of criminals when one discovers that the truths of their childhoods differ only by a matter of degree from one’s own. Thus sick societies kill the “evil other” before he has a chance to prove his humanity by telling his tale, in much the same way that sick individuals banish uncomfortable sides of themselves into distant boxes in their own psyches.
Unenlightened societies (and families) fear healed people more than they do the worst criminals. Healed people (and spirited children) do not protect denial, and their very existences force people to come into contact with their buried sides. Healed people tell the truth, and are summarily shunned. Healed people implicate their parents of long ago, and in so doing implicate the parents of today who are often little more than modernized clones running the same cruel loops.
Thus an enlightened society does not kill criminals. An enlightened society has no hesitation protecting itself from criminals by removing them, preferably temporarily, but an enlightened society offers all its available resources for the true rehabilitation, and thus emancipation, of the criminal – through emotional healing. Just imagine if the billions spent on war were channeled instead toward healing. And ironically, if you really want to make a criminal suffer, don’t kill him, let him heal – then he’ll know pain. Anyone who has healed much knows this.
Giving criminals a chance to heal allows them the chance to redeem themselves as members of society, and contribute to its evolution. By killing criminals we deprive ourselves of the lessons they could teach us if they could learn to speak their truth. Clearly Höss had the potential for this, and given time and the right environment so would others.
I once read the testament of a most gruesome serial killer who took the rare step of confessing his crimes and admitting his motives as best he understood them. Disturbing as it was, it was a valuable document, and for its contribution alone I was glad they hadn’t put him to death. If only he’d had the ability to trace the deepest roots of his pathology into his own childhood traumas (which he failed to do). Alas, prison didn’t offer him the right environment for that type of soul-searching. No surprise. It’s hard enough to find that environment in a therapist’s office. So many therapists still side with traumatizing parents and criminalize the truth-seeking child within.
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Overpopulation: It Is Time for the Old Species to Die Out
Signs of human overpopulation are everywhere, yet few talk about it. There are over six billions humans and their numbers are only expanding. Humans are destroying the balance of the planet at an alarming rate. Other species are going extinct faster than ever before – because of the insanity of Homo sapiens. Forests are being decimated, oceans polluted, ice caps melted, and the air and soil is growing toxic. None of this is a mystery, yet few do the math.
Humans must change. The old way is over. Humans have pushed the envelope to the limit and it is bursting. Yet few want to face the realities on an individual level. And the reality is clear: stop having children! If humans love this planet so much then the best gift they can give it is to disappear.
And yet I love humanity. I know humanity’s potential. But I have no love or respect for the old way. People cringe at the idea of not having children, and defend to the hilt their right to procreate, because they are addicted to their children, addicted to procreation. Without children they would have to face themselves – and their horrors within. They would have to face the truth of their parents, and the truth of their parents’ parents, all the way back through history. But if they do not face the horrors of their childhood histories they will only replicate them on the world around them, which is exactly what they have done to their children, and ultimately to the planet. They are destroying the planet, and they do not care. They would rather be blissfully numb than face the consequences of their actions.
The time for a new species is now. The time for the old species to go is now. And yet, this new species is not entirely ready to be born. Its gestation has just begun. It needs to nourish itself on truth, and prepare itself to handle surviving independently in the world. For too long the old species has drunk the psychic blood of its new children, and has forgotten how to fend for itself. Yet it must fend for itself if it is ready to learn once again to live in harmony with the world.
As they are, humans are a sick species. It is time for them to grow up…or to go extinct. For the sake of the world – and the sake of children whose lives are being painfully molded into the lies of their ancestors – this end cannot come too soon. And for the sake of the truth-seeker, the awakening and maturity of our species is the greatest hope of all.
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Climate Change: The Gods Aren’t Punishing Us – We’re Doing it to Ourselves
“Primitive” people throughout history have had a tendency to blame themselves when things go wrong in their world. They struggled to appease angry gods for times of drought and disease and accident and famine, thinking their own moral imperfections and behavioral errors to be the cause. Yet all too often they, with their “self-centered” worldview, were blaming themselves for things which had nothing do with them. The irony is, our modern world, with its global warming, melting polar ice caps, radical loss of species, and massive pollution, is falling apart directly BECAUSE of humanity’s sick actions – and yet now we deny it!
I find this fascinating. Perhaps our genius culture is a lot more primitive than we realize – just the flip side of our Stone Age counterparts. Perhaps a little appeasing of the angry gods would do us well. Allow me to compile a list of some potential sacrifices we could make for the sake of our world – and for the future of our species.
Actually, no need to make a new list. I already made one in a different essay, and it applies perfectly well here: LIST OF SACRIFICES WE CAN MAKE •••