Life Beyond the Megamachine

The Future Human

Bache vision framing


Mitchell

"We are living in a time of exposure, where the light of truth is shining into all the dark corners of our lives. As a result, all that has been lurking in the shadows is now coming into sharp focus. Some of the things that this light is revealing are deeply disturbing; some are downright terrifying. This is causing many people to feel lost and hopeless, or completely overwhelmed by the amount of work that we are facing.

Many recognize that this time represents a critical crossroads for humanity, a teetering point of choice that will determine the future of all life. Yet we seem to have become frozen by fear, unable to determine which path to follow. The good news is that we don't have to make this choice blindly. We have been given all the guidance that is necessary to choose the right path.

............Together, we have floated through the illusion of separation, and now we are slowly moving back toward the truth of our interconnectedness. We are at a place of initiation, the crossroad of choice that will determine if we travel together into a higher way of being or plummet back into the darkness to continue searching for the light.

To many, this is the dark night of the soul. Here, our perceived sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose dissolves into nothingness, and the world we are left with no longer makes sense. All our illusions are displayed in sharp contrast. Everything that has been hidden in the shadow has now come into the light. We are exposed. And in this glaring light we find the paradoxical darkness that it illuminates.

Thankfully, even in this darkest night, we can anticipate the coming of a new dawn. What we are seeing now is only part of the story. In order to see the larger picture, we must once again expand our vison. We must be willing to step back and look at the long view of conscious evolution. When we do, we begin to realize that what appears to be a time of darkness, descent, and destruction is a time of new birth. We are in the long dark birth canal, and the Great Mother is in the throes of her laboring pain. This is not a mythical birth, and the birth canal that brings life into this world is not a metaphor for something; it is its epitome. Through this birth canal, spirit is entering matter, overall and in each discrete entity. Slowly, spirit is awakening matter to the primordial truth that it is derived from and at one with spirit. Through this process, spirit is extending the presence of the Creator into the deep darkness, awakening all of the shadows and paradoxes so that they can be birthed into the light, and eventually transcended and integrated back into the whole.



Life Beyond the Megamachine

Despite pervasive propaganda to the contrary, the Megamachine society is not good for people. It is not good for life generally. It is good for machines - witness their unprecedented proliferation over the course of the past few centuries. While this has obviously increased the quantity of human life, it has simultaneously decreased the overall quality of life.

This may sound strange. If it does, it is because 99% of humans on Earth today have been raised in some cultural variant of the Megamachine -- which is now a globalized system -- and being so raised in this cultural environment we have been inundated with propaganda telling us that this way of living is good and desirable. In other words, it is simply "common sense" that modern industrial society is an unquestioned improvement upon previous ways of living. We are "developed" and "advanced" and have "progressed" throughout history, and today's human societies are obviously superior to all the necessarily inferior societies of the past. At least, that's how the story goes.

Notice, however, that this story is dogmatic. It is simplistic, reductionistic, absolutistic, linear, and fundamentalist. It is also factually wrong. The belief that modern humans are universally and indisputably better off than humans living in pre-industrial societies is not in any substantive sense supported by the evidence. Of course, in some ways, we are better off. That's beyond question. But it's absurd to think we are better off in all ways. As the sociologist Philip Slater reminds us, "There is absolutely no way to keep the goodies and toss away the evils -- it's a package deal."

If it were the case that industrial society is unequivocally better for people, why are the large majority of Americans -- the richest, most materially developed and technologically advanced society in history -- chronically depressed and anxious while simultaneously suffering from a wide range of chronic diseases and conditions, not to mention political and institutional corruption; record rates of violence, suicide, substance abuse and loneliness; mass incarceration; and record levels of debt, among many other widespread issues? This is not the normal state of being for humans; it is, in fact, an aberration, and reveals something profoundly unwell about our social-structural situation.

Nonetheless, I'm not going to try to argue this point here. If you are doubting what I'm saying, please investigate for yourself by reading these books:

I believe humanity's greatest challenge and opportunity today is to create the means of living necessary to sustain our existence through the collapse of the Megamachine, a process well underway at present. We must live in such a way that we sow the cultural seeds for a time beyond our own, and for a form and way of life vastly different from current standards. To describe this project and its aim, I adopt the concept "The Future Human" from Chris Bache, author of the incredible story told in his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven.