“We may assume then, that here and there, still invisible to the public eye, the future human already exists.” — Martin Heidegger
Every now and again a phantom of sorts rises up from the depths of the Common Memory, has a brief moment in our lives, and then sinks back down again into oblivion. A shapeshifter, she seems to prefer a certain type of gathering — say a concert, or a choir-dense church service — where rhythms pulse and bodies respond. Or the close physical proximity and repetitious roaring chants of a large sporting event, and the group identity fusion both engender.
At other times her visitations can be quite personal. One might catch a glimpse of her while on a solitary walk in nature, in an intimate encounter, during the theatrics of ceremony, or even when doing something as simple as playing a game or enjoying music with a few close friends on a warm summer afternoon. In such gratuitous moments there’s no separation. You and the other are one. And in this sweet re-union, you just might find yourself being made inexplicably whole again — which is the original, true meaning of the word ‘heal’.
The divine benefactress of all these unitary experiences was at the zenith of her power and stature during the last great cycle of matriarchy, which came to an end approximately 5000 years ago. Today she’s a gone girl, at her nadir and literally a ghost of her former self. Her duties as Queen of the Dead may have something to do with that. But so too has her profound distress over humanity’s unconscious drift into dis-connection, which has largely been an unforeseen consequence of our current patriarchal cycle and its hallmark form of consciousness: the subject/object split.
The split has been especially hard on her. Not so much because of its long duration, since she’s from another dimension and time is a mortal constraint. But because its divisive nature is so very foreign to hers. Perhaps that’s why she keeps making all these fleeting apparitions: so that she, and we, won’t completely forget.
Cycles are circles in time. Usually they unfold autonomously; but sometimes they pair up and dance together like binary stars. That’s been the story of matriarchy and patriarchy. Thus 5000 years ago, matriarchy’s autumn was patriarchy’s spring; and humanity’s loss was to the benefit of the Netherworld. Now it’s the opposite. Patriarchy’s autumn is matriarchy’s spring; and this time it’s those of us in the Land of the Living who stand to benefit.
The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson often spoke of a phenomenon he dubbed: “The Sunset Effect.” Exactly like the setting sun, dying cultural institutions sometimes fade to dark in a final blaze of color. Thus all of these power-obsessed male gerontocrats we have in the world today, who are hell-bent on suppressing women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ persons, aren’t really representative of a robust and flourishing patriarchy. Instead they’re its swan song: the last absurd gasp of a decaying, spent cycle.
And so as you and I prepare to direct our attention away from our fading patriarchal past, and turn it towards a more equitable and just re-matriated future, the Goddess’ darkly distraught husband comes quietly to her side, and untold legions of the deceased tearfully gather round their king and queen…
“She knows that she must make her farewells to the souls of the underworld, and ascend to her appointed place in the realm of the living. She gathers gifts of peace and paradox to take to the living, so they might remember, if only briefly, the richly textured beauty of the dark. Finally, on the eve of the spring equinox, Persephone weeps as she floats in the darkness. In her hand she holds a stalk of wheat, the symbol of her promise to return to the living. For a single, timeless moment she turns her ears to the impossible music that sings to her. Finally, she raises a single grain of wheat to her trembling lips.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
THE SUBJECT/OBJECT SPLIT
In 925 CE the last of the Southern Maya’s magnificent forest cities were on the verge of total collapse. For 200 years, societal cohesion had been eroding due to an increasing concentration of wealth at the top of the class structure, and rampant deforestation had been turning their once-benign climate unfriendly. So all it took was one prolonged period of drought, and it was game over. In quiet desperation, the last contingents of a disenfranchised populace totaling perhaps 3 million took what they could carry on their backs and in their hearts, melted back into the remnants of the great southern forest, and returned to the subsistence lifestyle of their ancestors.
If this description of the past sounds eerily akin to our present moment, it should. Except this time around we can see that the provoking crises of inequity and climate are really the result of one single crisis: a crisis of consciousness. What’s more, the problem today isn’t just local; it’s global. So how will you and I respond to this challenge, since there aren’t enough forests left for all 8 billion of us to melt into even if we wanted to or could?
Will we continue in our denial to believe that life as we’ve known it will somehow carry on, and thus essentially repeat the same blunder as those 5th century CE Romans? They too were living a good, complacent life of empire. But it all came crashing down the day those 100,000 Germanic tribesmen that had been massing on the northern bank of the Rhine did what the Romans believed was impossible, and successfully made it across the treacherous currents of that mighty river.
Will we place all our hope in the dubious possibility of a technological fix? Or will we finally recognize, and actually start to deal with, the root cause of the crisis: the unsustainable manner in which you and I today have learned to be human in-the-world. I’m talking about what’s become the dominant form of consciousness in the world today: the subject/object split. The split, if you’ve forgotten, is a perceptual and cognitive divide between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you).
Three factors have contributed to the split’s 2500-year hegemony. First is the now almost universal adoption of the Western, literacy-based model of education. The surgeon turned historian-of-consciousness Leonard Shlain explored the physiological effects of the sustained exercise of the skills of reading and writing alphabetically before he died. But to the best of my knowledge, someone has yet to connect the dots between the physiology, the development of split, and humankind’s rapidly deteriorating situation. As a result, due to education and habit, the vast majority of contemporary thinkers remain unconsciously beholding to this increasingly toxic psychology.
What I do know for certain is that in Ancient Greece, which was the birthplace of Western Civilization and the world’s first culture to alphabetize its native language, the definitive litmus-test for the presence of the split — the existence of philosophy and science as we know them today — didn’t show positive results until after the alphabet had been introduced.
Second is the fact that for the last 2500 years the split’s inherent perceptual bias has become increasingly embedded in, and reinforced by, the structurally congruent subject/verb/object (SVO) grammar of the Indo-European family of languages — the largest family of languages on the planet, with 445 members and 3.2 billion speakers or 46% of the world’s population.
And ironically the third factor is the implementation of the global communications network which, by its very nature, could be the functional neurology for a more unified, post-split form of consciousness. Unfortunately the digital technologies underpinning it have been captured and weaponized against us by powerful economic and political institutions that owe their very existence to the split and unwittingly serve its interests. This includes the social media platforms, as well as both major systems of economic organization in the world today: capitalism and state-sponsored socialism. It really doesn’t matter if you call it ‘employer/employee’ or ‘director/worker’. Both descriptions reflect the same master/slave model of relationship.
Problem is, when left on its own any form of consciousness can become increasingly unbalanced, toxic, and destructive. It happened to the At-one-ment; and now it’s happening to the split. Truth is: I cannot think of a single crisis in the world today that isn’t being directly caused or severely exacerbated by the divisive shadow of this deeply-engrained perceptual and cognitive habit.
AT-ONE-MENT DEPRIVATION DISORDER (ADD)
“Each ailment, each disease,” observes the Peruvian poet César Calvo Soriano, “comes to the world after its remedy.” We had a remedy for the subject/object split’s more self-aggrandizing distortions long before they began to become a problem. But because the people of that earlier time weren’t in a position to see what was happening, they allowed the at-one form of consciousness to wither and fade — ‘they’ being our ancestral Greek sisters and brothers. However bedazzled as they were by the immense power of the alphabetically-rendered word, we can hardly blame them.
Right up through the Classical period and beyond, safeguarding the knowledge of how to maintain perceptual and societal unity was the primary responsibility of the Eleusinian Mysteria (See Part 1). But that knowledge began to decay the day in 800 BCE when Phoenician traders first introduced the Greeks to the Semitic alphabet. Like the oft-cited frog in the pan, the perceptual, cognitive, and societal changes that alphabetic literacy produced took place so gradually that no one noticed. And when the shrine was brutally destroyed in 396 CE by marauding Roman troops and their Visigoth henchmen, the natural counterbalance to the excesses of the split was irrevocably lost.
On hindsight it’s clear that this was an unfortunate mistake. Because without a living, continuously-maintained at-one experience the internal coherence of human perception falls apart, individual psyches fracture, and collectivities fragment into the kinds of conflicting camps that are becoming so dangerous in our world today. And now, after being immersed in the literate perceptual and cognitive environment for some 2500 years, the Western mindset is having to deal with the consequences of that mistake, chief amongst which is an explosion of what I like to call ADD (At-one-ment Deficit Disorder) — not to be confused with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
We need to understand, however, that the At-one-ment and the subject/object split have both been creative evolutionary responses our two most fundamental human needs. The first is our need for connection and community: to find out who ‘we’ are. The second is our need to actualize selfhood: to find out who ‘I’ am. So purely from a needs perspective, one could argue that the At-one-ment had to slip away when and as it did because the matriarchal priority of connection had become so rigidified that individual innovation and experimentation of any kind were being stifled; and thus the need for self-actualization wasn’t getting met.
Now under patriarchal dominion we’ve swung to the opposite extreme. It’s the priorities of self that have become exaggerated; and this to a degree that what little is left of the societal commons is in danger of disappearing altogether. The result is the ongoing “Hell with you Jack, I got mine” free-for-all that passes for society in America and much of the world today. This toxic over-emphasis on the priorities of self is the first of four major symptoms of At-one-ment Deficit Disorder (ADD).
The second symptom is an increasingly normalized state of loneliness and isolation. In a May 2023 advisory entitled: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy blamed the situation on a breakdown of interpersonal communication. According to Murthy, half of adults in the U.S. are now reporting measurable levels of chronic loneliness. In 2021, a Harvard Report had suggested that 36% of all Americans, 61% of young adults, and 51% of mothers with young children were experiencing “serious loneliness.” The 14% increase in the two short years between these reports is most likely the result of a spike in isolation brought on by misguided Covid lockdowns.
The loneliness epidemic Dr. Murthy is referring to is neither limited to the US alone, nor to any particular age group. In addition to the salient mental and emotional problems it’s responsible for, significant physical health consequences include: a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease, a 32% increased risk of stroke, a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults, and a 60% increase in the risk of premature death.
Dr. Murthy is partially correct when he says that a noticeable deterioration of human connection is a major contributor to the epidemic. But framing the problem as exclusively a matter of human interaction is itself a symptom of this disorder, since our dis-connection from the natural world is an equally large contributor.
Symptom #3 is an increase in free-floating anxiety. The clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet believes that this kind of anxiety is closely related to chronic loneliness. In his view, both are the main prerequisites for his extremely controversial and discomfort-producing theory of “mass formation,” which for our purposes here essentially means crowd behavior. When faced with an existential threat that cannot be dealt with effectively as individuals, humans instinctively begin to function as a crowd by reverting to a malformed caricature of the at-one state. This happens because mass formation is largely an unconscious process, which causes the at-one instinct to become dangerously contaminated with shadow elements. Think of this as analogous to the strangely distorted image that peers back at you from a funhouse mirror.
The 4th symptom of ADD is resorting to false ways of satisfying the unmet need. And when that need is for connection, as it is for most of us today, then the counterfeit ways of meeting the need can range all the way from the deceptively bogus bonding offered by social media to fully-developed, widely-embraced ideologies such as socialism and communism. Anything will serve that creates an experience of belonging to, and participating in, something greater than one’s own personal self-interests — even when that experience is being wantonly manipulated.
One of the main lessons the history of consciousness has to teach us is that periodic swings between common-interest and self-interest are nothing new. Case in point: pre-history and history’s oscillating cycles of matriarchal (common) and patriarchal (self) emphasis, where victims in one cycle become perpetrators in the next. Such back and forth, tit for tat reversals have never really served us. Some day, and hopefully soon, we’re going to need to learn how to cultivate both at the same time.
The Shuar people of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon have a common dream that speaks of a bird that has been trying to fly with just one wing for a long time now. The result of such an imbalanced effort is that the bird ends up flying in circles (i.e., in cycles perhaps?): first in one direction (matriarchy?), then in the other (patriarchy?). This dream also contains a prophecy. The day is coming when the bird will finally learn how to fly straight by using both wings at the same time.
The Hopi have a slightly different take on the history of consciousness. By their reckoning, this is the fourth time that humans have found themselves trapped in the same evolutionary cul-de-sac. And in each of the three previous cycles, because people wouldn’t or couldn’t see that all the divisiveness threatening their societies was the result of an unbalanced patriarchal extreme of self-interest, things didn’t end well.
So whether this is the fourth time we’ve found ourselves suffering the consequences of a split-driven hyper-individualism or only the first, know that another way of being human — one that prioritizes cooperation, community, and harmony with Mother Earth — really is possible. The blueprint for it is already there in our Common Memory, just waiting to once again be made a priority.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL MATRICES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is a hot topic these days. The majority of the philosophers and scientists taking part in the conversation espouse a ‘materialist’ view. In other words: consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of brain activity. And therefore its structural form, or configuration, is fixed and constant.
Thus when these thinkers look to the past, or to the future, the people they see peering back at them all think and behave just like themselves — in fact are themselves, except that they’re dressed in skins or togas and don’t sport Ph.D.’s. And yet we live in a world where everything changes all the time, where nothing lasts. So why should the architecture of our consciousness and our ‘human nature’ be the lone exceptions?
In addition to being completely unconscious of, and beholding in their world-view to, the perceptual and cognitive biases of the subject/object split, materialists give little if any credence to the Big Picture presented by the history of consciousness. Most aren’t even aware of it, because a hardwired neurological process would never have a dis-continuous history. Even the possibility of such is outside their accepted universe of discourse.
Personally I don’t see how consciousness will ever be fully understood or explained if we remain within the narrow, split-determined bounds of the materialist model. If you don’t include our neurology’s technological extensions in your equation, then the rich and colorful diversity of human history is reduced to a split-determined, monochromic uniformity. This is absolutely true when it comes to the question of form, because the form you and I inhabit is the result of a partnership between our neurology and the experiential environment generated by our culture’s dominant information technology.
When innovation causes a culture’s information technology to undergo a paradigmatic change, that culture’s shared form of consciousness adapts by qualitatively mirroring the change. For example: like all indigenous peoples in the early morning of the world, the Archaic Greeks in-habited a more unified form of consciousness I call: ‘the At-one-ment’. Originally native to our animal forebears, the at-one form evolved into its uniquely human expression when the First People began partnering their brains with the spoken word 200,000 years ago. At that time, neither philosophy nor science as we know them both today existed — not in Greece, not anywhere else in the world.
The Semitic alphabet arrives in Greece in 800 BCE. And within just a few generations of immersion in the information environment of the written word, the form of Greek consciousness shifts away from the ancestral At-one-ment. It leaves behind its original technological matrix of right-brain activating language — be it verbalized, imaged, sung, whistled, gestured, or transcribed pictographically. And it adopts the left-brain activating matrix of alphabetic literacy, which shifts it towards the subject/object split. And once the split has achieved multigenerational momentum, both philosophy and ‘natural’ philosophy (science) are invented.
The problem is that all this transpired unconsciously; and therefore beneath the threshold of people’s awareness. The infectious enthusiasm of the first philosophers suggests that the Classical Greeks were so caught up in the break-through excitement that they simply couldn’t see the Big Picture. They had neither the ‘speed’ nor the ‘altitude’ required to see that there even was such a thing — much less, what that picture might actually be.
So why are we today able to perceive what they couldn’t? Because the faster the technological extensions of our physical and mental capacities go, the faster we go. For instance: the automobile extends the foot. Notice all the speeders on US interstates and freeways these days? The futurist Buckminster Fuller dubbed this relentlessly steepening curve: “accelerating acceleration”.
And what’s pushing this ? Well according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, humanity now generates as much information in just two days as we did from the beginning of civilization up until the year 2003. And how does the human brain deal with such a ‘cognitive overload’? The Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter has the answer to that: “Information overload requires speed-up which permits [pattern] recognition.” (They Became What They Beheld, 1973, brackets mine.) That’s why we can see the Big Picture that the Greeks couldn’t.
So if the unlearned lesson at the root of Western Civilization was to preserve the at-one experience while perfecting the subject/object split, ours has to be to correct this error by preserving the psychology of the split, while marrying it to a re-vivified experience of at-one-ment. So here’s an analogy to help you understand how technology-driven process of accelerating acceleration is working in the history of human consciousness...
Imagine you’re sitting in a window seat of an airliner preparing to depart the airport at Manaus, Brazil. As the plane slowly taxis into position, distinguishing and appreciating specific trees in the wall of forest encroaching on the runway is both possible and appropriate. That’s exactly what the First People were doing with their favored pursuits of story-telling and myth-making. Right up until the midpoint of the 1st millennium BCE, humans were immersed in the sensory world, at-one, and ‘taxiing’.
As the plane begins to accelerate and lifts off, individual trees become no longer distinguishable; but the community they’re a part of still is. In other words: ‘grove’ has supplanted ‘tree’ as your relevant category of perception. The historical equivalent of this dimensional shift was the development of the subject/object split, and the beginnings of a “craving for generality” that the philosopher Wittgenstein linked to the emergence of split-enabled philosophy and science.
Then, as your speed continues to increase, and you gain even greater altitude, distinguishing groves becomes impossible. They and their constituent trees are obviously still there; but you’d never know it because your perception has been forced to adopt an even higher level of pattern recognition. Now the only thing you can meaningfully discern is the immense emerald majesty of the Amazonian rainforest: the community of all its member communities. And the evolutionary equivalent of this stunningly beautiful panorama is the higher level, all-inclusive framework of the history of human consciousness.
RE-MATRIATING THE SPLIT
The darkness shifts and ripples. The world is ripped by a crash of thunder. The wind shrieks around her. The void explodes with jarring colors and a cacophony of discordant sounds. Persephone cries out in terror even as she leaps into the blinding light. For a moment that seems like eternity she forgets who she is, where she is, and why. And then, gentle laughter…the sounds of birds…the cool mist of morning’s breath. (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
As best I can tell, perfecting the Human At-one-ment was the work of the pre-historic matriarchy. So were we today to intentionally re-integrate both a personal and collective exploration of at-one consciousness as a corrective counter-balance to the excesses of the split, we would literally be re-matriating the split. In mythic terms, we would be welcoming Persephone back to the World of the Living. Most of our futurists these days, however, are members of the patriarchy with a very different vision of the future. Most of them are singularly obsessed with technology. Boys with toys.
Transhumanist anticipations of enhanced physical and mental powers are reverberating through the public imagination, helped along by Hollywood’s steady stream of lucrative super-hero/super-heroine films. Hardly any of these futurist fantasies take consciousness into account. The commonly-shared materialist assumption that the form of human consciousness is fixed and constant probably has something to do with this. So too is the presumption that the subject/object split they all in-habit is that one fixed form.
But after all I’ve shared with you about the split and it’s potentially dangerous shortcomings, I think it’s a bad idea to have a bunch of clever madmen with IQ’s of 10,000, all still unconsciously trapped in the divisive psychology of the split, in positions of influence and power.
The split is responsible for very one of today’s digital information technologies, AI included. Pioneered by the Classical Greeks, this particular form of human consciousness came to North America with the European invasion; and the men in-habiting it immediately set about demolishing the native at-one form, or driving it to the margins of society. The locals simply didn’t understand what they were up against. In an unpublished interview, Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Confederacy posed himself an interesting question : “If the Europeans hadn’t come to this land,” he asked, “would we ever have invented the airplane?” His immediate answer was: “Probably not.”
By nature, and as forms of consciousness go, the subject/object split is very masculine, very patriarchal. Starting with its inception 2500 years ago, the rising patriarchy seized on it and made it their weapon of choice in an effort to control all aspects of the deposed feminine: women in general, the at-one indigenous population, and all the inherent resources of Mother Nature. So what if we were to think of this 5000-year-old patriarchal cycle and its current transhumanist obsession as yet another common dream? Then we could say that the technology this cycle is producing is equally masculine and thus, by nature, phallic.
A more container-like expression of consciousness — such as the At-one-ment once was — would be mythically more feminine, more ‘yonic’. So were we to begin re-integrating the at-one form of consciousness into our own personal lives in ways I’m about to discuss, and then grow its fruits into buttressing cultural institutions, its re-matriating effect couldn’t help but have a profound effect on everything, including the future of technological innovation.
I’ve found at least one male futurist who’s thinking in this manner; and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of. His name is David Houle, and he publishes a great Substack entitled: Evolutionshift. Houle argues that as essential as the accelerating acceleration of technological innovation is to our future, it’s all in service to the still-unfolding story of human consciousness. In other words: the story of evolving technology is actually contained within the story of evolving consciousness. Were you to read Houle’s Jan 31, 2023 post, for example, you’ll see a beautiful example of what I’m talking about.
Simply by reminding us that consciousness contains technology, Houle is acknowledging that re-matriation is already well underway — even though he has a different way of talking about it. It’s already happening because today’s more integrated digital communications environment no longer supports the dis-integrated psychology of the split. And we can actually catch a glimpse of this by comparing two contemporary points-of-view on the nature of human thought.
In an essay entitled “Culture and Consciousness” (1992), the social anthropologist Catherine Lutz lists the essential characteristics of 21st century thought as: an absence of emotion in problem solving, linear thinking, sustained attention span, and objectivity.
A short decade later, the writer Nicholas Carr and the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield came up with a completely different list. The characteristics they see being expressed are cultivated empathy, associative hyper-linking (a device-enabled, nonlinear manner of thinking that the humorist Garrison Keillor once likened to "a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers”), shortened attention span, and subjective reasoning. Set these two lists side by side, and you’ll see that in each of the four points they’re exact opposites. So who’s correct?
Well, both are. Cemented in place by her academic training and employment, Lutz is describing the essential characteristics of the subject/object split. So she's effectively looking in McLuhan’s rear-view mirror, and describing the brain’s partnership with the 2500-year old literate environment that her career in higher education still demands. Carr and Greenfield are describing the qualities of our emerging digital partnership.
Please take note of their phrase “cultivated empathy” at the head of their list. Not only does it imply the kind of emotional engagement in problem solving the literate mindset finds uncomfortable at best, if you check your thesaurus you’ll see that many of its synonyms were essential qualities of the matriarchal At-one-ment. This fact alone should afford you some insight into the more feminine, post-split mindset your children and grandchildren are being primed to inhabit every time they partner their brains with electronic or digital devices.
PANDEMICS OF CHANGE
When I first got interested in history of consciousness, I decided that if that history really is a pageant of changing forms I would have to find a way to verify that for myself. I initiated a search for any body of experience that had come down from some earlier form, that wasn’t a product of the current one. Reading the psychologist Carl Jung’s Collected Works, I noticed that he kept referring to astrology. Surmising that astrology was probably much older than the split, I set out to see what it could teach me about its native form or configuration: the form I now call the At-one-ment.
It took me years to realize my intention, largely because I first had to understand the ways in which this old, old language had been increasingly reshaped by 2000 years of being processed through the objectifying perceptual and cognitive biases of the split. However once I got a handle on that, and most especially by developing my own living practice of astrology, I did eventually find what I was hoping for: an entry of sorts, rudimentary but nonetheless very enlightening, into the at-one form.
But then quite serendipitously, and to my utter amazement, I discovered that astrology could also be an extremely helpful ally in my ongoing study of the history of consciousness. Turns out that significant milestone junctures in that history always seem to be accompanied by major, and sometimes quite rare, planetary alignments. So let me show you an example, apropos to our discussion, of exactly what I mean…
By 1962, the rapidly evolving electronic information environments of radio, TV, and film were clearly beginning to undermine the split’s deeply-entrenched hegemony. At the same time, a once-in-a-century-plus alignment of the planets Uranus and Pluto was just beginning, and an obscure philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn was releasing his classic: The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. The astrological Uranus symbolizes the unexpected shocks and surprises of life; and the astrological Pluto, all processes of trans-form-ation. Thus Uranus/Pluto together = a shocking transformation. And that’s precisely what those turbulent years, the change in the media landscape, and this unassuming little book all turned out to be.
Kuhn took issue with the long-standing belief that science advances through a continuous accumulation of theory and fact. Charles Darwin, for instance, had once pontificated: “Nature does not make jumps.” Kuhn, however, begged to differ. He argued that science, which like all human inventions is itself a variant of nature, certainly makes jumps. And when it does, these jumps take place in a completely dis-continuous manner in which relatively stable periods of ‘normal’ advancement are irregularly punctuated by unpredictable periods of sudden change. Kuhn dubbed these revolutionary jumps: paradigm shifts.
I first read Kuhn’s book in 1968 when I was 23, and immediately recognized that his understanding of change wasn’t limited to science. Paradigms had been shifting all around me in those extraordinary Uranus/Pluto years. (The alignment was exact in 1965; but these major configurations can be symbolically relevant for as long as a decade in advance, and continue to reverberate for as long as a decade after.)
At one point in those stormy years I stumbled upon the words of a 14th century Christian monk, who in a letter to a friend said: “I don’t know what’s happening where you are. But here it seems that the world is surely ending.” The world itself wasn’t ending in 1968; but the world I’d known was. We’ll return to Uranus/Pluto shortly; but first let’s fast forward to early 2020 and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Right from the start, comparisons were being made with the notorious Black Death of the 14th century, even though the respective illnesses really were quite different. One thing that was common to both pandemics, however, was that each played a starring role in the events symbolized by an even rarer once-every-600-year alignment of three planets: Pluto, Jupiter, and Saturn.
The mythic Pluto was the Roman adaptation of Hades — Greece’s patriarchal Lord of the Dead who, if you recall, we saw drag both the goddess Persephone and the matriarchy she was patroness of down into the shadowy ‘underworld’ of humanity’s Collective Memory. The astrological Pluto is not only the Lord of Death, but of Rebirth as well; and is therefore a potent symbol for all processes of regeneration and renewal. Combos of Jupiter/Saturn tell us something about the enduring structures, time-honored traditions, and stable institutions of society. So a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn alignment = the death and rebirth, or transformation, of human society.
But human society transforms when consciousness transforms. Thus the emergence of the ‘Western’ form in the final millennium BCE, and the birth of Western Civilization were inseparable, co-evolutionary events. So if we were to consider a collectively-shared form of consciousness a stable institution of society, then we could also say that Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn = the transformation of human consciousness.
The Behaviorists once pointed out that “organization inhibits re-organization.” So for re-organization to occur, there must first be dis-organization. “In the destructive element immerse,” was Freud’s advice. And why would he recommend such a thing? Because the only way out is through; and the reward for surviving that is an uplifting experience of rebirth and renewal. Thus a concise schematic for Plutonian transformation would be: organization > dis-organization > re-organization.
The Black Death was the perfect example of this. Throughout the Middle Ages (5th to 14th centuries), European society functioned under the rigidly dogmatic organization of the Roman Catholic Church. What broke the Church’s stranglehold on the European mind and spirit, and made it possible for the imaginative re-organization of the Renaissance to flourish in the 15th and 16th centuries, was the total dis-organization of society brought on by a century of unrelenting waves of the plague.
Europe’s deadliest wave crested between 1347 and 1353 CE — right on the heels of another Uranus/Pluto alignment exact in 1343. It was the intrinsic dis-organizational nature of Uranus/Pluto that made possible the transformation of human society we today know as the Renaissance — from the Latin nascentia: ‘to be born’ + re: ‘again’ — which started to get traction a century later in 1445 under Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn.
And what does all this have to do with us today? Well, the exact same sequence of Uranus/Pluto dis-organization, followed by the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization, has just reoccurred for the first time since the 1400’s. We had serious Uranus/Pluto dis-organization beginning in the 60’s, a strong phase-2 echo of it exact in 2014, and then the beginnings of a Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn re-organization exact in 2020. There are, however, two important differences. The current time-frame is more compressed, so happening much faster; and the Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn is much tighter, so potentially far more powerful and consequential.
In major astrological events such as this, there’s always both a downside and an upside. On the downside — the unconscious, or ‘shadow’ expression — Pluto can symbolize impositions of raw power, obdurate control, and ruthless manipulation. We’re seeing this in the world-wide wave of authoritarian attacks on democracy, including right here in the U.S. We’re also seeing it in the fossil fuel industry’s desperate ramp-up of it capitalist priorities, the climate and its innocent casualties be damned. And we’ve seen it big time during the pandemic as well, since Covid has been the world’s first virus to partner with a strong-arm ‘public relations’ department. When acted out unconsciously, the energy being symbolized works you.
On the upside, when you understand the energies being symbolized, and you choose way that align with them consciously and intentionally, you work the energy. If enough of us do that, then the rebirth and renewal just now getting started will likely flower into a global Renaissance. And for reasons we’re about to discuss, it will in the end produce a far more consequential evolutionary change in consciousness than the earlier, more local European version was able to do 600 years ago.
However, keep in mind that last time it took more than a century, and wave after wave of serious illness and related crises, to break down the old and usher in the new. Just so, the Covid-19 pandemic and all the unanswered questions it has and still is raising was probably but one in an ongoing series of necessary dis-integrations headed our way.
So keep your seatbelt fastened. And hence the wisdom of readying a ‘lifeboat’. But if the Black Death had something to teach us about the transformation of society, might it have something more to teach us about how consciousness transforms?
THE PATTERN THAT CONNECTS
Artistic depictions of the Black Death immerse the viewer in a vision of hell. Fire was said to rain down from the sky. Death slept with you by night, and fear ruled your days. Psychological decompensation — the inability to cope effectively with stress leading to personality dis-integration — became commonplace. Disfellowship, exclusion, and other mass formation strategies surged; and scapegoating was brutally weaponized. The usual suspects were Satan, your local ethnic minority, and your cat. The doctors, most of whom at the time were astrologers, blamed everything on a very difficult co-alignment of Saturn/Mars (‘fear-amped aggressiveness’), since no one at the time had any idea that Uranus and Pluto even existed.
As for the illness itself, epidemiologists generally believe that bubonic plague was transmitted to humans by the fleas of infected rats. But as UK researchers Dawn Lester and David Parker point out, archeologists have never found any evidence of the mass rat die-offs that one would expect if that were the case. Neither were there any first-hand documentations of such. So if humans were dying en masse, why weren’t the rats?
What was observed, however, was: “masses of dead fish, animals and other things along the sea shore, and in many places trees covered in dust...and all these things seem to have come from a great corruption of the air and earth.” (Quoted in Lester & Parker, What Really Makes You Ill, 2019, emphasis mine.)
Tree-ring chronologies collected by the paleoecologist Dr. Mike Baillie corroborate this first-hand observation. Seems the Black Death coincided with a period of severe atmospheric and environmental stress due to a highly unusual series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and meteor strikes — even a close comet pass in 1456. All of this happening in close proximity would certainly have had the potential to corrupt the atmosphere, which might help explain why pulmonary failure was so prevalent. It also suggests that a highly contagious pathogen wasn’t the only thing responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 75 and 200 million people world-wide.
Turns out that not everyone who managed to survive was hopelessly mired in mass psychosis. As society unraveled, intentional communities began to spring up in rural areas, offering safe haven from the abounding psychological decompensation and the numerous toxic exposome ( the sum total of all your environmental exposures) co-factors of urban life. These intentional communities served as incubators for some of the more progressive ideas of the Renaissance. In other words: they functioned exactly like lifeboats off a sinking ship. Survivors and their descendants became ‘seed-people’ for the eventual rebirth of society.
As the threat escalated, the ecclesiastical thought-police lost control of the European psyche. The long-instilled Catholic belief in a transcendent patriarchal God divorced from a fallen nature quietly fell out of favor, along with the split-induced dogma of an unbridgeable divide between spirit and matter. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci helped antidote people’s distrust of the natural world and fear of cats by depicting both as beneficent. In response, the common people of the countryside quietly returned to the old pre-patriarchal, at-one expression of matriarchal consciousness.
In other words: rural pockets of a pandemic-traumatized populace invited the Goddess to return, and she graciously accepted. This time, however, she didn’t didn’t com in the guise of either Persephone or Demeter. In a world still deeply Catholic, she came as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Later, as the Renaissance gained momentum amongst the educated, the Goddess shape-shifted once again into Anima Mundi: ‘The Soul of the World’. Sadly, all these spontaneous resurgences of re-matriation lasted at most a generation or two. And here’s why…
As we discussed earlier, human consciousness presents experientially as content and form. Content is everything we sense, perceive, think, and feel. Form is the manner in which our psyches organize the ever-changing stream of content. The structure this provides is a cultural construct that evolves with the environment established by our culture’s dominant information technology. When innovation restructures this environment, consciousness restructures; and the result is a paradigm shift.
Even though the faith-paradigm was temporarily destabilized in 15th century plague-decimated Europe, the communications paradigm wasn’t. The alphabetically-rendered word remained the preferred technology. And because there wasn’t a new technological foundation to support a different form of consciousness, a coalition of powerful ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests regrouped around the comfortably familiar psychology of the subject/object split, used it to reassert control, and successfully restored the patriarchal agenda to dominance.
That was Uranus/Pluto > Pluto/Jupiter/Saturn 600-700 years ago. Now the exact same sequence of planetary alignments has just reconnected you, I, and everyone on Earth today to the people who lived and died in that earlier pandemic and prepared the way for the Renaissance. What’s different this time is that we have three things going for us they didn’t.
First: the literate information environment that underpinned the subject/object split through both the dis-organizing events of the Black Death and the re-organizing efforts of the Renaissance is rapidly disintegrating. The only things still holding its associated form of consciousness in place are personal and collective habit, split-based education, and split-perpetuating economic and political institutions.
Second: it took 2500 years for the subject/object split and the 2nd Great Transformation of human consciousness to re-configure society. The vehicle for achieving this was the gradual dissemination of alphabetic literacy — a skill so highly valued in society today that it has to be one of the closest things we have to a sacred cow. As a consequence, my suggesting that it might also have a pernicious shadow effect is essentially akin to heresy. But what if I’m correct? Then what we’re really dealing with here is billions of unwitting humans, plus a vast educational, economic, and political infrastructure, unconsciously committed to an increasingly lethal perception of reality.
Marshall McLuhan taught us that technology extends our natural human capacities. A wheel extends your foot; a computer extends your brain, etc. The possibility that there’s a relationship between the dominant technological extension of your information capacities, and the form of your consciousness, has remained below our threshold of awareness for 99.97% of humanity’s existence. That is no longer true.
And third: my best guess is that we’re about as far into the unfolding 6th Great Extinction as we are the digitally-facilitated 3rd Great Transformation. Combine that with the increasing societal pressure of the climate crisis, and we simply don’t have the time to let the emerging information environment unconsciously engineer the change for us as emerging technologies have done in the two previous Great Transformations. Fortunately, for what may be the first time in the current cycle of civilization and possibly the first time ever, the fact that we’re apprised of the technological dynamics of consciousness means that it’s now possible for both individuals and collectives to begin intentionally crafting our own forms.
MUSTERING THE SWARM
300,000 years ago our forebears began to partner their neurology with the spoken word, and produced the 1st Great Transformation of consciousness which made us fully human. 2500 years ago, the dissemination of alphabetic literacy fostered the emergence of the subject/object split, and gave rise to a 2nd Great Transformation which made some of us Western. And now today, as you and I partner our brains with digital technology, a 3rd Great Transformation is taking us global — which essentially means back to one, but on a higher turn of the evolutionary spiral.
So I wonder: how many of us will make the transition out of local to global consciousness by choice and personal effort? How many will simply allow the rolling digital wave to carry them passively into the new form? And how many will remain mired in the deeply-engrained habit of the split?
No one knows exactly what the emerging digital form will finally be. But I think it’s safe to assume that it will begin as a conjugate of the subject/object split and a re-vitalized contemporary version of the original at-one form. Our literacy-based educational systems are essentially designed to institutionalize the split. But with the exception of a few minority spiritual traditions, we lack the equivalent institutions to widely support and foster the at-one experience.
That’s one reason why I think it’s unrealistic at best to expect this evolutionary change to engage everyone. It’s far more likely that the majority will remain with their educational vector and what’s familiar. New worlds spring up like plants from the detritus of decaying old worlds. So if becoming a compost of sorts doesn’t sound appealing, I suggest you put some effort into becoming one of the newly-sprouting ‘plants’. Still is it pure folly on my part to think that it’s even possible to bring that about in the relatively brief time left before we all become casualties of the 6th Great Extinction with just a minority of support?
Not necessarily. I remember reading a study a decade or more ago that looked at how flocks of birds and schools of fish are able to all turn at once — the best example of which is probably a murmuration of starlings. The conclusion the authors arrived at was that 15% were initiating the turn, and the remaining 85% were following. I cannot find that study now; but here’s an article that summarizes pretty well how researchers were thinking about that question in those earlier years.
A different approach was in the works by 2013, when the science-writer Ed Fong summarized the newest research in an article in Wired Magazine entitled: “How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future.” In a follow-up interview on NPR, Fong stated: “As a collective, there is an intelligence that does not apply to any of the individuals, or even the aggregate of the individuals.” And furthermore: “There is this swarm intelligence, this ability to make decisions, to carry out computations that exists only at the level of the group (emphasis mine).”
So perhaps asking how many are turning and how many are following wasn’t quite the right question because that approach is built on two assumptions. First: that collective behavior is determined hierarchically as there are leaders and there are followers. And second: that in the end the determination is made by individuals, even if those individuals are all part of an aggregate.
The research that Fong cites is fundamentally different. The premise there is that insentient and sentient aggregates behave differently. An insentient aggregate — say, for example, a pile of rocks — is simply the sum of its parts. A sentient aggregate - say a flock of birds — actively generates its own unified field of perception, cognition, and experience. Their collective behavior isn’t the tabulated result of individual choices. Rather it emerges from the group’s living inter-connections and inter-actions. Fong continues…
“So for humans, for example, you can take a bunch of people and put them in a large arena with lots of different targets around them. And you - if you tell them all to stick together and you give one of them information about which target is the right one to head for, and you'll see them all moving about randomly but very gradually heading towards that target. So the vast majority of people in that group have no idea where they're going, but because they're sticking together, they can follow the single informed person to the right destination.” (emphasis mine)
If I understand this correctly, the implication is that we I don’t have to know in advance where the 3rd Great Transformation is taking us; or exactly what the form of consciousness now being ushered in will eventually be. We’ll find that out in the process of re-connecting and re-membering once again how to live at-one. All we have to do is embrace the opportunity to nurture such experiences whenever and however they present. “That’s the beauty of being part of the swarm,” says Fong. “Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you still get there.” (emphasis mine)
What seems necessary is that the fully-developed digital form of human consciousness will have to meet the two basic human needs that I spoke of earlier, and that are inherent in each and every one of us: our need for self-actualization (the split), and our need for community (from the Latin unus: ‘one’, and cum: ‘with’).
To date we’ve only done one or the other. We need to learn how to do both without confounding them. Some life situations will require us to be at-one; and some will require the distancing skills of the split. Eventually we’ll learn to move seamlessly from one to the other as necessary. But first we’ll have to re-learn how to live at-one with each other and the natural world. There will always be differences of opinion and conflict. But history demonstrates that it’s possible to have differences without them becoming these gulfs as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon that are tearing the US apart right now on a daily basis.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to go out and start intentional communities as some of those plague-beleaguered pioneers of the Renaissance did. Re-vitalizing the experience of human comm-unity can begin as simply as a getting together with a few friends and asking yourselves the question: “What could we do as one mind and heart that would benefit ourselves, society, nature?” Buy bulk food cooperatively? Help each other with house maintenance? Plant trees on each other’s property? Trust your swarm intelligence; and stick with whatever it gives you long enough to see the results.
The perceptual and cognitive bias of the subject/object split has produced an over-emphasis on individuality. We tend to assume that the individual is the sole matrix of decision-making and thought; and we aggressively disparage any possibility that groups can function as thought matrices equally well or even better. We constantly reinforce this unconscious prejudice with emotionally-charged, derogatory slurs such as: ‘hive mind’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’ — or even the term ‘swarm’ itself. And yet the reality of intentionally-directed collective consciousness seems to be exactly what the emerging science of collective behavior is now validating in such a timely way.
We cannot solve the chronic problems of the split by remaining within the confines of its polarizing psychology. We have to find a way to step outside if we’re to find a solution. Returning to the At-one-ment is both impossible and undesirable. The First People had their problems too. What we can do, however, is learn from their legacy, which has been conscientiously passed down to us by the indigenous peoples of the Earth. We all owe them a great debt of gratitude for holding to the old form while the rest of us have been obsessed with the lures of the split.
We do, however, have one very simple but profound precedent for the possibility of re-vitalizing an at-one relationship field. After all, isn’t it the challenge in any successful inter-personal relationship for the two or more ‘me’s’ involved to become a functional ‘we’? Let’s expand that paradigm and experience to include all our relationships. Because if we truly want a new world, we’re going to have to grow it together — one relationship at a time.
BIOPHILIA
Biophilia is a term popularized by the biologist E.O. Wilson in 1984. It literally means: to be in love with nature. Wilson believed that humans have a genetic predetermination to be attracted to the natural world, and that this attraction is a valuable evolutionary adaptation. In addition, however, this exotic little word is perhaps the best synonym I know for the practical, down-to-Earth experience of living at-one. I always found the term at-one-ment a bit awkward; but it was the best I had until Biophilia came my way. So how do we fall in love again with nature?
Well, the simpler the better. If you can afford to spend some travel time in a beautiful, natural setting you should certainly avail yourself of it. The problem with a vacation is the same problem Ram Das pointed out with psychedelics: the experience inevitably ends, and the benefits start to fade. So unless you’re in a position to make one or both an ongoing spiritual practice, why not start with something that can easily become one. If there’s a nearby park, or if you have a backyard with trees and/or plants, you’re good to go. What you need is any way available to you that allows you to form an ongoing, day-to-day relationship with your natural world.
Think for a moment about your best human friends. You built those relationships by recognizing a basic affinity and sharing experiences. How many social occasions have you attended where you met perfectly nice people, but with whom you really did not connect. So there has to be some basic chemistry at work if you and the other are to become more than just ships passing in the night. You have to spend a good amount of time doing things together. Then the attraction matures into a true, at-one friend-ship.
Re-building your relationship with nature requires exactly the same. There has to be an affinity; and you have to share experience. So what in the natural world that’s available to you attracts you? It doesn’t have to be spectacular. In neo-shamanic circles, practitioners often work with imaginal ‘power animals’. Something about their animal is a teaching for them. It can be an impressive creature: say a wolf or jaguar. But it can turn out to be something very humble. A squirrel will work just as well as a bear if squirrel is your teacher. The trick is to trust that intuitional sense of mutual attraction, and not get caught up in your own one-sided idea of what your power animal should be.
So for example: say you’re on a stroll in your local park. Just start noticing the trees and plants. Linger a while. If nothing ‘speaks’ to you, try again the next time you visit. When one does, pay attention. Ask permission. Talk to the spirit; or just say hello in whatever way you care to. You may have to stretch a bit. If you need support, here’s a wonderful book by a Buddhist practitioner that I think will do the job.
You and your best friend didn’t get there overnight. Building a friendship takes time and attention. Visit your new friend in different seasons and at different times of the day. Laugh at the absurdity of this whole thing. Ponderosas or zinnias don’t speak English; so don’t expect them to. With time a different kind of communication develops. It can be very subtle at first. What you get isn’t the point. It’s who you become in the process. Because as your relationship with that first creature ripens, it naturally begins to replicate. You make more new friends; and with that you’re well on your way.
So take your kids, friends, and anyone you can out into nature in any way you can. Re-member yourselves with The Mother in the company of trees, rivers, mountains, prairies, oceans, plants and animals. Teach by example. Health is as contagious as dis-ease. Show your kids what you’re learning. Have them find their power tree, their power zinnia. Make it into a game; and play the game in as many different ways as you can on a regular basis. You’ll be teaching your children a valuable survival skill for the years ahead.
When the opportunity avails itself, share what you’re learning with like-minded others. When possible, join in ceremony. As psychedelics become more widely acceptable and legal, they can be powerful allies in re-membering the at-one form of consciousness.
As we saw earlier, many of the foundational ideas of the Renaissance were nurtured in intentional communities that served as ‘lifeboats’ during the localized collapses brought on by the Black Death. This time around the threat is our burgeoning climate crisis, matched by Capitalism’s addiction to consumption and inability to accept limits. The naturalist John Muir's jarring lament that "nothing dollarable is safe" is far more true today than it was when he first voiced it over a century ago. And sadly so too is an even more recent warning by Kalle Lasn, co-founder of The Adbusters Media Foundation: "It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that even the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.”
Emmanuelle Cappellin’s 2021 film Once You Know addresses these same issues, but from a climate-crisis perspective. The film makes a strong case for co-operative co-effort, not the rugged individualism of the end-stage subject/object split, being the tactic that will have survival value going forward. In other words: should things get more difficult your most dependable lifeboat will be your community, not your bank account.
HOMECOMING
She is surrounded by the children of the upper world. They bring her gifts of iris and apple blossoms, the scent of rain on the ocean, the sighs of lovers. She hears the whisper of the crocus at her feet welcoming her and spreading the word along the grassy hills — ‘She returns, she returns, Persephone returns.’ And as the sun rises, Persephone is filled with joy and the wonder of life, and she begins to remember.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
When a bereft Demeter, disguised as a decrepit old woman, was wandering the barren Greek countryside in search of her abducted daughter, she is said to have passed through the modest village of Eleusis. The villagers, so it’s said, were the first humans to treat her kindly. In gratitude, The Mother gifted them the life-sustaining practice of agriculture, and the life-transforming experience of Mysteria.
The gift of Mysteria served humanity for 2000 years before being crushed by a rising patriarchy. The gift of agriculture served us much longer. But now that gift is threatened as it falls victim to the chemical-based, non-regenerative agricultural methods spawned by today’s patriarchal mindset: the subject/object split. So where’s our Goddess when we really need her?
The Archaic Greeks would have said that she’s literally in the underworld, tending to her duties as Queen of the Dead. Be they right or wrong, we today would never take things so literally. We need a more psychological explanation, one that’s post-split and inclusive enough to be historically informed. So from our point-of-view, a better answer might be: “Well, she’s waiting for us and for our invitation; because she really isn’t separate from us at all. In fact, she is us.”
Because as long as we think of her as separate, we remain mired in the psychology of the split. By intentionally re-kindling the practice of Biophilia, in whatever way we choose, we’re not only reconciling the subject/object split, we’re actively breaking our habit of continuously re-creating and re-buttressing the patriarchal split. But we don’t want to completely abandon the split like our ancestors did the At-one-ment. In certain situations it’s absolutely invaluable. We just don’t need to be living in its polarized mind-set 24/7. Abandoning it will only perpetuate these epochal swings between matriarchal and patriarchal dominance. When we reconcile the split personally and collectively, we reconcile the matriarchal and patriarchal forms of consciousness.
In making her cyclical descent to the underworld, whether it be on an annual or epochal scale, Persephone doesn’t go to some physical or imaginary place. She sinks down into what Jung termed humanity’s collective unconscious. When she returns to the Land of the Living, it’s because humanity has re-membered, and is once again living in the at-one experience of Biophilia. Re-matriating consciousness is how we invite her to re-turn. If and when enough of us on Earth do that, the we that is she will be back in the Land of the Living. But apparently that change can only happen one person at a time.
I hope I live to see that day; because I know it’s coming. And when I do, I’ll invite The Maiden to come with me on a road trip. We’ll leave the mountains of northern New Mexico, and drive all the way to West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. There we’ll stand by the grave of the anthropologist Loren Eiseley and his wife Mabel Langdon Eiseley. Way ahead of their time, they understood the practice of Biophilia and how to live at-one with the Earth. As Loren once wrote: “I am a man who regrets the loss of his fur and his tail.” Me too. And I’ll bet you that Persephone would enthusiastically concur.
And when the moment is fully ripe, and it’s time we go, I’d ask her to read aloud with me these words carved at the base of Loren and Mabel’s weathered headstone: “We loved the Earth but could not stay.” They’re a beautiful reminder, to humans and goddesses alike, that some cycles begin and end no matter what we do or don’t do.