CHAPTER FOUR

The Dark Night of the Soul:

The Death Throes of the Old

You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.

Idries Shah

No sensible decision can be made without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Isaac Asimov

The crew of spacecraft Earth is in virtual mutiny to the order of the universe.

Edgar Mitchell, astronaut

The preceding chapters of this book took a peek at how human life on planet Earth might have arrived at its point of great transition; i.e. at the gates of initiation, awaiting a transformational rite of passage. I speculated that global unease exists within the collective mind and that some of these intuitions have played out within people’s individual visions, dreams, or during hypnotic sessions. The ‘modern’ mind that has exerted itself upon the present world and which developed on a trajectory of Western industrialization, until arriving at the technological age, exhibits a great deal of short-sightedness. It is a mind-at-large that doesn’t quite seem to understand past patterns of change. It seems to possess a great amount of guilt (myth of the Fall?); a large amount of blindness (the myth of progress?); and little historical remembrance (ignorance is bliss?). It is little wonder then that a majority of people today, especially in the developed nations, are surprised, bemused, and somewhat dazed to find themselves staring into a melting pot of uncertainty. Why does the world have to change? Why can’t it continue on its present path? Well, growth is about experiencing great change, and cyclic renewal as infinite growth is not possible upon a finite planet.

Part II of this book will take a brief tour through the ‘dark passage’ that we are now venturing into. This is part of our collective rites of passage: it will shake us, reshuffle and reorientate a great deal of life on the planet; and it will also, hopefully, catalyse and prepare us for a psychophysical transformation. The reorientation required – both psychological and physical – may be far from linear, I contend. The next few chapters, however, will largely concentrate on the physical aspect of the situation as we wrestle with the cloak of the old world system that clings onto a modus operandi, refusing to let go without a fight. Despite our glorious, gleaming, polished achievements that the world displays with pride, our current systems (social, cultural, political and economic) are remarkably anachronistic, cunningly deceptive, opaque, and in dire need of renovation. Yet in order to sweep out the brushwood we may be forced to endure a metaphorical, and literal, dark night of the soul.

The next 20 years cannot be the same as the last 20 years. Change is upon us rapidly, even if we are not aware of its pace. As mentioned in the previous chapter, every two days the world is creating as much information as was created from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. The somewhat ethereal (i.e. non-physical) nature of information, however, is not the only thing that is speeding up – the whole growth of the world is. Nation states have expanded into regional blocs: EU (European Union); AU (African Union); UNASUR (Union of South American Nations); AL (Arab League); and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), to name but a few. Nations that were once considered less developed are now expanding extensively into global players – e.g. China and India – and nations/regions that are strong in resources – Russia, Iran, Brazil, etc. – are shifting their positions in the geopolitical arena of the ‘Great Game’. The world is now swaying between regions that are resource sinks (importing energy) and resource sources (exporting energy) as our globalizing civilizations push towards overshoot. Overshoot is an ecological term for a population exceeding the environment’s carrying capacity; i.e. the ability to supply the needs of the population. The result, as I will discuss in this chapter, is usually an implosion or slow decline and/or migration.

What makes this transitional period so precarious is that it is based around the transaction of energy: both physical and psychic. Let me qualify this – yes, everything is energy if we take the view that matter is a construct of ‘dense energy’ out of the universal energy vacuum. The new quantum paradigm is revealing much about the nature of universal energy and how matter and energy fields interrelate (as I discuss in Part III). Yet information, food, sunlight, thoughts, oil, all these things are energy too: energy is that source which allows any system to continue to grow against the forces of decay. That is, anything that goes against the classic law of entropy. Entropy, as part of the second law of thermodynamics, states that all energy moves from a more intensive state to a less intensive state; i.e. energy dissipates. We continue to grow because we can take in constant amounts of energy each day to store and use – we eat, we drink and we breathe. We have more energy than we need to maintain our body and thus we are generally able to grow; until, that is, our bodily systems deteriorate with age to the point whereby no amount of energy is sufficient to maintain them. The same also applies to our nations, our regional blocs, our civilizations and our ecosystems. Each cycle of growth and change is about the balance between energy and entropy. And this is why the next 20 years are going to see a lot of change.

Energy & Entropy

Taking a leaf out of the science of complex systems, any given system (whether biological or social) requires sufficient energy to maintain internal structure, so the system does not break apart. Now when this is amplified on a larger scale we see that as a state/nation/civilization increases its level of internal relationships, more energy is required to stabilize the system and maintain its working capacity. In other words, for any system to maintain its stability it must be regularly fed by an appropriate degree of available energy. Not only does this functioning cause a great strain on resources, but it also makes the ‘efficiency’ and running of the system sensitive and vulnerable to shocks. As a system expands and increases its degree of interconnections, it generally becomes less resilient and more fragile to shock impacts.

Anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter, in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, noted how these very same principles could be seen as triggers for the collapse of the Mayan and Roman civilizations.¹ The significant trigger for societal collapse was not solely environmental mismanagement but, importantly, the rate of return of energetic investments required to maintain the level of social complexity. The notion of ‘net energy’ is the crucial equation: if more energy is invested or put into any given system than the amount of energy gained as a result, then we well and truly have a problem. For example, if a person works 7 days a week, 12 hours each day, only to gain a slice of stale bread at the end of the week, then this is a bad energy investment and is likely to lead to an early death. And it is this predicament that has faced many cultures and civilizations in the past, resulting in the tragic nature of historical cyclic collapse.

According to anthropological studies, the ancient Sumerian civilization went into terminal decline because of the inability of its agricultural land to feed and maintain a growing population. In Sumer’s case it was likely that soil salinity played an important part in its break-up, as increasing soil salinity led to massive crop failures in the Indus Valley 4,000 years ago. Similarly, archaeologists also believe that soil salinity lead to massive crop failures and the abandoning of lands in Central America, affecting such civilizations as the Maya.² The loss of soil fertility has been a major factor in the collapse of several major civilizations throughout history. Another case in point is Easter Island, a very insular society that, like the Mayans, succumbed to topsoil erosion due to cutting down virtually all of their trees to build boats. The exposed topsoil was thus eroded leading to loss of soil fertility and the depletion of their food source. Those that didn’t migrate, eventually starved to death leaving an ‘empty’ island for future explorers. This is a classic example of the struggle between rising entropy in the face of weakening energy sources.

The same thing happened to one of the world’s mightiest empires. The implosion of the Roman Empire can be said to be another case of overshoot – the inability to supply its expanding empire with the necessary resources; in other words, imperial over-reach. The more Rome conquered territories both at home and abroad, the more it needed to supply and maintain its expanding infrastructures. Yet as the empire increasingly failed to recoup its energy investment (e.g. through enough new taxes to pay for the military expansion), the fringes of the empire ceased to be supported. The power infrastructure weakened, allowing invading hordes to enter; less taxes were thus flowing into Rome, which meant that the Roman Empire was being supported by diminishing returns. When no longer able to maintain its empire by new conquests and plunder, Rome was forced to turn more heavily towards agriculture for sustenance. However, as the Roman Empire began to draw more heavily upon its agriculture, this led to declining soil fertility and decreases in agricultural yields. At its height the Roman Empire relied on grain being delivered by barges through the port of Ostia, which were then transported up the Tiber to Rome. It is reported that by the 1st century ad more than 30 million modii (1 modius is about 1 quarter of a bushel) of grain was being imported annually to Rome from northern Africa and Egypt. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter suggests that:

During the later period of the Roman empire, agriculture provided more than 90 percent of the government’s revenue. Food production had become the critical linchpin in the survival of Rome.³

The final collapse of Rome ushered in what became known as the Dark Ages, and the world was set back a few hundred years as energy use became more localized and ‘low-capacity’.

Continuing with the theme of the energy-entropy cycle, the Dark Ages finally entered a new period of ‘energetic’ growth as new farming practices in the late Middle Ages – horse and plough – created increased harvests and new food crops. Again there followed the cyclic pattern of population expansion, growth in urban settlements, and commerce. The new energy sources were wood, wind and water. By 1086 there were more than 5,600 watermills in England alone, spread out amongst over 3,000 communities. Watermills soon were put into widespread use throughout Europe, including milling grain, tanning, sawing, crushing ore and operating bellows for furnaces. Watermills, however, as their name suggests, had to be constructed near a source of flowing water, usually beside a river. It is said that in the 1790s there were more than 500,000 watermills operating in Europe alone.⁴ Windmills, on the other hand, could be constructed almost anywhere there was available land as wind is essentially free. Thus, windmills also emerged into widespread use, especially amongst the rural communities (hence, ‘commoners’ mills’). Yet nothing is for free – not even wind power – as with energy there is always a cost. For nearly 800 years the European expansion used trees to build watermills, windmills, farm equipment, ships; also to fire the furnaces and heat the homes. This then resulted in a depletion of energy resources; namely, a wood crisis. Yet how did Europe subsequently manage to upgrade into the first Industrial Revolution? Because a new energy source was found in time before the onslaught of collapse – coal.

Coal proved to be a hard-working industrial energy source, quite literally. It powered the heavy machinery that constructed the infrastructure for a new ‘modern’ world and fuelled the new imperial reach – the British Empire. This period of history marks the world’s discovery of the magic of fossil fuels, and it has continued to rush ahead with accelerating growth without as much as a look back to earlier historical lessons. It has been fossil fuel energy that made it possible to have such a radical break from the old agrarian world and to leap into an increasingly urbanized industrial one. And yet this newly discovered energy source has been on Earth long before any human ever set foot on it. As John Michael Greer notes:

No human being had to put a single day’s work or a single gallon of diesel fuel into growing the tree ferns of the Carboniferous period that turned into the Pennsylvanian coal beds, nor did they have to raise the Jurassic sea life that became the oil fields of Texas.⁵

What we’ve been doing so well for the past 150 years is living off the fruits of ‘free’ energy. Millions of years of stored energy came gushing out of the ground into blackened greedy hands. And now it seems that our present civilizations have all but wasted it in a century and a half of extreme extravagance. In going global we have entered – and entertained – a new myth: infinite growth within a world of finite resources.

There’s No Infinity in a Finite World

Despite some of the optimistic claims from the energy industry, planet Earth is a finite resource. Let’s face it – planet Earth cannot import oil. Yes, countries can – and more often than not they do – but a planet does not have this luxury. Our planet imports plentiful supplies of sunlight and solar radiation constantly (otherwise the planet would not sustain life). Now that we are more or less living upon an industrialized, urbanized planet, our local, physical energy needs are primary. And oil is a pervasive energy that is the lifeblood of modern civilization. It fuels the vast majority of the world’s travel and transport means – cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, ships, farm equipment, the military, etc. Oil is also the primary source for many of our fundamental, everyday needs: fertilizers; cosmetics; plastics; packaging; lubricants; asphalt/road building; mechanical components; etc. It took the last 150 years, and huge investments of time and money, to construct the industrial, economic and social infrastructures that process the black gold from liquid slime into some of our most precious components. These infrastructures are now embedded throughout our world, providing the veins that carry our precious lifeblood.

As the human need (greed?) for this energy source exploded, each generation constructed more complex, pervasive and interdependent technologies that formed linking systems into many areas of human life – for better or for worse. Industrializing society now forms an intricate and entangled web of interconnections, dependencies and dubious alliances. Our modern global energy system is now so integrated that components, equipment, etc., are outsourced and involved in an elaborate oil-dependent chain of transport and delivery. Furthermore, oil prices play a key role in the global economy: increasing food prices; transport; delivery; travel; increased unemployment and rising living costs. And if these negative impacts occur during an economic downturn then their effects are exacerbated. This energy-intensive weak spot of our globalizing civilization was exposed, decades ago, by Roberto Vacca in his popular book The Coming Dark Age, warning that the interdependence of technological systems could turn out to be our Achilles heel. Yet our energy-intensive lifestyles (especially in the industrializing nations) are addicted to oil; and with a current consumption of 84 million barrels per day, how are we ever going to replace this?

Many people still don’t fully understand the energy situation we are facing; and many of those who do know are in active denial. Either way, we should all know better. Yet reform rarely occurs during a smooth patch, and is seldom initiated without drastic reasons. In other words, reform is more generally the result of revolution than the rational implementation of foresight and vision. What I am trying to outline here is that our rapidly expanding, economically-driven, global civilization is the result of a once readily available and plentiful supply of fossil fuel energy – oil. Our reliance has been placed upon a finite physical energy to fuel our living industrial organism. Now that situation is changing. The predicament facing us now is not only a technical one; it is also a social and cultural crisis as we have allowed our dependence upon oil to embed itself into virtually every aspect of life throughout the world, whether it has been for convenience, comfort, or colonialism. Yet perhaps it has been the privileged minority in the more developed societies that have benefited most from what has become a culture of excess and extravagant waste. Our globalizing empires of human construct are Babel towers of illusory wealth and permanence. How close are they to a tipping point?

The influential 2005 Hirsch report that was prepared for the US government stated that ‘peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain’. And peaking means that there will still be large reserves remaining, only that the half-way mark has been reached. Therefore the rate of world oil production cannot increase, and thus will decrease with time. It also means that the remaining oil reserves will be harder to extract, of lower quality, needing more refining processes and greater investments; all costing more money. The last super giant oil reservoirs worldwide were found in 1967 and 1968. The Hirsch report states that:

As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking.⁶

The report continues by saying that to deal with the issue of world oil production peaking will involve literally trillions of dollars and require many years of intense effort. Further, that past energy crises will provide little guidance for these times ahead as they are uncharted waters. Increasing global demand has been so far supplied through the continued use of older oil reservoirs, which are now more likely to be within a phase of declining production. With no new significant oil reserves being developed, and with global oil demand expected to grow 50 per cent by 2025, the future looks troubling. The Hirsch report closes by saying: ‘In summary, the problem of the peaking of world conventional oil production is unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society’.⁷ Well, we might ask – has peak oil arrived?

Below is a list of the estimated dates/time frame for peak oil alongside the status of the speaker:

2006–07 –	Bakhitari, A M S, Iranian oil executive
2007–09 –	Simmons, M R, investment banker
After 2007 –	Skrebowski, C, petroleum journal editor
Before 2009 –	Deffeyes, K S, oil company geologist, ret.
Before 2010 –	Goodstein, D, Vice Provost, Cal Tech
Around 2010 –	Campbell, C J, oil company geologist, ret.
After 2010 –	World Energy Council (NGO)
2010–20 –	Laherrere, J, oil company geologist, ret.
2016 –	EIA/DOE analysis
After 2020 –	CERA, energy consultants
2025 or later –	Shell, major oil company
No visible peak –	Lynch, M C, energy economist8

This is an interesting sliding scale, especially when we note the affiliation of the respective speakers. It is thus inevitable that peak oil will be, if it is not already, a physical reality. We therefore have to accept that a future of declining fossil fuel energy is upon us, with all this implies for our global futures. Intervention by governments is likely to become more overt as the economic and social implications of a dwindling energy supply become more visible; and before the chaos begins. Will this be the beginning of a long drawn-out descent as some commentators predict ⁹; or will it be, as some others suggest, a terrific fall with a big bang?¹⁰ Either way, we are assured that energy is the lifeblood of any living organism; and we have been pumping our global body with the blood of a finite, dwindling sticky source.

The initiatory passage through the underworld, as alluded to in the previous chapter, is a dark journey. There is little light, and the trial is about passing through this darkened terrain in order to arrive back to the light of the awaiting world above. Only when the hero returns is it with a new light: that of vision, experience and an altered state of consciousness. So, too, may our global society be pushed through a ‘dark night of the soul’ in order to find a new collective, creative vision of light. Consciousness may well be the energy of the future – our new lifeblood – that fuels our global society into adolescence and renewed growth. In the meantime, we are struggling with the older energies of black goo, sulphuric slime, and the dangerous blackened coal pits where humans dig like slaves.

The world we are moving into requires new myths, whereby we are not constrained by the powers of corporate greed, political tyranny and the suppression of human creative vision. Fossil fuels feed an economic control system, which benefits the few at the top of the social hierarchy. Profits line the pockets of the major global players, and pipelines cross, cut into and devastate the lands of the impoverished majority. It is an energy system that perpetuates a lower form of psychical energy. It is a physical network that coerces – both covertly and overtly – the lifestyles and circumstances of our present social systems. This is why I suggest that the transitional initiatory period, our dark night of the soul, will be replaced by a psychophysical transformation of life on planet Earth. It is my view that the human race is in line for some great changes as a more creative, empathic, collectively integrated field of consciousness begins to emerge across the planet.

Yet it would certainly help if we could break away from the culture of cultivating uselessness. As if bored with our experiences, we create a whole array of artless gadgets to amuse us and fill the infantile hours. We live in distracting times, racing towards the cliff edge like a convoy of excited, pharma-fuelled lemmings. Instead we should be putting both our physical and our psychical energies into moving through this shift and preparing for a rearrangement of life circumstances. Rather than hoping to maintain the cracking, crumbling status quo we should be thinking about creating an alternative path. The industrial cultures created Modernity, which is attempting to model itself as a global culture, and which is an artificial device that devalues our original and creative component. We may be in danger of replacing the creative capacity of the human mind with technological crutches; unless, that is, we are shocked back into our ‘rightful minds’.¹¹

As it stands, our collective ‘dark night’ may last longer than is needed because the incumbent power structures are determined to hang onto their control until the very last drop has been squeezed. They know very well, and have known for a long time, that it’s all about energy.

It is all about ENERGY

We live in highly materialistic times where the main focus of human life is upon exterior gains and external systems. This is partly a symptom of our modernist myth of progress. It may also be a part of our historical ‘Fall’ whereby the long-ago (now mythological) ‘Golden Age’ of spiritual, harmonious and egalitarian tendencies has been all but forgotten and replaced by the ‘dark ages’ of matter. Whatever the speculative hypotheses at this point, we can say that the majority of our earthly human systems are firmly rooted within the physical. On this level, ‘energy’ is that which fuels our mechanistic societies; yet it does not solely include the fossil fuels. It also consists of other resource energies such as food and water. Importantly, it also involves the energies of fear and control (see next chapter).

The energies of control go hand in hand with the control of the flow of resource energies. In other words, by controlling the lifeblood that flows through the channels of our global societies a minority (often referred to as the global elite) is able to manage an otherwise burgeoning chaotic population. In the modernist, materialist race to construct a global empire, the architects of such control have been relying upon the pattern of increasing gains (both economically and energetically). Now that these energetic resources (oil, natural gas, food, water) are becoming ever more scarce, there is increased activity on the part of the elite minority to covet these precious sources. These are symptoms belonging to the behaviour of the old psychic energy. Such desperate grasping for control of these physical energy resources will make the transition to finer energies (see later chapters) much more difficult and traumatic.

For example, if we take a look at our human staples of food and water we will see that there have been some covert, strategic moves operating behind the political scenes for quite some time. The control and management of global food supplies has been a priority for decades. The 1974 UN World Food Conference in Rome outlined the necessity of maintaining sufficient world grain reserves, especially since the price of world grain had shot up dramatically because of the huge increase in oil price during the early 1970s’ oil crisis (at one point world oil prices had risen by 400 per cent). The US export strategy in the 1970s was to further control food trade supplies, which led to moves to consolidate power as 95 per cent of all grain reserves in the world were under the control of 6 multinational agribusiness corporations – Cargill Grain Company; Continental Grain Company; Cook Industries, Inc; Dreyfus; Bunge Company; and Archer Daniels Midland – all of which were US-based companies. The US long-term strategy was to dominate the global market in grain and agriculture commodities, as outlined in the early 1970s by Richard Nixon. This policy coincided with taking the dollar off the gold exchange standard in August 1971 to make US grain exports competitive in the rest of the world. However, in order for the US to become the world’s most competitive agribusiness producer it had to replace the traditional American family-based farm with the now widespread huge ‘factory-farm’ production. In other words, traditional agriculture was systematically replaced with agribusiness production through changes in domestic policy. For example, domestic farm programmes that had previously protected smaller farm incomes were phased out during Nixon’s term in office. This policy was then exported to developing countries in a bid to make US agribusiness more competitive and to get a foothold into foreign markets:

The Nixon Administration began the process of destroying the domestic food production of developing countries as the opening shot in an undeclared war to create a vast new global market in ‘efficient’ American food exports. Nixon also used the post-war trade regime known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to advance this new global agribusiness export agenda.¹²

In Henry Kissinger’s 1974 report ‘National Security Study Memorandum 200’ (NSSM 200) he directly targeted overseas food aid as an ‘instrument of national power’, suggesting that the US would ration its food aid to ‘help people who can’t or won’t control their population growth’.¹³ Also, the policy shifts during the 1970s were towards increased deregulation, which meant increased private regulation by the large and powerful global corporations. This led to an increase in corporate mergers and the rise of transnational corporations (which today often have larger GDPs than many nation states).¹⁴

As large corporate agribusinesses were creating their food production, storage and distribution monopoly, smaller domestic farms were going bankrupt and closing. (Although this trend was predominantly occurring within the US, it was also later spreading to other developed nations who were forced to ‘modernize’ their agricultural industry to compete with global trade.) For example, between 1979 and 1998 the number of US farmers dropped by 300,000 as by the end of the 1990s the agriculture market (in the US at least) was dominated by large commercial agribusiness interests. The US also operated a foreign policy of offering financial assistance ‘to developing countries via the World Bank in return for these countries to open their markets up to cheap US food imports and hybridized seeds’.¹⁵

By the beginning of the 21st century world supplies of cereal were under the control of a few US-based monopolies. Only four large agrochemical/seed companies – Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont – controlled more than 75 per cent of the US’s seed corn sales and 60 per cent of soybean seed sales. By the merging of giant agrochemical and seed companies, livestock could be fed on a huge diet of drugs in order to stimulate increased growth. It has been estimated that in recent years the largest users of antibiotics and similar pharmaceutical products have been not humans but animals, which consumed 70 per cent of all pharmaceutical antibiotics. Statistics show, quite shockingly, that the use of antibiotics by US agribusiness increased from 500,000 pounds to 40 million pounds (an 80-fold increase by weight) from 1954 to 2005. As a consequence, the Centers for Disease Control in the US has reported an ‘epidemic’ rise in food-related diseases in humans as a result of eating meat containing large quantities of antibiotics. One Harvard University researcher, Ray Goldberg, who set up a research group to examine the revolution in agribusiness (including genetically modified organisms) reported that: ‘the genetic revolution is leading to an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy business’.¹⁶

However, as the global demand for agriculture increases so will the need for increased water supplies. To date, agricultural farming accounts for 66 per cent of the world’s water supplies; and this is without including industrial and personal/household use. It has been calculated that ‘the world will nearly have run out of existing water supplies by the mid twenty-first century’.¹⁷ Just as in the case of oil/fossil fuels, water will become the focus of an ‘energy war’ in the very near future with various nation states arguing over how much disputed and/or shared water sources belong to a given area. In fact, there have already been instances of nations attempting to redirect water sources: for example, in 2006 Uganda decided to cut the flow out of Lake Victoria into the River Nile.

One of the major problems is that there is a significant discrepancy between available fresh water (run off) and population; for example, Asia has 36 per cent of run off but 60 per cent of the world’s population. By contrast, South America has 26 per cent of run off but only 6 per cent of the population. In areas where there are large urban populations it is likely we will see increased instances of water being redirected from agricultural land/food production to supply urban cities; such as is the case in China. Desalination, too, will prove to be important, for those nations not naturally supplied by fresh water will struggle to keep the input energies flowing. Saudi Arabia alone accounts for 20 per cent of global desalination but at the expense of huge amounts of energy. Whilst Saudi Arabia has oil to use as energy for desalination projects now, this is liable to change in the future, at which time Saudi Arabia, as well as other Middle Eastern nations, will find themselves struggling to quench their needs.

The ‘dark night’ that I have alluded to, which signifies the initiation – or incubation period if you will – describes a time whereby the material gross energies will dominate the global scene. The old energetic world order has indeed been dependent upon these types of physical fuels for maintaining social and global structures. Yet as I have already suggested, this gross-matter energy focus is indicative of our planetary infancy. Just as the ‘near-death’ period is a time of struggle as our world has to deal with moving away from its dependency upon these gross and ‘dirty’ energies, on the other side lies the discovery and use of finer, cleaner energies. For now, though, we may see the last throes of a struggle to control the final flows of energy lines.

Dark Night Death Throes

The signs are there for anybody to see; energy colonialism is as old as slavery, which is itself an ancient form of energy colonialism. Uninvited incursions and occupations, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, are purely means to control energy sources and supply routes. The ‘Great Game’ of oil routes is now often derogatively referred to as ‘Pipelinestan’ after the many pipelines that run through the Central Asian ‘stan’ states. A major new Western oil route in Pipelinestan is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) which was conceived to allow Western states to gain oil independence from the Persian Gulf. This pipeline at 1,768 km long begins in the Caspian Sea, running though Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, before arriving at the Mediterranean coast. This serpentine metallic energy pipeline first began to supply the West with crude oil in 2006.

More recently, however, Pipelinestan has now become home to the Central Asia–China gas pipeline (known also as Turkmenistan– China gas pipeline) which runs at 1,833 km. This natural gas pipeline begins in the gas fields of Turkmenistan and runs through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to connect with the west–east gas pipeline in China. The complete pipeline was inaugurated on 14 December 2009 when China’s Hu Jintao visited Turkmenistan, alongside the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Energy makes for interesting bed-partners indeed.

As well as the mad scramble for securing oil routes, food chains and water supplies, the world is also desperate to secure what are known as rare earth metals. These metals, as their name implies, are found in relatively small quantities; their uses, however, are wide and varied, and are included in superconductors, magnets, car components, radar, optical-fibre communications, televisions, computers, mobile phones and various sensitive military applications. Furthermore, China currently produces over 97 per cent of the world’s supply of rare earth metals, and in late 2009 announced plans to extensively cut its export quota over the upcoming years in order to conserve domestic supply. There have also been signs that recent disputes, with Japan over disputed maritime boundaries for example, have led to China cutting off supplies of rare earth metals. After all, in these times, it’s all about ENERGY.

As existing global systems are hit by multiple stresses and strains there will be increased vulnerabilities in the supply chains. We will witness increasing ‘shocks’ to the system as the ‘old energy’ paradigm tries to continue managing ‘business as usual’. One of the major casualties here will be the global food chains. A recent example is the severe drought in Russia which destroyed 25 per cent of its wheat crop. As a result, Russia declared a ban on all wheat exports, sending up the price of food worldwide. Hikes in bread prices in various countries led to local food riots, such as the deadly ones in Mozambique. Following this, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization held a special meeting in Rome on 24 September 2010 to discuss the issue of food security. Julian Cribb, scientist and author of The Coming Famine, has stated that ‘The most urgent issue confronting humanity in the next 50 years is not climate change or the financial crisis, it is whether we can achieve and sustain such a harvest’.¹⁸ Already there have been notable increases worldwide in the prices of wheat, cocoa, coffee, sugar and meat. Experts believe that increasing food prices will lead to further civil unrest and rioting, especially in developing countries. And for the first time in modern history China became a net importer of corn, largely used for animal feed.

The scales are shifting, and the world equilibrium of energy (fuel, food, water) supplies is becoming dangerously unbalanced. We are slipping (or perhaps are being pushed) down through the underworld tunnel that, by necessity, we are forced to pass in order to deal with the potential re-emergence that faces us. Yet when it is dark we might be tempted to avoid seeking out the new and to look instead where we think there is light – still within the old comfort zones/systems. The following is a classic tale that illustrates this human tendency:

Some local villagers came upon Nasrudin one night crawling around on his hands and knees under a lamppost.

‘What are you looking for?’ they asked him.

‘I’ve lost the key to my house,’ he replied.

They all got down to help him look, but after a fruitless time of searching, someone thought to ask him where he had lost the key in the first place.

‘In the house,’ Nasrudin answered.

‘Then why are you looking under the lamppost?’ he is asked.

‘Because there is more light here,’ Nasrudin replied.

Humanity’s period of initiation may appear to be deceiving for a time. There are likely to be various shortages and system breakdowns as the energy overshoot begins to become apparent. There may be many instances of ‘looking for the key’ in the wrong places just because that is where we feel more secure and safe. The desire for security may well be a catch that keeps us in the shadows and away from the real light of discovery (see Chapter Five).

On a physical level the more complex a living entity (animal, city, nation, civilization) becomes, the more energy is required in order to maintain its equilibrium – and even more energy to sustain its continual growth. Anthropologists often refer to the degree of a civilization by its ability to utilize energy for human advancement or needs. In other words, energy can be used to measure the level of social achievement of a culture. Yet there also needs to be a balance between physical and psychic energy; that is, the progress of any civilization needs to be balanced between our vision and inspiration and our use of available gross energy. After all, the most important constraint for every society is available energy, whether it is from the ground (fossil fuels) or from within the human mind (vision/inspiration).

Often a third mediating force can be seen in human civilizations as contributing to this energy equation – that of communication. Revolutions in communications can be indicative of changes in how the human mind perceives the world and interacts with it:

The convergence of energy and communications revolutions not only reconfigure society and social roles and relationships but also human consciousness itself. Communications revolutions change the temporal and spatial orientation of human beings and, by so doing, change the way the human brain comprehends reality. Oral cultures are steeped in mythological consciousness. Script cultures give rise to theological consciousness. Print cultures are accompanied by ideologicial consciousness, while early electricity cultures spawn psychological consciousness.¹⁹

As civilizations become more complex and energy-consuming they often develop more sophisticated communications in order to better organize and manage these resources. These communication revolutions, in their turn, compress time and space differently for the human experience. It is thus possible that certain developments in human cognition and psychic awareness have come about through a simultaneous advancement in energy communications. As more complex systems in energy and communications emerge they reposition social arrangements. People are required to adapt to reinterpret the new environments and social contexts, which then also affects human perceptions. Marshall McLuhan noted how the emergence of print and the printing press revolutionized the production, storage and distribution of information and knowledge.²⁰ This then led to printed treatises and ever-deepening probes into the human psyche and the nature of consciousness.

It is interesting to note that the first modern definition of consciousness appeared in English in 1620; and in 1690 self was combined with consciousness to produce self-consciousness. The written form was therefore important to the evolution of human consciousness. Now today’s modern global communications have shrunk the paradigms of space-time into an almost instantaneous ‘now’. This has had remarkable effects upon the human psyche, cultivating increased empathy, connectivity and feelings of a global family. These are the significant stirrings of a collective consciousness awakening; of a species developing from infancy to adolescence. With this new collective mind rising, I postulate, we can transition into the next stage of our planetary-species evolution. As I shall endeavour to explain in later chapters, these are the early signs of a new planetary mind in gestation that is connected to the discovery and utilization of finer energies. And it just may be these finer energy discoveries that allow us to move away from our dire dependency upon the dirty finite fossil fuels.

Yet this is not likely to happen overnight. We should not expect to awaken one morning (e.g. on 22 December 2012) and expect to be in a lighter, etheric fifth dimension. Of course, it might be nice for this to happen, yet I suspect the reality may be somewhat more drawn out than this. In other words, we will have to work for it – and towards it.

The upcoming years and decades will provide much opportunity for transitioning from the older ‘gross’ to the new ‘finer’ energies in both physical and psychic domains. However, as this occurs we may also see, as is evident even today, ever-increasing totalitarian/draconian control measures being put into place by the governing elite to maintain its grip on the old world. These final desperate acts of ‘old energy’ control in order to preserve the illusion, and to keep the majority of humankind in the shadows, are what I refer to as the ‘shadow fire’, which is the subject of the next chapter.