Coming Home: The Birth & Transformation of the Planetary Era

by Kelly Sean M.

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.