Fixing the Problems of Our World
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In this excerpt from his latest book, “The Bardo of Waking Life”, Richard Grossinger once again demonstrates how much our poet/seers have to give to our public policy debates.
by Richard Grossinger
Admittedly there are no solutions—not now, not in a hundred years. All we can hope for is a change in consciousness, the sort tendered, for instance, by optimistic proponents of a 2012 harmonic shift (pessimistic ones warn of Armageddon then).
I think it will take at least a thousand years to get real metamorphosis on this weird planet—and we may not have that much time; certainly the current civilization doesn’t. I can’t imagine a fleet burst of percipience making life on Earth see the bigger picture*. Yet, at the same time, human activity occurs on a stage so far removed from its unconscious source that we would hardly know whether present events portend a coming quantum leap or total anarchy and catastrophe.
On the surface we seem to be getting worse, more violent and brutal, uglier and more destructive, further and further from enlightenment. But conscious acts are not a measure of actual consciousness; they are the outcome of all that is working its way through unconsciousness toward a fugitive shimmer. Often the most vicious deeds and avaricious regimes (see Rwanda and Khartoum) are veiled harbingers of awakening. Beheadings and genocides may precede a breakthrough rather than apocalypse, for they let us experience as direct fact the impossibility of proceeding in this way. They notify—not men and women, who don’t get it and don’t care—but the psyche, which, by definition, always gets it, and is capable of the most stupendous transformation. And they blow out the shit, clear the unconscious of its compulsion to express every dreaded fantasy and corresponding guilt.
The impractical, privileged notions herein below cannot work. They are guileless, preachy, petulant—but, in order to be ready for the changing of the guard, we had better start thinking about our lives and institutions in radical and errant ways, because for sure the guard is going to change.
These are invitations to tease the barriers of our civilization. Of course, they are wrong: dead wrong and relatively wrong too. Simplistic and trite. Yet we must express something—pipe dreams call them, utopian fantasies. We must exercise our deepest imagination if we want to address—perhaps even survive—the tidal wave that is coming.
1. The most basic, comprehensive consciousness shift that could improve the planet, and also is within our present grasp, is to end inheritance in every culture in every form—or at least put an austere limit on it. This means no deeding of commodities; it does not affect personal heirlooms or spiritual treasures. Inherited material advantage cannot be passed on to relatives and proteges.
The goal is to curtail dynasties and their hegemonies, to flummox long reigns of classes by lineage or adoption, Caesar to Caesar, Bush to Bush; House of Saud, House of Windsor, House of Trump, etc. Give every newborn the benefit of discovering who he or she is without a bequest. Make “earning your keep” a global maxim. Put a taboo on inheritance and accumulated wealth such that the mere suspicion of it, like cannibalism or incest, is abhorrent. That would a quantum leap from where we are now, as most people, especially wealthy ones, consider the deeding of property and rank their right (and even want to be able to do it untaxed), but at least it is conjecturable, whereas many of the other changes proposed below are an anywhere from dozens to hundreds of thousands of generations from plausibility.
I suspect that at least half the planets along our present time-space continuum have arrived at this resolution. Either that or they, like us, are up shit’s creek without a paddle.
*Are animals included in the proposed 2012 shift? It would be a powerful and intelligent jolt that could penetrate all human and animal psyches at once.Page 1 of 12 pages 1 2 3 > Last » - Full Article
