Times like these challenge us to examine the path that got us here, orient ourselves in the current situation, and consider our possible futures ahead. Racial tension, police brutality, the erosion of democracy, the degradation of our planet, the widening divide between rich and poor, and, just now, a coronavirus pandemic that is shaking the world economies to their foundations – all of it is conspiring in a perfect storm of apocalyptic proportions.
Alarmists and dooms-day prophets want us to believe that these are the End Times, and they are urging everyone to change their ways and get on the right side.
Half of what they are saying is correct: If we don’t change our ways, things are likely to only get worse and the world as we know it will be destroyed. Our lack of understanding when it comes to the nature and dynamics of living systems has prevented us from seeing how each of those vectors mentioned above is not merely correlated with the others, but is itself a symptom of the same underlying pathology.
Where I think they have it wrong, however, is in their prognostication of these “last days” as marking the terminal end of history and our human residence on Earth. True enough, the current upheaval is perhaps unprecedented in the history of our species, in being disruptive (breaking the routines and structures of daily life), protracted (still unfolding with no definite end in sight), and chaotic (the ‘perfect storm’ outside our control) – and all at once. With all of that going on, it’s easy to conclude that its conclusion will be hopeless and final.
When you feel powerless to do anything about the situation you’re in, giving up is the easiest thing to do.
I don’t want to suggest that our times aren’t so bad, that we just need to look on the bright side of things. They are bad. Many people are suffering and dying, and our planet itself is careening through seismic and systemic shifts that are pushing entire species into extinction almost daily. If ‘bad’ means painful, harmful, difficult, and serious, then these times are bad – maybe worse than they’ve ever been.
So am I just whistling in the dark?
I’m not ready to give up just yet because of one variable in particular, one factor in play that can make the difference between a final catastrophe and a breakthrough to something new – not just in terms of a unique arrangement of catastrophic leftovers, but as a next stage in our evolution as a species. This creative element is the human spirit.
And so, in what follows I want to dig deeper and reach higher into our spiritual intelligence and imagine a possible future for us, together.
When I speak of the human spirit, I don’t mean something that is separate from our animal nature, like a metaphysical soul riding inside our mortal body. Rather, I mean to identify an evolved type of intelligence (SQ) that has emerged with our developing brain and nervous system over the millenniums of hominid evolution, along with its construction of symbol systems that are the foundation of our world cultures and their webs of meaning.
Our spiritual intelligence gives us a way of engaging with the environment, each other, and ourselves that really does set humans apart from the rest of Earth’s species. And yet, one of its astonishing virtues is in how it enables us to understand the essential interdependence of life, the unity of existence, and our communion with all things. My diagram identifies a four-dimensional vision that our spiritual intelligence makes possible.
I will suggest that a successful transit through the disruptive, protracted, and chaotic change of these times requires a full activation of the human spirit; and further, that this moment is a decisive phase in the spiritual awakening of our species.
The terms of this vision – faith, love, purpose, and hope – are familiar to us. Nevertheless, or maybe because that is so, we will have to carefully define these terms and refresh their meaning. Their overuse and abuse in religion, business, and everyday life makes it necessary, every now and then, to trace them back to their metaphorical roots.
Deeper Faith
In the West, faith is understood as a willingness to believe something that lacks evidence or seems to contradict commonsense logic. “You’ve got to have faith” has come to mean “just believe it anyway” – that something is true or will come to pass, even (or especially) if nothing presently substantiates your belief. Under this definition, faith has frequently been used as encouragement to suspend or set aside thoughtful consideration and dismiss all evidence to the contrary.
In its deeper history, however, faith has nothing directly to do with beliefs. Essentially faith is trust, a letting-go or release of our ego identity to the deeper support and generative source of being, represented in religion by the metaphor of God. From ego (the separate center of “I”) we drop into the contemplative experience of embodied mind, and from there into an open space of boundless presence.
The deeper we go, the less ego there is, and the more immediate our awareness of resting in the present mystery of Being itself.
Wider Love
When faith deepens to the point where no separate “I” remains, our communion with everything else as manifestations of the same essential reality awakens in us a compassionate regard for these others “as myself.” With the judgments and contractions of ego identity gradually relaxed and released, our own boundary opens ever wider to include more and more of what had earlier been perceived as “not me” or even “against me.” Another way of phrasing this is to say that the boundary which had formerly separated our identity from others now becomes a threshold for compassionate engagement.
Our current crisis is providing us an opportunity to reverse ego’s inclination to contract and withdraw where we seek smaller zones of safety and control, and instead to transcend those security limits in the interest of reaching out to, connecting with, and including the other.
Higher Purpose
The idea of purpose and having a purpose is used in religion as a way of personalizing “god’s plan” for one’s life. According to this conception, god is in control of everything and has predetermined (predestined according to Calvinist doctrine) all things for his glory. Our lives will make more sense, work better, and end up in the right place as we are willing to commit ourselves to god’s plan and purpose for us.
But because theistic religion is focused on the identity and destiny of individual believers – that is to say, on ego – the impulse to contract inside smaller and safer identities where our insecurity can be better managed (or so we believe) tends to hyper-individualize this notion of purpose in theism and the societies it has influenced.
As I’m using the term here, higher purpose is not another name for “god’s plan and purpose for my life.” Higher denotes larger horizons of space and time, and purpose is more about intention than objective. In other words, it’s more about living on purpose than achieving goals or accomplishing a mission. A wider love by definition includes more, and as we are enabled by a deeper faith to transcend our separate identity for a larger communion, our investment of caring attention and mindful behavior (i.e., intention) shifts into that higher and larger – transpersonal – field of concerns.
Longer Hope
Our time horizon, referring to how deep into the past and far into the future the awareness of our present situation extends, is necessarily as small as our ego insecurity will allow. When it’s “all about me,” and this “me” has contracted inside an identity that is separatist, defensive, and insatiably discontent, our time horizon is very small indeed. We don’t identify ourselves with a family, a people, a species, or with a larger community of life.
Our relevant past goes back only as far as we can remember, and only to those events and experiences that have shaped our individual (ego) sense of self. And as the retrospectus of our life is what sets the forward range of our life’s prospectus, we simply cannot see beyond our own death into the longer destinies of our family, our people, our species, and of life on Earth.
It should be clear by now that hope is not wishful thinking, a kind of closing the eyes and “hoping for the best.”
Instead, as we consider our possible futures from the elevation of a transpersonal higher purpose, taking in the full communion of our life with others and grounded faithfully in the present mystery of reality, hope is what enables us to envision a future that includes us all, one that will be an inheritance of wellbeing for future generations.
This critical moment in human history and in the history of our planet has placed us at a choice point. On one side is the option of persisting in our current way of life, continuing to push our agendas and promote our beliefs. But let’s not forget: this is precisely the path that’s brought us to this point.
On the other side is the option of breaking through and moving beyond our current mindset, into a new way of being together. When the routines and structures of daily life break down, when the stress of change seems unrelenting, and when it’s no longer possible to simply return to the world as it was, transformation is our way through.
Tracts of Revolution 