When I was a child, I remember feeling certain that a great secret was waiting to be revealed to me. I felt the whole world trembling with this mystery that lurked behind the surface of ordinary reality. It was hidden under the sidewalks of New York City, within the windows of the apartment buildings that stared out at me like ten thousand unblinking eyes. It was whispered by the wind that blew teasingly through the leaves of the trees, causing ripples across the Hudson.
I was sure this mystery waiting to unveil itself to me was the core of existence. When I found it, I would know my purpose and mission and become a whole being. I assumed all adults had passed through the portal of this unfathomable event. I believed this must be the secret subtext of their conversations, which otherwise seemed nonsensically dull and boring.
In high school, I began to grasp, then to accept morosely, that no hidden revelation awaited me or anybody else. It slowly dawned on me that the adults I knew did not have access to anything beyond the ordinary and day-to-day. I felt baffled, betrayed, by this realization.
I think many of us can recall the anticipation, the expectancy, that the world was designed to reveal a great secret. We can also recall the sense of despair we felt when our hope was extinguished.
The yearning we feel as adolescents, when all of our senses strain for some deeper intensity of being, is the desire for initiation and transcendence. We seek access to something sacred – something greater than ourselves. Because our culture denies us the fulfilment of this yearning, we become alienated and jaded. Over time, we learn to accept our disappointment, to forget our hopes. We are forced to accept degraded substitutes – to find a limited form of transcendence in media spectacles, sporting contests and artworks.
I believe modern civilization is founded on this original betrayal. All traditional societies around the world – all premodern cultures – had some form of rites of passage, of initiations, which marked the transition from childhood to maturity. At some long-ago point in our history, Judaeo-Christian civilization abandoned the techniques of initiation, which allowed each person to reach self-knowledge or gnosis, in favour of indoctrination. Spiritual knowledge was no longer available to everyone. It was controlled, held in secrecy, by the priests and the rulers.
This history can be traced back to the closing of the Mystery Schools that were crucial institutions up until the rise of Christianity. All of the great figures of antiquity congregated annually at Eleusis in Ancient Greece, where they imbibed a potion together, the kykeon, which most probably contained psychedelic plants. In the Middle Ages, the Church stamped out the European remnants of plant shamanism with the Inquisition, where those who possessed second sight, who used substances like belladonna and henbane to undertake visionary flights, were burnt at the stake as witches.
A civilization developed that promoted only one kind of consciousness – a rational, day-lit form of awareness, denigrating the intuitive, the visionary and the mystical. These forms of holistic rightbrain awareness can also be considered feminine. Modern civilization not only repressed women and demonized female sexuality; it also suppressed the feminine, intuitive aspects of consciousness. It only considered the left-brain or masculine aspect to be valuable. As this patriarchal civilization developed science, logic and military discipline, it was able to extend its reach across the world, constructing a global empire.
Because it is innate to us, the yearning for transcendence and initiation always reappears in some form. If it is not integrated into the culture in a healthy and useful way, it expresses itself through nightmarish deviations. Writing between the First and Second World Wars, the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin thought that humanity could not avoid collective experiences where we enter into ‘ecstatic contact with the cosmos’. Either we create such ceremonies consciously, or they will be inflicted upon us through catastrophes. Benjamin saw the First World War as an example of this. It was an ‘attempt at a new and unprecedented mingling with the cosmic powers’, unleashing gargantuan powers of death and destruction.
Today, we see our innate human yearning for transcendence displaced onto technology. In Silicon Valley, the Singularity has become a quasi-religious faith supporting the ideology of corporate progress. The idea of the Singularity is that humanity’s destiny is to merge with our machines or be replaced by them entirely. As I will discuss in more depth later, I think this is a wrong direction. I don’t believe we should reject technology. I believe our evolution of technology is part of the evolution of consciousness. But we should seek to master our mechanical and virtual tools for humane, regenerative purposes.
The world wars that defined the twentieth century could be seen as expressions of the suppressed, primitive parts of our collective psychology – what Carl Jung called the shadow – projected on a massive scale. They reflected the level of unconsciousness existing at that time. In the same way, I believe we have unconsciously unleashed the ecological mega-crisis in order to force a collective awakening and to bring about the next level of our unfolding as a species.
Our governing elites and educated classes have known for over a half-century that we are charging towards ecological collapse. Abundant data, the Club of Rome reports, books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made this clear decades ago. But we have been unable to change our direction and, in fact, we have continued to accelerate towards disaster. Underlying the momentum of post-industrial civilization is a deep well of suppressed grief over our assault on the biosphere. This also must be brought into our awareness, and acknowledged.
We see the same pattern occurring in ourselves and in the lives of the people around us. People will persist in addictive and self-destructive patterns until they find themselves forced to choose between a path of self-knowledge or disintegration and death. On a neurological level, they seek to push themselves to the limit, pursuing different states of consciousness – seeking some intensity of communion that the normal world has denied them.
Collectively, the human species is revealing the same pattern of self-destructive impulsion – suppressed yearning leading to heedless abandon – that we see on the individual level. We are pushing against the boundaries of ego-based individualism, seeking to reach the next expression of our human being-ness. In order to evolve, we have to recognize the pattern.
We can conceive of the biospheric meltdown humanity has caused as a rite of passage for our species as a whole. Anthropologists have noted that rites of passage invariably pass through a series of stages. In the first stage, the candidates are taken away from their homes. They are forced to undergo a process that is shrouded in mystery, considered life-threatening as well as sacred. During this stage of separation, they undergo certain ordeals that force them into an altered state of consciousness, where they receive visions. The elders help them to understand and interpret what the spiritual world has revealed to them. In the final stage of reunion, they are welcomed back into the community, which celebrates their return.
Initiations can take many forms. They can involve long fasts, vision quests, solitary walkabouts in the wilderness. Initiation can mean taking psychedelic plants like peyote, iboga, mushrooms or ayahuasca. They vary widely in intensity and duration. One form of initiation, for Australian aboriginals, involves being buried up to your neck in the earth for one excruciating, interminable night. In the tradition of the Kogi people who live in the mountains of Colombia, the young boys who are destined to be the Mamas, the teachers of their community and those who perform divinations, must spend many years in darkness, to develop their visionary capacities. For an initiation ritual of the Hopi snake clan, poisonous snakes are collected from the wilderness. The members of the clan sit in a circle, with their knees touching. The snakes are dumped out of a sack into the centre of the circle. The men must remain in absolute stillness until all the snakes have slithered away, passing over them.
Modern civilization maintains faint vestiges of initiation rites in ceremonies like baptisms and Bar Mitzvahs, or hazing rituals at college fraternities. For the most part, these ceremonies are comparatively sedate. They do not force people to risk their lives, undergo personal transformation, face their fear of death and the unknown, or access a visionary trance. A diploma rather than any threshold of inner realization tells us we have reached adulthood.
We seem to be subconsciously impelling ourselves towards planetary catastrophe to break our alienation and ego-centrism, to reach a new intensity of communion. We are making this happen through collective catastrophe because we no longer have rites of passage which create the same effect through intentionally guided ritual. But the chaos and catastrophe we are unleashing may have an unforeseen result. Collectively, humanity can realize love – universal, unconditional love – as the root of our solidarity, the basis for healing our world. Through a shared experience of catastrophe as well as the witnessing of mass suffering, we may be forcing ourselves to open our hearts individually and collectively.
In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit visited communities in the wake of major disasters, such as New Orleans after Katrina. We are conditioned by the mass media to believe that people will behave like monsters or criminals when society breaks down, but Solnit found the opposite. For the most part, people go out of their way to help each other when catastrophe strikes. ‘In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones,’ she writes. Years after a disaster, many people recall their experiences as the best time of their lives, when they briefly felt a sense of belonging and togetherness. Ironically, before modern civilization, this was our natural state, going back tens of thousands of years.
‘Disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collaborative life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own,’ Solnit writes. ‘In a society in which participation, agency, purposefulness and freedom are all adequately present, a disaster would be only a disaster.’
Our current civilization artificially keeps us alienated and isolated, in competition with each other. The system functions mechanically to benefit those at the top of the financial pyramid, who control humanity through mass media and government, instilling fear and insecurity. We subconsciously strain against this condition of slavery and serfdom. We require a breakthrough to a new system to express the full range of our humanity – our innate altruism, our empathy for one another. The oncoming emergency will force us to access the deep reserves of intelligence, compassion and creativity that we need to bring about this metamorphosis.
As individuals, we don’t need to wait for catastrophic rupture of our planet’s support systems before we shift into an actualized, empathic state. We can make it our conscious choice; we can live that way now. But tragically, it seems that humanity, as a collective, requires a universal crisis to bring about our mass awakening.
Initiations are more than cultural or social processes. They may have a crucial impact on how our brain functions. They may be neurological events that have a permanent impact on how we relate to the world.
The newest structure in the brain separates us from our primate ancestors. This structure is called the prefrontal cortex and is part of the neocortex. It has only reached its current level of complexity over the last 100,000 years – barely a blink of evolutionary time. The prefrontal cortex is an evolutionary mutation that allows for higher-order thought, language and abstract symbol processing. As Joseph Chilton Pierce writes in The Biology of Transcendence, this region of the brain governs ‘all higher intellectual capacities such as our abilities to compute and reason, analyse, think creatively, and so on’. Our sense of self-identity and awareness develops through adolescence, but we may require a culturally induced ordeal – an initiatory shock – to reach our full potential.
Through extreme events or initiation rituals, the individual can attain visionary states, overcoming the limits of the ego. This often happens, for instance, in Near Death Experiences, which can permanently change how the survivor sees the world. The visionary or non-ordinary state that brings a sense of unity with the cosmos, or awareness of the multi-dimensions of the psyche, may be very fleeting. Even so, such non-ordinary states of consciousness can provide a stable reference point, like an anchor, particularly when the society recognizes their importance and value.
One function of initiation, according to Pierce, is to connect mind and heart. The heart is also a thinking organ, possessing neurons. It emanates a measurable field of electromagnetism in the shape of a torus that surrounds the physical body. Almost universally, Pierce writes,
A poignant and passionate idealism arises in early puberty, followed by an equally passionate expectation in the mid-teens that ‘something tremendous is supposed to happen’ and finally by the teenager’s boundless, exuberant belief in ‘the hidden greatness within me’. A teenager often gestures toward his or her heart when speaking of these three sensibilities, for the heart is involved in what should take place.
When society thwarts our innate drive to find meaning and transcendence through inner experience, the deepest, most sensitive parts of ourselves go numb.
With no access to transcendent states, people are trapped by constant cravings, seeking empty gratifications. They try to solidify their sense of personal identity through material possessions or by seeking power over others. They cannot reach maturity, which, for a member of a tribe, means taking responsibility for your community, revering and caring for the natural world, and accepting also the place assigned to you in the cosmic order.
When I was in my late twenties, that suppressed yearning I had felt as an adolescent reappeared in a deeper form. I don’t know why I was afflicted with it to such a degree. All I know is that my life seemed increasingly empty and meaningless without some way of reaching transcendence. I’d grown up without any religious or spiritual beliefs. My parents were artists who had rejected the religion of their ancestors.
My Irish Catholic father, Peter Pinchbeck, painted in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists. He brooded over huge canvases in his bare SoHo loft. My Jewish mother, Joyce Johnson, belonged to the Beat Generation as a young woman in the 1950s. She wrote about her relationship with the novelist Jack Kerouac and her adolescence in her memoir, Minor Characters.
Art was their replacement for religion. It was their life and their faith. From childhood, I wanted to be a poet and novelist. I imagined myself, eventually, writing novels in the tradition of the European avant-garde, following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Nabokov, Georges Perec and other authors that I loved.
I was influenced by the Beat writers, particularly Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. These authors confronted their own existential crises as young men, hovering around Columbia University in the 1940s. The Beats flitted in and out of mental institutions and prisons, exploring the edges and underworlds. Fighting against the mainstream culture, its stereotypes and hypocrisies, they sought knowledge through direct experience. They explored psychedelics and other ways to reach what the poet Arthur Rimbaud called a ‘systematic derangement of the senses’.
In the late 1940s, Kerouac conceived of the Beat Generation as a ‘subterranean revolution’ outside of politics, growing up under the shadow of the atomic bomb, seeking to build a new society based on ‘apocalyptic love’ and the rediscovery of joy in a liberated society, free of guilt. They rejected the mainstream construct of an adult maturity based on sexual repression, conventional careers and constricted rationality as false. The goal of the Beats was to break free of received ideas and stale conventions. They wanted to recover originality, spontaneity, mystical truth. They believed everyone could access their innate brilliance, once they liberated themselves from social conventions. Kerouac wrote, ‘You are a genius all of the time.’
I suffered a long illness as a child, an infection of the spine which kept me in hospital for eight months between the ages of 11 and 12. I wore a full body cast for most of that time. In the wake of it, I developed scoliosis. My time in the hospital shaped my consciousness in many ways. I felt like an outsider, exiled from my body. I also had to learn to find comfort even in the most painful and difficult circumstances.
I suspect this long childhood illness accidentally left me with unusual abilities and tendencies. I couldn’t forget the hovering nearness of death, which made me want to find some meaning or purpose to life. As a writer, I developed the ability to pursue subjects that were too difficult, abstruse or threatening for most people to explore in depth. I think I also developed some inner detachment which helped me look at the world from an impersonal, systems-level viewpoint.
In my late twenties, as I plunged ever deeper into an existential emergency, I kept thinking about my handful of psychedelic trips back in college. They were the most powerful indicators that there might be other aspects of reality – other levels of consciousness – that modern civilization had suppressed or rejected. I went back and took LSD and mushrooms again. These substances seemed to reveal so much.
On the one hand, they were deconditioning agents. They made me aware that our civilization was an artifice, a consensual hallucination, and that our world could be constructed differently. I also experienced closed-eye hallucinations, incredibly intricate geometrical patterns and images that didn’t seem like anything produced by my mind alone. They seemed to demonstrate the existence of archetypal dimensions, the collective field of the psyche that Carl Jung explored in his work.
As I researched psychedelics I learned about the ritual use of ayahuasca in South America and iboga in West Africa. As a journalist, I was able to get magazine assignments to undergo these rituals in their original context. I went to Gabon, on the equator of West Africa, to eat the iboga root in a ceremony with the Bwiti tribe. During this all-night event, as I lay on the cool ground in the Bwiti temple, I was taken on a journey through my life up to that time.
As I wrote in Breaking Open the Head, I was shown a series of scenes from my past – they weren’t just visual images. They were like holographic, sensorial recreations. I recalled myself as a child, with my parents fighting in our loft. I remembered how I made myself terrified that there was a monster hiding under the bed or in the closet. I remembered how sad I felt when my parents separated and I moved uptown with my mother.
Later, I saw myself in my twenties going to literary cocktail parties and getting hammered on alcohol. I saw how this drinking had a negative impact on my character, my work and relationships. The scenes appeared again and again, as if mocking me with my stupidity. I had the uncanny feeling there was a guiding intelligence in the iboga – a plant spirit – that wanted to communicate with me, to teach me.
I went to the Amazon jungle in Ecuador to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies with the Secoya people. The Secoya were a tribe of 30,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the time I visited, there were fewer than 700 of them left, split between two small reservations.
Only a few elder shamans remained – tiny, wizened men in their eighties who wore coloured tunics and crowns woven from local branches. The elders walked us through the dense jungle, pointing out many plants with healing powers, giggling frequently. The oil companies were decimating the jungle, poisoning the rivers and building roads. The roads attracted poor mestizos who slashed and burnt the forest to create subsistence farms.
Of all the substances I explored, ayahuasca remains my favourite. The substance has now become popular around the world, with shamans bringing the plants to Europe, Asia, South Africa and everywhere. Ayahuasca is a bitter drink that requires two plants, the ayahuasca vine – Banisteriopsis caapi – and the DMT-containing psychotria viridis. The brew induces a huge range of visionary effects. You can find yourself immersed in the liquid medium of the aboriginal dreamtime, entering pure consciousness or the samadhi state, or visiting myriad spirits and deities who take you on journeys to other worlds and dimensions. Ayahuasca can also bring you profound, healing insights into the nature of your own soul.
I visited Huautla de Jiménez, a mountain town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where magic mushrooms were found in the early 1950s by the investment banker and amateur mycologist Gordon Wasson, and Valentina, his Russian wife. I explored the postmodern world of psychedelic chemistry. In Marin County, I visited grey-bearded, legendary Sasha Shulgin in his laboratory and tested a number of his experimental compounds.
I attended an ethnobotany conference in Palenque, Mexico, where I tried dimethyltryptamine, nn-DMT, for the first time. DMT is a chemical produced by the human brain, and also found in many plants. When I smoked it, my body and my surroundings vanished. I broke into a fully realized other reality – a kind of hyper-dimension – that seemed far beyond anything the wiring of my brain could concoct. I felt I was communing with a superconsciousness that was extraterrestrial, overwhelming. I was immersed in a crystalline, fluorescent lattice made up of one being that was simultaneously many beings, all of them chattering at a high pitch. I felt they were omniscient, aware of me as part of some programme or of what the science-fiction writer Philip K Dick named a Vast Alien Living Intelligence System (VALIS).
Breaking Open the Head became a record of my transformation. By following a personal path of self-discovery, my understanding of the nature of reality changed profoundly. I started as a secular materialist, a Freudian and sceptic. I ended up converted to a mystical and shamanic worldview. This didn’t happen all at once. It took a series of ceremonies, adventures, good and bad trips, as well as extensive research through the literature on visionary experience and interviews with many people who had undergone similar journeys of initiation. I experienced inexplicable psychic phenomena: synchronicities, occult apparitions, visitations, telepathic links and much more. These experiences convinced me that consciousness is not ultimately brainbased but a fundamental property of the universe.
Reductive scientific materialism is unproven and therefore a kind of religious faith. The belief that consciousness is brain-based – an epiphenomenon of evolution, caused randomly by neurological wiring – remains a hypothesis. For scientists like Robert Lanza and Amit Goswami, the last decades of experiment support the opposite view: consciousness is the underlying reality. The universe – all matter – gives transitory expression to its infinite, ever-changing potential.
In Biocentrism, Lanza notes that space and time have no reality outside of our awareness of them. They are, finally, ‘tools of our animal understanding’. He believes the universe has been fine-tuned for our emergence and that it exists in order for living beings – we ourselves – to experience and participate in it. Consciousness – the ‘I Am That’ of Eastern mysticism – has devised this adventure for itself, and we are its expressions.
According to quantum physics, the existence of a material world depends on an observing consciousness, which collapses the incessant quavering of energy waves into a definitive, perceivable state. We have also discovered that electrons, once connected, maintain their link no matter how far they travel away from each other. Time, it would seem, does not exist for these subatomic particles. This fact subverts our conventional understanding of time.
In The Self-Aware Universe, Goswami, a physicist, theorizes that principles of quantum theory allow for the existence of subtle bodies and aspects of an immortal soul. What mystics call spirits or souls could be energetic complexes bound together, as quantum waves, via Action at a Distance. Such complexes may remain connected after the death of an individual.
The individual spirit may seek to develop its patterns of thinking, feeling and willing further through reincarnation, assuming bodily form again and again. Such energy-clusters eventually fulfil their potential, Goswami suggests, when they realize their self-identity with the underlying spaceless and timeless reality. This would be what various traditions call enlightenment, illumination, attainment or realization.
Both scientists propose that consciousness is primary and precedes material manifestation. Goswami believes we must develop a ‘science within consciousness’, rather than conceiving an objective reality that exists outside of it. A great bulk of evidence, as well as repeated experiment, demonstrates that such an objective reality simply does not exist. Yet, for the most part, we continue to act as if it does.
I am sure some readers will find some of my ideas to be objectionable, dismissible, even absurd. That is okay. We are at a crisis point. We need to be willing to think differently and consider alternative possibilities, even radical ones, in all areas. We need to do this simply because the system – industrial, social and ideological – we have inherited is destroying the biosphere upon which all life depends.
What I learned from my own journey is that initiation is not a single threshold experience. Even after one accepts the existence of a spiritual world, there are many levels of initiation and development to undergo. My own development has, unfortunately, been very uneven. Although I accessed some forms of occult knowledge and many new ideas through shamanic work and psychedelic exploration, I was unable to face some flaws in my character for quite a long time.
I now believe that prolonged psychedelic use amplified some of my flaws. Some people have an innate tendency to push themselves to the edge, seeking to know what lies beyond it. Those are the people who become artists, shamans, visionaries – or criminals, psychopaths or lunatics. We all have these tendencies to some degree.
I published my second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in 2006. The book became a bestseller, and I became an eccentric counterculture celebrity in middle age. Driven by urgency about the planetary crisis, I launched companies and think-tanks before I had reckoned with my own childhood wounds – before I had sufficiently seen or integrated my shadow.
Suddenly famous, I found I had a great many more sexual opportunities than when I was young, poor and unknown. A deep well of erotic disappointment and dissatisfaction, even bitterness, had accumulated over the years. I think this is the sad, suppressed truth for many men. Given the opportunity, I wanted to make up for lost time. I took advantage of these openings; sometimes, I acted in ways that were thoughtless and self-serving, that I now regret. I didn’t realize my sexual quest had become a nasty compulsion until the pattern revealed itself.
What made the situation more complex is that I honestly believed I was promoting ‘free love’ in a positive way. I went out of my way to be honest. I thought I was following in the footsteps of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who believed that society should support ‘lifestyles of ecstasy, for whoever wants them’. In fact, I still agree with him.
Part of my problem was that I still saw myself as a wounded, sensitive person – an underdog – seeking to grow and understand himself. With the success of my work, other people, particularly younger people in the counterculture world, saw me as a leader or an authority figure. Innately dissident, I wasn’t ready, at that point in my life, to be anyone’s role model.
Personally, I think we need to break away from the nuclear family and the monogamous couple as our ideal. I believe that a liberation of Eros – encompassing love and compassion, as well as sexuality – is a critical aspect of the next phase of our evolution as a species. As I will discuss later, this evolution requires a new level of cooperation between the genders which will benefit everyone. It also requires deprogramming from inherited patterns of jealousy and competitiveness, and an eventual transformation of our socio-economic system.
Although I have made many mistakes in my life, I believe my perspective still has value – in fact, it probably has more value because of the errors and missteps. I took some uncharted detours through murky swamps of the psyche, seeking to integrate my personal dark matter. I believe our individual suffering can illuminate larger processes happening in the collective. By healing ourselves – by understanding the forces that work on us and making peace with them – we contribute to the healing of the whole. As Nisargadatta Maharaj says in I Am That: ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t resist, don’t delay. Be what you are. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly. Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret.’ I have experimented honestly, and I don’t regret.
This book is – I admit it – a continuation of my attempt to spark a revolution at Burning Man over a decade ago. As unsuccessful as that attempt was, as crazy as I am, I still feel I had, in essence, the right idea. I know it is difficult and painful to contemplate what is happening to our world. Most of us are experts at distracting ourselves from the mega-catastrophe that threatens to engulf all of us, even laughing it off. But if we are brave, I believe we can come to see it as a necessary and even positive threshold in the life of our species. It is only by embracing this crisis in all of its mind-bending complexity that we can find the will and the incentive to change ourselves and our world.
From the 1960s until today, many people have taken personal journeys of initiation, rediscovering mysticism and shamanism, and embracing an expanded awareness of psyche and cosmos. This collective voyage of initiation can’t be completed, however, until those who have taken their personal vision quests are able to bring their new knowledge back into our society – to have it fully absorbed, welcomed and integrated. The best option is that we undertake a peaceful, deliberately designed and non-destructive system change.
We can think of our current civilization – its technical and sociopolitical infrastructure, its ideology and beliefs – as an operating system, much like the software that runs our computers. Now we need to reboot and install a new system software. A new social design could, eventually, give every human being the opportunity to flourish and thrive, to live creatively, without fear for their future. Accomplishing this is a great mission that will require a truly rational, empathic application of our technical and creative powers.
We must build this new programme – engineer this global reboot – within the next decades. If we can accomplish this, we will have passed the test that the universe has set for us. I realize that some people will worry I am proposing a nefarious form of ‘social engineering’. The truth is that we have already been socially engineered. As Terence McKenna noted, culture is our operating system. We have been conditioned since birth to accept a system of global control, elite privilege and military domination. Identity is, to a great extent, a social construction.
‘The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes’, Oscar Wilde wrote. ‘Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.’ I think this is true. It points towards the enormous task as well as the great opportunity confronting us now. The Earth will not be able to support a global civilization based on hyper-consumerism and hyperindividualism for much longer. Therefore, we must change human nature as it is currently known. We must do this – not only to survive, but also to reach our full potential as a species.
Our technocratic society uses the mass media as an instrument of mind control and threatens those who dissent or resist with violent reprisals (for example, nonviolent drug offenders seeking to explore their own consciousness face draconian prison sentences). Through incessant media bombardment and government fear-mongering, people are conditioned to believe that oppression, injustice, violence and inequality are normal and inevitable. What we require is a new social design to liberate humanity from its prison. This redesign must also reckon with our darker and more destructive impulses and find ways to channel them.
My mission with this book is unabashedly utopian. To quote Wilde again (although remembered mainly as a playwright and dandy, he was also a brilliant social critic): ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.’
Postmodern civilization is already a pseudo-utopia. Over the last few centuries, we have constructed an artificial paradise of consumer goods – the society of the spectacle – for those with the resources to enjoy it. Unfortunately, this artificial paradise is built on excessive waste and ecological destruction. It has created misery for those on the margins, the victims of famines, wars and genocides. By addressing its flaws, we can realize the next manifestation of our genius as a species – and achieve, in comparison, a true utopia.
I know it seems strange to discuss the imminent prospect of ecological meltdown on the one hand and the attainment of a practical utopia on the other. But such is the schizophrenic nature of our time. As we shall see, both outcomes seem plausible. In the near term, we may get a bizarre mix of the two.
I don’t think a massive dieback of the human population is inevitable – perhaps I refuse to believe it. But the longer we wait to relaunch our social operating system, the more difficult it will be to avert planetary catastrophe. We have already waited too long.
I seek to bring together the archaic and the postmodern, the visionary and the rational, the corporate and the anarchistic, in a viable synthesis. I don’t expect us to revert to old-fashioned eighteenthcentury agrarianism, although I do think communities will need to grow more of their own food and become as self-sufficient as possible. I also don’t think we can regress all the way back to small-scale bands of hunter-gatherers, although there is a great amount we need to learn from indigenous and aboriginal cultures that supported their local ecology for thousands of years. Out of compassion, we must seek to maintain the current human population even as we radically reduce our burden on the Earth.
I don’t reject the potential of futuristic technologies – artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology and so on – out of hand. But I think we must explore them with great caution, and with constant oversight from civil society. Right now, crucial decisions that impact on the biosphere in its entirety are left to engineers, corporations and financiers. Our current form of government was established in the late eighteenth century, when news as well as progress moved at a much slower speed than today. To deal with our rapidly changing circumstances, we need more than a reform – we need, I think, a new political-economic operating system.
In many cases, the promise of advanced technologies has been far greater than what they delivered. Each new level of technology also brings with it unforeseen negative consequences, requiring more innovation to fix. As the dark ecologist Paul Kingsnorth has noted, this has created an increasingly alarming, even world-endangering ‘progress trap’. As our civilization becomes more technologically complex, it also becomes more fragile. The prospect of the Singularity, promulgated by Google engineer Ray Kurzweil and other techno-utopians, is one we must investigate carefully. It is something like a ticking time bomb we must defuse.
The study of biological evolution – the history of life on Earth – reveals an inveterate tendency towards greater levels of cooperation, coordination and symbiosis. This idea may seem surprising at first. As part of the paradigm we inherited – the one we are now leaving behind – many thinkers and scientists placed their focus, instead, on the competitive, aggressive and destructive aspects of nature. This view of biology as a constant struggle for life meshed perfectly with the predatory economic mode of capitalism. This idea has now been superseded by a new view of life as an intricately networked phenomenon, where organisms support each other far more than they compete.
According to biologist Lynn Margulis, the author of Microcosmos, who developed the Gaia hypothesis with scientist James Lovelock, ‘The trip from greedy gluttony, from instant satisfaction to long-term mutualism, has been made many times in the microcosm. While destructive species may come and go, cooperation itself increases through time.’
We can find the most accessible example of cooperation and symbiosis as the pattern of evolution in our own bodies. Our bodies are made out of a hundred trillion cells and vast colonies of microorganisms that work together seamlessly. In a previous stage of the Earth’s evolution, these organisms were fighting against each other for scarce resources. During a period of crisis, they figured out ways to collaborate to construct more complex structures – organs, like skin, eyes and lungs. In a way, all human technologies are just recapitulations of technological feats we already find in the microcosm. Long before the Internet, viruses exchanged information – genetic code – around the world at high speed.
When humans cooperate to build a satellite dish, it is not that dissimilar to the communities of specialized cells and microorganisms that assemble an eye or an ear. ‘As tiny parts of a huge biosphere whose essence is basically bacterial, we – with other life forms – must add up to a sort of symbiotic brain which it is beyond our capacity to comprehend or truly represent,’ Margulis wrote.
Individual cells in our bodies do not hoard wealth – excess energy – but store it in deposits of fat that are freely available to the cellular community as a whole. Cells contribute their efforts to the collective body without seeking more for themselves, as energy flows seamlessly, going wherever it is needed. Without any competition, cells as well as organs work with maximum efficiency for the success of the whole.
We can understand the process we are undergoing as purposeful, teleological and even implicitly designed – in the same way that nature designs conception, foetal development and birth on the level of an individual organism. Humanity, as a whole, constitutes a planetary super-organism, one unified being, in an ongoing, symbiotic relationship with the ecology of the Earth as a whole system.
The more we can individually prepare and awaken to our situation now and choose to undergo initiation, the less collective suffering will be experienced by humanity, as a whole. I believe each of us can realize this crisis we face as a great adventure and a mission which dignifies human life and gives it meaning.
In Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright noted that humans keep developing increasingly larger and more complex forms of social organization – from the small tribe to the city-state, from national governments today, to extra-national bodies like the United Nations and the European Union. For Wright, this suggests an eventual transition to global government. I look at this transition differently, believing that we will eventually transcend national governments by establishing a harmonic planetary orchestration, where local communities will function like the cells and organs in an efficient, selfregulating body. Once we evolve, we will have governance – planetary self-regulation – without governments.
Wright gives credit to the earlier work of the Catholic mystic and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who introduced the idea of the noosphere (from the Greek word nous, meaning mind), which he described as a layer or envelope of thought that encompasses the Earth. Writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, de Chardin proposed that, just as the Earth has an atmosphere, a lithosphere and a hydrosphere, it also has a surrounding layer made up of thought. For de Chardin, the noosphere already exists although most are unaware of it. Humanity will reach a point where we consciously activate it by attaining a collective realization.
De Chardin believed humanity’s realization of the noosphere to be a mystical process through which we will discover, and celebrate, our inherent communion with the cosmos: ‘Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire,’ he wrote.
The inception of a harmonized planetary collective would light up the noospheric switchboard. Our socio-political reality would no longer be distorted by greed. Our world would be shaped by wisdom, encompassing a long-term vision for human beings to live in healthy communion with our shared sister Earth. If we were to consider love – what Sigmund Freud called Eros – as a biological drive, we might define it as the instinct that binds separate entities into greater aggregates.
For de Chardin – as well as Wright and a number of other thinkers – humanity’s social and technical development, seen as an extension of the Earth’s biological processes, suggest that our evolution has an underlying purpose and direction. Just as a plant flowers or a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, we are inexorably, whether we like it or not, undergoing a metamorphosis into a harmonized collective – a superorganism. As we attain that state, we may find that our interests and capacities change profoundly, just as a butterfly, no longer crawling or devouring leaves, gains an added dimension of flight and starts to pollinate. Rather than fearing what is coming, we can welcome it and rejoice in an opportunity to create a new world.