Epilogue

The following is the rough draft of the last section of my upcoming third book.

So, here we are in the twenty-first century.  We are not a generation born wild and free, running around naked in lush tropical rainforests, nibbling on fruit, nuts, and grubs.  We inherited an age of challenges, the result of a long string of risky experiments.  Negative consequences have piled up over the centuries, and we now stand in the dark shadow of a mountain of predicaments.

Humans are not cursed with defective genes, but we have succeeded in creating a highly unsustainable way of living and thinking — a defective culture.  The clock is running out on this troublesome experiment.  It would be wise to acknowledge this, and mindfully explore saner ways of living and thinking.

Like all other animals, humans focus their attention on the here and now, the immediate vicinity.  Many animals are capable of foresight.  Some know that panthers hunt at night, so they sleep in the trees.  With regard to the manmade realm of techno-innovation, foresight is largely impossible.  Nobody could have imagined the enormous consequences of metal making, fossil energy, or the domestication of plants and animals.  A few wild cultures still live sustainably with barely any technology.

Low impact cultures do not believe in human superiority.  They do not suffer from a persistent itch to hoard personal property.  They have exactly what they need.  They do not control and exploit the ecosystem, they adapt to it.  They have time-proven cultures in which everyone practices voluntary self-restraint.  In this manner, they could enjoy extended periods of real sustainability, living in a healthy wild ecosystem.

High impact cultures, by definition, cannot have a long-term future.  In their spooky fantasies, the primary goal is to pursue economic growth, by any means necessary, for as long as possible, without regard for the generations yet to come.  Nothing is more important than perpetual growth, at any cost.  This is the dominant paradigm in consumer societies, where it is perceived to be perfectly normal and intelligent.

But deviants on the fringe, who enjoy an amazing ability to recognize the obvious, warn us that normal is insane.  For revealing this inconvenient truth, they are called doomers.  But the consumer hordes, who are enthusiastic lifelong participants in the most destructive culture in human history, are the true champions of doom.

Consumers are annoyed by the truth tellers, and denounce them for their negativity, but it’s actually the other way around.  Sending tons and tons of waste to landfills, via a lifetime of recreational shopping, in an effort to gain social status, is a heartbreaking tragedy.  It’s a path of ferocious negativity.

The truth-telling deviants are not doomers, they are simply more present in reality.  For them, the foolishness in our culture becomes less invisible.  Being present in reality, in the fullness of the darkness, puts them in a far better position to think clearly and make wise decisions.  They become less vulnerable to peer pressure.  They become less willing to mindlessly do what a mindless society expects of them.

In the process of healing from acute ignorance, you cross a painful threshold.  One day, you realize that the consumer fantasyland has little relationship with reality.  Big storms are coming, and the future will not be a prosperous and pleasurable joyride.  This realization hurts.

When this occurs, despair is an appropriate response.  It’s OK to grieve for the loss of a major long-held illusion.  At the same time, it’s also appropriate to celebrate your mind-expanding awakening, your successful return from the realm of the living dead.  Despair is like a hangover, a painful headache resulting from an unhealthy binge.  It’s a normal temporary experience on the long journey to growth and healing.

The consumers scream, “We can’t go back,” and that’s true.  We also cannot indefinitely remain on our current dead-end path.  John Trudell, the Santee Sioux activist, summed it up nicely.  “There is no old way, no new way.  There is a way of life.  We must live in balance with the Earth.  We must do it.  We have no choice.”

Eight words precisely describe the one and only sustainable destination, “We must live in balance with the Earth.”  That sacred destination has never been farther from where we now stand.  So, what should animals with legendary big brains be doing?  Obviously, we need to change how we think and live.

At the moment, consumer society feels little or no desire to question its mode of living and thinking.  Many have chugged the Kool-Aid of the techno-wizards, and have a blind faith in the wondrous solutions promised by clever experts.  Many others have little or no understanding of reality, because they suffer from ignorance, or limited ability to think.  Still others can sense the growing darkness, but are paralyzed with fear and powerlessness, and block out the yucky feelings with false hope.

Nothing can stop the coming storms of change, all paths lead to turbulence.  You can’t save the world.  You can’t fix everything, but you can use your gifts, and do what you can to confront ignorance, protect your ecosystem, and lessen the long-term damage.  There are infinite opportunities for doing beneficial work.

It’s time for unlearning, identifying the silly nonsense we’ve absorbed over the years, and hurling it overboard.  It’s time for learning, continuing our exploration of reality.  It’s time for communicating, helping each other learn.  It’s time to get outdoors, without electronic distractions, and develop an intimate relationship with the planet of our birth.  It’s time to grow and heal.

We are living in the most momentous century in the entire human experience.  It will be a time of immense learning and awakening.  As our glorious house of cards disintegrates, we will experience a beautiful die-off — countless idiotic myths, fantasies, and illusions will lose their hypnotic power, tumble into the tar pits, and never again entrance us.

It will be a century of huge lessons, an era of tremendous enlightenment.  No, climate change was not a hoax!  Yes, there really are limits!  Concepts like carrying capacity and overshoot will become well understood by any who survive.  The powerful storms of the Great Healing will inspire a great tide of questioning, critical thinking, and clear understanding.

No matter what we do, the Great Healing will eliminate a number of key predicaments, even if we don’t change our ways.  Whether or not we get serious about rapid population reduction, the current population bubble will become an ex-predicament.  Finite resources will certainly strangle the mass hysteria of consumer mania.  As we move beyond the era of climate stability, every ecosystem will be hammered by big changes.  The consumer lifestyle will no longer be an option.

Big Mama Nature has little tolerance for overshoot.  One way or another, sooner or later, some form of balance will be restored, with or without us.  But if we summon our power, and strive to live with responsibility, we may be able to prevent some destruction.  It’s essential to understand the mistakes that got us into this mess, so we will not be tempted to repeat them.  Learn!  Think!  Heal!

My Name is Chellis...

Chellis Glendinning grew up in Cleveland.  Her father was a caring doctor and a brutal child abuser.  She and her brother were raped, beaten, and tortured.  Her pain was swept under the carpet by the magic of dissociation — a portion of her personality split off and became unconscious.  Memories of her traumatic childhood were forgotten for 40 years.  Amnesia allowed her to function in the world.  She earned a PhD and became a psychotherapist.

One day, in a therapy session, her childhood traumas suddenly began to return to consciousness.  Chellis was determined to fully understand them, resolve them, and recover a healthy state of wholeness.  She wanted to heal herself 100 percent. 

Understanding matters of great importance often requires the use of a powerful medicine called history.  To know who we are, we must know where we came from.  Trauma and pathology are almost the norm throughout today’s society.  A daunting number of people are in therapy, or taking medication, or hobbled by untreated mental imbalances.  These problems are frequently passed from generation to generation.

Chellis explored her family tree and discovered patterns of ancestors who were damaged by alcoholism or mental illness.  She strongly suspected that her father had also been abused.  She learned about her Puritan ancestors in colonial times.  Reverend Thomas Hooker lived in what was to become Connecticut.  On Sundays, he preached the sweet love of Jesus to the faithful, and then he spent the rest of the week as a bloody terrorist, determined to exterminate the diabolical Native American savages.

Looking even deeper into the past, the trail of trauma kept unfolding.  Prior to the invasion of America, Europe was also a realm of intense craziness.  For 300 years the skies were darkened by the smoke of burning witches.  Insane leaders routinely led their people into countless wars.  The written history of Europe was insane from page one.  By and by, Chellis came to comprehend that her father’s madness was just a wee speck of pathology in an enormous tsunami of pathology that spanned many centuries and regions.

Very importantly, she also came to comprehend that this torrent of pathology did not in any way represent the normal human condition.  It was obvious that nature-based societies, like the Native Americans, inhabited a fundamentally different spiritual universe.  They did not devour the land and leave wreckage in their wake.  She could see that nature-based societies more closely represented balance and normality.  They suffered little from mental illness.  Their reverent relationship with the Earth was rooted in a million-year tradition — 35,000 generations of low-impact living. 

It became clear that the madness of modern technological society could readily be traced back to a recent fork in the human journey that occurred about 10,000 years ago, just 300 generations back — the domestication of plants and animals.  “This was the purposeful separation of human existence from the rest of life,” and the fence was its symbol.  It divided the world into two new realms: wild and tamed.  This shattered the ancient wholeness, and replaced it with chronic traumatic stress.

The transition to domestication blindsided human societies.  It was completely out of balance with our traditional, time-proven way of life — living with respect and reverence for the natural world.  The new game was about owning and controlling nature.  Eventually, these unlucky people forgot what it meant to be human beings, and they ended up living like fish out of water — flippity-floppity-flappity.  Gasp!  Gasp!  Gasp!  It was a temporary way of life with no future. 

The last six generations have witnessed the horrific transition to industrial civilization.  The nightmare shifted into fast forward, and we are racing toward a future where nature has been erased by endless shopping enterprises, clear-cuts, crumbling pavement, rotting cities, eroded farms, toxic wastelands, and endless flocks of zombies entranced by glowing cell phones.  Billions of traumatized people perceive this living death as being the normal human existence.  It is no coincidence that our era of flourishing ecological annihilation is also an era of flourishing mental illness. 

“Well-being and wholeness depend on, and exist in constant and complex intimacy with, the well-being and wholeness of the Earth,” according to Chellis.  “It’s well past time for us to come home, to return to the matrix from which we came, to recover what we have lost, to remember again the wisdom and balance of the natural world.”  To explain this process, she sat down with a wooden pencil, and wrote a book called My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. 

Readers salivating to finally discover the simple, no sacrifice, silver bullet solution to the Earth Crisis will be reduced to sobs and sniffles once again.  Chellis describes a healing process that will likely take generations to complete.  It’s not about healing individuals, it’s about healing the entire society.  I must say that this book truly does provide readers with general guidelines for not only ending the Earth Crisis, but also restoring humankind to genuine sustainability, boundless joy, and complete wildness and freedom.  

There are seven-point-something billion people alive now, many of whom are victims of traumatic stress — paranoid, hyperactive, infantile, powerless, alienated, fearful, depressed, near-comatose beings whose mental wholeness has been shattered into many pieces.  Imagine for a moment repairing this mess — the individuals, the society, the ecosystem, and our history.  Imagine unlocking the shackles of technological society and walking away.  Imagine guiding humankind to a point where we are willing and able to abandon our exploitation of domesticated plants and animals.  Imagine returning home, to the family of life, to wholeness.

Many thinkers have concluded that the reason we got into this mess was a combination of excessive cleverness and inadequate foresight.  Chellis adds another chapter to the story — the immense, highly-contagious, psychological damage resulting from our terrible plunge from balance.  When we become aware of the corrosive presence of this madness, we can more fully comprehend the anatomy of our predicament.

Chellis has given humankind an important Big Vision, a potent idea to explore.  Obviously, the healing process will not be quick or simple.  Our challenge is simply to take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves, and take the first step.

Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, Shambhala, Boston, 1994.