Vision Quest

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

- Albert Einstein

We had originally called this the White Man's Vision Quest. A friend commented that it should be White People's Vision Quest, to include both (or all) genders. We replied that it was 'white' men who established and fortified the current global authoritarian patriarchy, so we are the ones most in need of a new vision. However on reflection, we find that she had a point. In 'white' culture it has been the men who have lost or forsaken their spiritual vision to the greatest degree, but since the Twentieth century women have publicly reclaimed their personhood and their power and are catching up with the men. More than a few women seem all too willing to share in the men's loss of vision, and those spiritually-challenged men welcome their company in their man-made hells.

But it is not just the European and other Western nations that are in need of a new vision. Even many Indigenous individuals and entire cultures around the world have succumbed to too much of the 'white' people's vision. What humanity really needs is a proper, shared, explicit global vision. And the fact remains that our present global order comes from 'white' culture, whose survival and dominance has depended on the principle of might makes right.

We are not implying that no other cultures were based on might makes right. In fact, that is the first principle of survival in the physical world. But in the normal evolutionary process of human beings, individually or as a group — and again, generally speaking — intellectual or spiritual might is far superior to physical might, all else being even.

Intellect and emotion, as well as mind, spirit, and even 'God,' are not entirely different and unconnected things. Those are all aspects of the same 'thing': consciousness, or life.

It should be obvious to any reasonable person that there is much that is good in contemporary culture. But much of what is common to 'white' culture is nothing more than an expression of our natural, animal selves; those are easily expressed within any society which has not attained a higher and clearer vision.

Changing

The last couple of times that global society disintegrated, it wasn't the end of the world. We got ourselves somewhat together again as a society of nations — a few defeated, a few vindicated; some strengthened, some weakened or crippled, some destroyed forever; some newborn from others that were disfigured or destroyed. Only a few were mostly uninvolved and relatively unscathed. But human society picked itself up, dusted itself off, and carried on as it always has, even after Little Boy and Fat Man (the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) upped the cost of our collective madness by so much.

But the next time, which can't be too far off now — and pretty well all of us can feel this in our hearts, our guts, or wherever it is that we retain those vital vestiges of deepest feeling — the next time this human order of ours disintegrates likely will be the last. When it comes to existential threats, blowing ourselves into radioactive smithereens is seldom even at the top of the list any more.

We cannot continue as we have been doing, comfortably looking out for number one while letting the government and the authorities take care of number two and all the other numbers beyond that.

We cannot continue as we have been doing, grabbing up, digging up, using up and burning up our resources to sustain and energize a wasteful, combative, counterfeit, deadly system of economics which has become global; all the while ignoring our most basic material needs, such as breathable air, potable water and non-toxic food — to say nothing of our non-material needs. We cannot keep ignoring what is happening to, on, and even above and under the land which feeds, shelters and sustains us, as a result of our collective stupidity.

We cannot continue as we have been doing, breeding like rabbits, in many cases supposedly to fulfill an order given by God in an ancient time to our arch-ancestors in a fresh, underpopulated, and over-bountiful world — though here in the West we do it primarily because it comes naturally, we enjoy it, we tend to act on impulse, and we are over-stimulated through commercial media.

We cannot continue as we have been doing, viewing those who are different or who are elsewhere as objects to be used, manipulated ignored or avoided; instead of seeing them as brothers and sisters, all of us sharing the same spirit of family, community and humanity. We cannot go on validating and fortifying the fears, distrust and biases which either we have invented and created for ourselves, or were manufactured for us.

Yet in spite of what is already coming upon us we are still reluctant to change, perhaps because most Westerners have become far too comfortable in our affluent and wasteful lifestyles, which soothe us into ignoring global emergency and our individual responsibility for it.

Perhaps some of us are fearful of change because experience has taught us that we can't often expect to go from works-for-me to better-for-everyone without first veering worse-ward somehow, especially when ‘good intentions’ are involved. Yet, that's just part of who we are. We learn from our mistakes, but it makes us reluctant to try new and different responses in familiar situations in which the old ways have become unworkable.

If you haven't already guessed, we're talking about fixing government, the economy, politics, religion, education, business, recreation, the environment — the whole mess.

But it's not a completely hopeless mess. It may still be possible to fix it, because it has a common cause: Us against Them, when it should be us and them.

Yet even now, when we find ourselves in a 'do or die' situation, most people are still too eager to hang on to ways and things, to tie them down and even screw them into place in an effort to keep them, or to keep them from changing. Perhaps it is because we have no faith. Not in that ultimate being or supreme principle to which religious and cultural traditions as well as personal intuitions and experiences often point and attest; nor even in that principle of evolution with which modern science has seasoned and stirred the theological pot and is currently enamored. We have no faith even in ourselves, probably because we don't fully know our selves.

We can't seem to live with the fact that in nature — which is where we all really are and live — everything has a season and a reason. Once something has served its purpose, sooner or later it is turned into something which, from an objective viewpoint, is just as good or even better, because Mother Nature always recycles.

A change may seem like crap at first, but crap becomes manure becomes fertilizer becomes food becomes us. (After that, it is up to each of us whether we continue the cycle until we again become crap, which doesn't become us, or whether we continue becoming ourselves even more.)

The first operating principle of Utopia (heaven, nirvana, the kingdom of God, the Way, the Secret Path, etc.) is love. The second principle is that the utopia must be dynamically alive. That is to say that it must be observing, responding to, acting upon and ameliorating reality, and doing it in the most convenient, beneficial, and loving way possible. Utopian visions that are loveless or rigid and inflexible are not utopian at all, and even generate dystopia.

At its extreme, the contemporary, Western vision of life is of competitive and combative biological robots that evolved out of an accidental, meaningless and lifeless explosion of absolutely nothing and now constantly compete to dominate each other. Not only is this a mistaken, biased and dishonest assessment of the common world outside of politics and commerce, it is also proving to be an illogical, insidious and unsustainable view.

The corollary to the first principle of Utopia is the first principle of Hell: the perceived impossibility of escaping a situation which is becoming or has become highly undesirable and dangerous. That perception is based on a fear of change.

Fixedness, permanence, solidification, preservation, crystallization, rigidity, immutability, finality — all are forms or processes of death. That's not what we really want in our lives, is it?

to be continued . . .

(Image from Pixabay)