At this point in human evolution, we find ourselves “halfway between the beasts and the angels.”. We have shown both the best and the worst of each, as human history has shown us. We have soared much higher than the angels, and we have behaved much lower than the beasts.
Humans have climbed to magnificent heights in many arenas. The past century has seen achievements that would be totally unimaginable in the century preceding it. Through genetic engineering we can replicate and control life forms; with artificial intelligence we have created devices that surpass human thinking capabilities; through organ transplants and other miracles of medical science we can prolong human life by many years. In 1903 the first airplane soared to an altitude of ten feet; just sixty-six years later we landed on the moon, altitude: 238,857 miles.
In the social arena we have made breakthroughs never before possible: In the US, 150 years after African slaves were owned as property and treated like farm animals, a man of African descent was elected as president. He was competing for the position with a woman, whom nine decades earlier would not have been allowed to vote in a presidential election.
We have soared to great heights. But in many ways we have descended much lower than the beasts. In the past century over 100 million people have been killed by war and genocide. (This is equal to the population of the entire planet at the time of Socrates.) In the last decade of this same century, over 100 million children have died from starvation or malnutrition. Those deaths could have been prevented for what the world’s nations spend on its military every 48 hours.
We now find ourselves at a crucial juncture in this human experience. We have acquired powers undreamed of by our ancestors. In many ways we have attained godlike powers. But alas, we have not evolved the wisdom needed to broker these powers. In this regard we have become more like the beasts than the angels. This is a very dangerous circumstance; we are like a small child with a loaded gun.
For the first 99.99 % of humanity’s time on earth, the greatest threat to his existence came from the vagaries of nature: wild animals, microbes, parasites, climactic changes and natural disasters. But today the greatest threat to human existence is humanity itself. Of the many possible scenarios for our collective demise, the vast majority of these are -directly or indirectly- the result of human behavior. If the human species were to become extinct, the most likely culprit would be our selves. We have met humanities greatest enemy- and they are us. This statement is true for no species other than ours. It is the greatest of paradoxes that the (presumably) most intelligent species on this planet is also the most self-destructive.
Our development has become dangerously one-sided. We have achieved an astounding degree of knowledge of the material world; and we remain appallingly ignorant of ourselves. We have overdeveloped knowledge and underdeveloped wisdom. This lop-sided development has forced us into a position where we must become more balanced, or we may perish as a species.
The answer does not lie in negating the progress we have achieved and returning to some idealized primitive past. The problem lies not in knowledge, or technology, or in the material world itself. The problem lies in the tremendous imbalance and the lack of integration between our inner and our outer worlds. We have failed to parallel our rampant external development with a corresponding growth in self-awareness. We have created external wealth and internal poverty.
Because of this internal poverty we have developed a culture which tries to fill its inner emptiness with material possessions, with pleasure, with entertainment and social status. We have developed a lifestyle which uses both people and the earth’s resources to fill our inner emptiness. We have become a highly addictive culture. This has led to rampant consumerism and to near depletion of many of our planets resources.
Paralleling our lagging wisdom is our lagging compassion. Our blindness to the deeper aspects of ourselves is reflected in our blindness to much of humanity. The state of humankind is always a reflection of the collective human psyche. This blindness has led to huge disparities in the distribution of wealth, education, power, and privilege: The richest one per cent of the world's population owns 40 per cent of the world’s wealth; while the poorest half of the world’s population- about 3.5 billion human beings- owns barely one per cent of the world’s wealth.
In many ways the American dream has become a nightmare. And what is the solution to a nightmare? We may wish to change the bad dream into a happy one; but a more direct and permanent solution is to simply wake up.
In the biblical story of creation Adam falls into a deep slumber. (In Hebrew, “Adam” means “Human”) Nowhere in this story, nor anywhere in the Bible, does it tell us that Adam had awakened. It’s not mentioned because it has not happened; Adam (humanity) remains asleep.
Adam’s slumber is the major cause of our crisis. The crisis before us is not a political or economic or even psychological crisis- it is a spiritual crisis. Most of us do not know who or what we truly are; and this ignorance may destroy us. Waking up has become an evolutionary necessity; it is no longer optional.[i]
[i] This blog is an excerpt from Birthing a Greater Reality: A Guide for Conscious Evolution pp 13-16, R Brumet; Unity Books, 2011.