Darkness Is Collective And Cumulative; Its Negation Begins In Meditation

A friend, sharing my feeling that man continues to plunge the planet and humanity toward the abyss, sent me a link he thought was helpful. It had the opposite effect.

“Humanity is sloppily, awkwardly lumbering toward consciousness,” the author proclaims. As much as I would like to believe that as well, it simply isn’t so.

The basic direction of humankind hasn’t changed since Homo sapiens emerged 100,000 or more years ago. That’s why human nature is viewed as immutable. But nothing is immutable.

In our age, things are rapidly becoming darker inwardly and more perilous outwardly. The human condition is worsening by the week. But the need for hope, much less Steven Pinker-like optimistic delusion, precludes seeing things as they are.

Most people who haven’t given up on humanity and life believe the choice is between a hopeful and optimistic attitude, and what the author of the piece defines as “the more cynical and pessimistic corners of the internet.”

Espousing optimism, she immediately contradicts herself: “Because of the internet, humanity has probably changed more in the last 25 years than it did in the previous 2500.” Yes, but not for the better.

Hope is time, time is the enemy, and “gradually” is never. But hope, which is said to be the last thing to die, is dying a hard death. It’s is no choice at all between cynicism/nihilism, and hoping that we’re headed in the right direction as a species. They are two sides of the same coin.

Such examples as the grotesquely disproportionate use of force by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza in reaction to the October 7 terror attack by Hamas invalidate the idea of an “expansion of human consciousness.” If humankind had the decency that existed even during the Reagan era, Israel’s slaughter of children and women in the name of “self defense” would have been stopped months ago.

As the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh told the international court of justice (ICJ) at The Hague last month, “The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people, despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian people being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and television screens. The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, vain hope that the world might do something.”

As for the United States, the supposed moral leader of the so-called free world, retired Israeli Major Gen Yitzhak Brick tells it like it is: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

A healthy society teaches its young to continually distinguish between what they want to believe and what is. Good luck finding an American adult, on the fascistic right or the hapless left, with that trait.

My friend’s spokeswoman ends her pollyannaish piece on a more accurate note, except for a clause that gives one pause:

“I don’t know if it will be enough to save us from all the existential hurdles our species faces in the near future; I just know we are rapidly becoming a conscious species, and consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist. We won’t need to wait long to find out which one wins out.”

Humankind certainly is not “rapidly becoming a conscious species,” but speeding toward a dark singularity.

Will a totally endarkened human consciousness burst into the light of insight at “the last trumpet?” Even asking the question feels like I’m indulging in wishful thinking.

A creative explosion in human consciousness certainly doesn’t depend, as progressives and New Agers believe, on the gradual awakening of collective consciousness, but on insight simultaneously igniting in a minority of awakened individuals across the planet.

There’s a tremendous urgency for radical change, which begins inwardly, not outwardly.

Besides the planetary ecological crisis, another driver of the imperative of psychological revolution is AI. Given the recent success of Elon Musk’s “neuralink” brain hacks, and a less surgically invasive human-AI fusion on the horizon, the intactness and spiritual potential of the human brain is endangered.

Yet fewer and fewer people care about the earth and humanity as a whole. The crisis of human consciousness, with all its outward manifestations, is just too overwhelming.

“All I can do is take care of me,” echoes the refrain echoing around the world by those who don’t have to worry about being bombed or where their next meal is coming from.

Will the momentum toward a dark singularity end in an explosion of insight? Or will the expansion of collective darkness end humanity with a bang or a whimper?

That is the greatest and most painful unknown, not for the future but in the present. Choosing is losing. There’s no choice except to keep growing in insight as undivided individuals.

This age may be hopeless, but as long as the human spirit is alive and insight is growing in a few human beings, humanity is not doomed.

Martin LeFevre

Lefevremartin77 at gmail

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