My stroke of insight
TED | Talks | Jill Bolte Taylor
Here are more hints of how narrow our imagination of life has become constricted through the lens of culture and civilization. One morning, neuroanatomist JB Taylor watched with lucidity as her left brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness - in an unfolding massive stroke. As the left hemisphere of her brain stopped, she discovered the universe of the right brain in it's purity. She found herself in a universe of the moment without the identity distinctions of self versus other - reminiscent of the high state many religious traditions lead us toward. She also notes the left brain's perception of sequential events in time and its association of discrete concepts, including language - leading to our separate sense of being.

"Our rigid, narrow self/other distinction is coming to an end, victim of its own premises. As the mystics have taught, the separate self can be maintained only temporarily, and at great cost. We have maintained it a long time, and built a civilization upon it that seeks the conquest of nature and human nature. The present convergence of crises has laid bare the futility of that goal. It portends the end of civilization as we know it, and the instauration of a new state of human beingness defined by a more fluid, more inclusive sense of self. This convergence of crises is a birth crisis, propelling us from an old world, an old self, into a new."
-- form Charles Eisenstein's article Down with Descartes printed in the May/June 2008 issue of Orion magazine

"We face not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it, and a birth into a new kind of human beingness."

What we perceive as The End is how the future looks from here. Our irreversible headlong path into the crises of the environment, health, education, energy, food, politics... leaves us no choice but to deal with the result of human culture's mindless consumption. The path we tread Requires awakening into a better world, a world we all know is possible and nearby.

"All the technical solutions for living sustainably and harmoniously exist already, and indeed always have existed. What is required is a shift in consciousness, a reconception of ourselves as individuals and as a species that will reverse the widening separation and deepening misery of the past millennia, but that, paradoxically, will only come as their result."

"The fact that the regime of separation appears to be reaching new heights, the fact that the whole globe is falling into the grip of the monetization of life and the commodification of relationship, the fact that the numbering, labeling, and controlling of the world and everything in it is approaching unprecedented extremes, does not mean that prospects for a more beautiful world are receding into the distance."

"The Hell we have created originated in the program to objectify and control nature. It is only by transcending that program and its accompanying conception of self that we can expect to create anything other than a further intensification of what we have today."

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.

Beliefs are not just thoughts floating around in the head, they are part of our embodiment and they manifest as actions. In other words, a state of belief is a state of being.

"Clearly, beliefs about the nature of physical reality are connected to beliefs about human nature. These, in turn, determine how we relate to the world. Beliefs are not just thoughts floating around in the head, they are part of our embodiment and they manifest as actions. In other words, a state of belief is a state of being."

"The built-in arrogance of the Skeptical position is counterpart to an equivalent loneliness, which is implicit in the fundamental assumption of the religion of science-objectivity. We are discrete and separate observers in a universe of impersonal forces and masses. Along with
loneliness comes powerlessness. Just as all life events are reducible to just so many generic particles and forces, so also is our power to affect the universe limited to the physics of F=MA. In the final analysis, you, my friend, are a mass."

Huge Mines Rapidly Draining Rivers, Cutting Into Forests, Boosting Emissions

The miners have created a marvel of human industry that takes a spongy muck once considered worthless and converts it into oil for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. But the price of that alchemy is high: Each barrel of oil requires two to five barrels of water, carves up four tons of earth, uses enough natural gas to heat a home for one to five days, and adds to the greenhouse gases slowly cooking the planet, according to the industry's own calculations.

Native residents of Fort Chipewyan, a village of 1,200 on the shores of Lake Athabasca, have experienced abnormally high rates of rare cancers. Federal and provincial medical investigators are trying to determine the cause.

The leftover emerges as a black, foul liquid collected in tailing ponds. The ponds have grown; one dam is among the largest in the world. The mining companies must fire off propane cannons to scare away migrating birds from the toxic waters.

There should be no question to anyone now that we are facing limited supply. Limited supply will force "conservation" as price increases. A significant question is how fast and disruptive this transition will be. Various experts predict a spectrum of impact between the extremes of imminent collapse of civilization (reminiscent of Y2K panic) to a gradual transition to alternative renewables through the ongoing salvation of technology. It seems there will always be a class of people who will continue to fill up even when gas crests $20USD/gallon. But how will the rising costs of commodities and other energy derivatives impact the cost of living on the lower and middle classes as a whole? Rather than speculating, the documentary "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil" presents a real-life petri-dish scenario. The impact of the oil embargo is disruptive, but the community rises to the occasion in positive and creative ways: http://www.powerofcommunity.org/

Chuck's beautiful writing continues to prepare us with envisioning tools for the transitions that the crises of our time herald.

"...we are on the cusp of a civilizational transition greater than the fall of one civilization and the rise of the next, but to a whole different kind of civilization. One way of understanding this shift is that we are moving toward an age in which the masculine Yin and the feminine Yang will be in ascendancy."

Read it in full here: The Testicular Age

As we reach the full peak of either Yin or Yang - at that point the other is already clearly manifest at our new emerging center - forever bringing into being new creation.