Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era

by Kelly Sean M.

Subtlest of all, and pervading the planetary anthroposphere like an invisible miasma, is a psycho-spiritual crisis of consciousness, a crisis of meaning and imagination.

Our dominant habits of mind are not adequate to—and are arguably responsible for bringing about—the complex global polycrisis in which we find ourselves in this sixth century of the Planetary Era. We cannot—or do not wish to—see where we are heading.

dominance of patriarchy throughout the historical period. During this period, the masculine principle has been traditionally associated with such qualities as competitive striving, independence or separativeness, dominance, and in later periods with a certain inflection of consciousness and rationality that stresses certainty, closure, and rigidly hierarchical thinking.

Can we then expect a rise or return of the “feminine”*—that is, a greater emphasis on such qualities as cooperation, relatedness, and more embedded, holistic, fluid, and lateral thinking—on the other side of the threshold? Given the extremity of our current situation, we can only hope that this will be the case.

For our purposes, the most helpful expression of the logic of the Absolute is the triad: identity, difference, and new identity.*

The individuation or actualization of the Self is associated with deepening into what Jung calls the symbolic life and manifests as a progressive embodiment of wholeness, a healing of developmental lesions, and a more conscious and wholesome relationship to the holy or sacred.

A fourth possibility for a threefold division, not just of world history, but of the human journey on planet Earth, a division that more clearly manifests the more fundamental pattern, might be: anthropogenesis, diaspora, convergence.

we know him today, came into being.”30 Echoing Jaspers’ crucial insight into the deep structure of world history, and in a clear evocation of the fundamental pattern, W. H. and J. R. McNeill write that “human history is an evolution from simple sameness [identity] to diversity [difference] toward complex sameness [new identity].”

What we have, in other words, is a differentiation and strengthening of human agency and of ideal or psycho-spiritual factors as determinants of social change. From this point on, world history and social macroevolution cannot be understood apart from a consideration of the evolution of consciousness.

The seven cultural ecologies (which I group under the six transformations) are as follows: 1. Hominization: i. Sylvan (prehominid evolution of Ramapithecus) ii. Savannan/Lacustrean/Coastal (from Australopithecus to Homo erectus) 2. Symbolization: iii. Glacial (from archaic Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiens) 3. Agriculturalization: iv. Riverine (ancient civilizations) 4. Civilization v. Transcontinental (classic civilizations) 5. Industrialization: vi. Oceanic (modern industrial nation-state societies) 6. Planetization: vii. Biospheric (planetary noetic polities)

At the center of the New Testament portion of the biblical drama is the mystery of Incarnation: the birth, passion, and resurrection (another expression of the three phases) of Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos become “flesh.” This religious mystery was taken by Hegel to be a symbolic expression of the essential nature of Absolute Spirit or the evolutionary Whole—visible equally in nature and in history—as it was for Jung in the psyche’s striving for wholeness or the actualization of the Self as complexio oppositorum, a “weaving together of opposites” (one of Jung’s favorite formulas for the nature of the Self).

With the above considerations in place, we more clearly see the underlying dialectical logic in the procession of dominant Western worldviews, which we can now list as follows: I. IDENTITY: BIBLICAL/THEOLOGICAL II. DIFFERENCE: MODERN SECULAR III. NEW IDENTITY: PLANETARY “Great Code”: creation, fall, redemption; Incarnation: birth/passion/resurrection = descent of Logos humanism; science; eventual disenchantment = exaltation of the finite The special characteristics of the third, planetary, worldview will become progressively more apparent as we proceed, in the following chapters, to consider in greater detail the birth and vicissitudes of the modern.

This New Age of the Eternal Gospel meant, among other things, that the rule of the Church hierarchy was to be replaced with that “of a monastic community of saints in the succession of St. Benedict, destined to cure, by an ultimate effort, a disintegrating world.”54 Some of the triads that Joachim associated with each of the three Ages include: childhood, youth, and maturity; law, grace, and greater grace;* starlight, moonlight, and daylight; fear, faith, and love. Anticipating two of the three ideals (liberté, égalité, fraternité) associated with the French Revolution, there is: bondage, freedom, and friendship.

Though minimized by several generations of later historians, the esoteric cosmological perspective of the Renaissance was crucial to the inspirations of Copernicus, Kepler, and even to Newton, despite the great secret he made of it. “For twenty-seven years,” writes Michael White in Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer,

fundamental traits associated with the modern worldview—the ideal of freedom and the disciplined pursuit of capital—are intimately tied to the Protestant Reformation, which transpired alongside the rise of modern science.

Abrams writes that “faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by faith in an apocalypse by revolution, and this gave way to faith in an apocalypse by imagination [Romanticism] and cognition [Idealism].”

the Romantics and Idealists, instead of the machine, the organism and life become the root metaphors for the cosmos as a whole.

While the mechanistic paradigm displays a series of mutually external chain links ... the romantic paradigm evokes a liquid milieu where each site finds itself in contact with all others, a milieu through which waves of meaning, propagating in all directions, are capable of generating harmonics and positive or negative resonances.

The overall drive of the cosmos is toward the production of increasing complexity of organization as the vehicle for the eventual emergence of self-reflexive consciousness—again, however, not as an epiphenomenal or even merely emergent quality from an otherwise dead or inert matter,* for the order or organization of the cosmos is a manifestation of soul (the anima mundi), or Spirit (Geist).

At the same time, the characteristically human expressions of this consciousness are not to be restricted to the mechanistic intellect (Verstand) of the Enlightenment, but now encompass a much vaster range of potentials, from the sub- or unconscious (a term that enters the language in this period) to the superconscious, from the creative imagination favored by the Romantics to the intellectual intuition or speculative Reason (Vernunft) of the Idealists.

the second and third phases of the greater arc—can be summarized as follows.

As David Bohm will later put it, the new physics suggests that the nature of the cosmos is best described not as a machine, but as “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.”

In contrast to the Cartesian and Enlightenment ideal of autonomous reason, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung reintroduce the Romantic notion of the unconscious as the deeper or wider dimension of the psyche, a dimension that is grounded not in reason but in life.

To summarize, the new cycle—the third fractal repetition of the larger arc—can be represented in the following diagram.

The great twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich summed up the prevailing mood toward the end of this period with the observation that the West was gripped with the “threat of spiritual nonbeing” in the form of an overarching “anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness.”

Both feeding and feeding upon the growing anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, the industrialized north and west plunged ever more frenetically into the mass delirium of industrial growth society that, as Theodore Roszak characterized the situation in 1969, “after ruthlessly eroding the traditionally transcendent ends of life, has concomitantly given us a proficiency of technical means that now oscillates absurdly between the production of frivolous abundance and the production of genocidal munitions.”

The technocracy can be defined as “that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technological experts who, in turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge” and to “the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity.”105 By “science” and “rationality” one should read the scientism and primarily instrumental reason (Hegel’s Verstand or “understanding”) of the new enlightenment, whose cadre of experts by this time had become the handsomely funded lackeys of the (techno) military industrial complex.

if we see beat-hip bohemianism as an effort to work out the personality structure and total life style that follow from New Left social criticism. At their best, these young bohemians are the would-be utopian pioneers of the world that lies beyond intellectual rejection of the Great Society. They seek to invent a cultural base for New Left politics, to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new esthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the consumer society.

This new cycle—the fourth fractal repetition of the larger arc—can be summarized as follows.

More broadly, the exponential growth in information over the last century, the flooding of the collective consciousness with commercially driven cultural artifacts, and the steady denigration of the past in favor of the new (and preferably disposable) have all contributed to a generalized cultural amnesia. Most of us have forgotten the path that has led us to where we now stand, or even that there was any path at all.

with the Fall of Saigon in 1975 on one end, and Reagan’s second term in 1986, on the other—we see a pervasive shift in the collective psyche from the optimistic and communitarian idealism of the sixties counterculture to a reactionary and fear-based culture obsessed with the threat of various kinds of religious and moral evil. This period sees Reagan’s Manichaean characterization of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” the beginning of the “war on drugs,” OPEC’s “stranglehold” on American oil, and “America held hostage” in the Iran hostage crisis.

We shall consider the spirit of this “Great Turning,” as Joanna Macy calls it, in part 3. The last two cycles, the fifth and sixth, are summarized in the diagrams on the facing page.

For many, it is better to live in a split world—simultaneously modern and premodern—than it is to live solely in the spiritual wasteland of late modernity, however “rational” or coherent the latter may see itself as being.

the same time, and despite their deeper potentials or their organic role in the larger historical process we have been considering, the practice of science and the values associated with secularization have been taken up or co-opted by the corporate-driven techno-industrial complex that has come to dominate the planet during the late modern period.

One sees the mark of this complex in Spretnak’s summary of the values of modernity, which includes the following interrelated ideas: the restriction of human being to the sphere of economics (the notion of homo economicus) and the related ideal of unlimited economic expansion; the overvaluation of objectivism, rationalism, and reductionism coupled with the rule of mechanistic science; the standardization and bureaucratization of work; the compartmentalization of education, and indeed of all aspects of life (work, politics, social life, love life, spirituality); and finally, the “preference for competition and a dominance-or-submission dichotomy as the structure of all relationships in the spheres of modern life.”119 To summarize, one could characterize these dominant values of late modernity as expressions of a materialistic, power-seeking mentality that, in the pursuit of its ends, imposes a disjunctive or reductionistic logic—the mechanistic paradigm—on all aspects of life.

INTERDEPENDENCE ... TEACHES US THAT THERE ARE NO SINGLE ISSUES because it’s one whole that can be addressed only by bringing together all the parts. Bioneers gathers people at the crossroads of ecological restoration, human health and social justice. There is only one cause—it is all of them.

According to Morin, the first kind of religion, which began to be eroded from the time of the Enlightenment, was a religion of salvation, of an otherworldly God or gods. The second kind of religion, typified in both Marxism and positivism or scientism, did not recognize itself as a religion, though it still held up the promise of (this-worldly) salvation. The third kind of religion would be a “religion in the minimal sense [suggested in one derivation of the word: from re-ligare: to join back together]”125 and “would involve a rational undertaking: to save the planet, to civilize the Earth, to unify humankind while safeguarding its diversity.”

a depth religion, uniting people in suffering and death. It would not promise any primary or ultimate truth.... Such a religion would lack any providence, any shining hereafter, but would bind us together as fellows in the unknown adventure. Such a religion would not have promises but roots: roots in our cultures and civilizations, in planetary and human history; roots in life; roots in the stars that have forged the atoms of which we are made; roots in the cosmos where the particles were born and out of which our atoms were made.... Such a religion would involve a belief, like all religions but, unlike other religions that repress doubt through excessive zeal, it would make room for doubt within itself. It would look out onto the abyss.

The holographic paradigm, by contrast—which bases itself on a certain reading of quantum (and to an extent also relativistic) physics—conceives of reality, at least at its most fundamental level, as “undivided wholeness in flowing movement.”135 This wholeness is manifest at the physical level in the complementary relation between such classically opposed terms as space and time, matter and energy, wave (or field) and particle, position and velocity (or momentum), and perhaps even more so in the mysterious phenomenon of “entanglement,” or non-locality (of which Einstein spoke derisively, before it was experimentally confirmed as “spooky action at a distance”).

Along with the notion of dynamic holism, the theory makes room for the emergence of genuine novelty (with the idea of “order from chaos”), for the importance of global transformations (“phase shifts” or “bifurcation points”), a certain unpredictability of evolutionary outcomes, and the potentially critical effect of very small actions or changes in the organization of complex systems (the co-called butterfly effect).

There are three central concepts in Grof’s model. The first is that of the transpersonal, which refers to a class of experiences of “mind-at-large” that involve the transcendence of the spatial and temporal boundaries that normally define the ego or separate-self sense. These experiences can range from encounters or identification with other beings (both human and nonhuman) all the way to mystical union and dissolution into what Grof describes as the “supracosmic and metacosmic void.”

The second central concept in Grof’s model is that of the perinatal. Though initially an expansion and deepening of the Rankian insight into the effect of the birth trauma on the development of personality, the concept eventually unfolded in the direction of a more complex and nuanced understanding of the death/rebirth archetype, where the life-and-death struggle of the fetus at birth is seen as the prototypical encounter with the universal, or archetypal, process of deep transformation.

THE evolutionary spiral we have been tracing, especially since the birth of the Planetary Era, has involved not only the differentiation, but also the dissociation between such pairs of elements as the individual and the collective, humanity and nature or the cosmos, and the sacred and the profane. The modern West, and therefore increasingly the rest of the planet, has tended in the direction where one of the elements of each pair is dominant or has sought to become so: the human has eclipsed the natural through the construction and proliferation of artificial environments and through the subjugation, and now the devastation, of the biosphere. A one-sided, atomistic individualism has helped generate a reigning culture of narcissism, which in addition is correspondingly vulnerable to the phenomenon of mass-mindedness.156 The systematic disenchantment of the world has gone hand in hand with the growth of increasingly virulent forms of religious fundamentalism.

To acknowledge this shadow is to own it, which does not, however, mean engaging in fruitless self-condemnation. Rather, it means accepting that, whatever our life circumstance, we are creative-destructive participants in the global drama, the course of which both determines, and is determined by, even the most seemingly inconsequential of our actions, thoughts, and feelings—especially when these are secretly guided or informed by root assumptions of the still-dominant paradigm.

it would be the concept of wholeness. The word suggests not only the sense of totality, integrality/integrity, harmony, completeness, fullness, comprehensiveness, actualization, and realization, but also—through its deep resonance with its cognates, healthy and holy—the qualities of vitality, adaptiveness, sustainability, and creativity, on the one hand, and those of numinosity or meaning, purpose, wonder, and mystery, on the other.

any proposal for a planetary wisdom must honor and integrate the hard-won accomplishments of modernity. Corresponding to the general moment of difference, these include the sociopolitical ideal of freedom (however difficult in practice it might be to implement, and even to define in unambiguous terms), as well as the cumulative (if partial and sometimes misleading) revelation of the nature of the cosmos through science and technology. A planetary wisdom, therefore, will not involve a wholesale repudiation of modernity and a literal return to origins, but rather (recall Hegel’s notion of aufheben) a simultaneous fostering of the virtues and a rejection of the vices associated with the modern era. As

The notion of complex holism, which I am proposing as a meta-principle that might inform an emergent planetary wisdom, finds expression in the following four planetary ideals: cosmic solidarity, human unity, radical interdependence, and spiritual liberation.

it is not only that the physical “stuff” of which we are made is inextricably woven into the complex fabric of the entire cosmos, it is that this very stuff, which in some mysterious way gives rise to or at least facilitates the emergence of our experience, is also (complexly) co-constituted by our experience of it.

Our solidarity with the cosmos is, at the most fundamental physical level, thoroughly and complexly participatory: we participate as members of the cosmic whole or totality, and we participate in bringing this whole into manifestation or actualization.

it is of the very nature of nature or the cosmos to produce life, and therefore ourselves as living beings. As I briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter in connection with Gaia theory, life has created and maintains the planetary atmosphere as we know it and depend upon it.