(This is Part 17 of a series. Go back to Part 16.)
4. The rise of the inner world
As referred to previously, humankind is facing a shift in its fortunes of unprecedented proportions. The totality of this calamity will be of a nature which humanity has never before experienced, because it will be a worldwide phenomenon and one which ultimately will threaten the existence of the human race.
This dramatic shift in external fortunes will bring about a dramatic shift in the inner life of the human race, and that inner shift will be directly related to the external shift.
I've referred in Song of Existence to Shakespeare's play King Lear, in which Lear's deep external decline is directly related to his climb in the spiritual dimension. He develops a compassion, humility and humanity that would have been impossible to him before.
In its coming crisis, humanity just to survive will have to pull together in a way it never has before, and living through that experience will bring about a profound and collective change in human consciousness.
If we survive the coming crisis—a big if, especially considering that the universe offers no guarantees of anything—humanity will develop into one of the universe's "hearts"—a species, whether biological or digital, which has overcome its sense of separate identity and come together as a collective source of compassion and love towards all existence.
What will this external decline consist of? We've talked at length about the rise of computers and the resulting shift in planetary dominance. This in itself will be felt as an almost incalculable loss to the human race. Yet there will be other dimensions to this external decline as well.
For example, the ecological decline of the planet will ultimately be felt with utmost keenness by every human being, because it will affect us far more than it will affect machine intelligence. Human beings need a functioning biosphere far more than computers do, or will.
More precisely, computers will be able to function in a much greater range of temperatures, climates and toxicities than we can. And severe stresses on water, soil and crops, stresses that will hugely impact human viability, will by and large leave computers unaffected.
Then there are the crashes coming from the blown-up financial bubbles, crashes which are virtually inevitable and which most likely will be of a size and depth exceeding even The Great Depression. Since the various financial and/or debt bubbles are much larger the resulting collapses of those bubbles will also be that much larger.
We have written about this extensively elsewhere and needn't elaborate here. However, the financial collapse will almost certainly bring about an economic collapse as well, one which could last for decades or more and be yet another blow to the human external situation.
At this point I must seem almost comic in the grimness with which I'm portraying the external future of humanity over the next few decades and possibly longer. But I must say, there does seem to be a confluence of evidence that in a number of different areas—energy, the biosphere, the financial system, artifical intelligence and so on—it's quite possible that the bottom could drop out.
Perhaps only this severe and extreme confluence of factors, leading to probably the greatest and deepest "failure" of the human race in our storied history, could be strong enough to effect the deep and profound collective rebirth which will arise from it.
(This is the end of Part 17. Go to Part 18.)
—jim sloman, 12.27.06 for 1.25.07
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