Universal Change

It's Bigger Than the 250th Birthday

The fight over American democracy, so prominent in the contested activities of this semiquincentennial moment, seems like the “main event.” While a worthy fight (unlike the phony wrestling match in the South Lawn of the White House), it is also a side show in the story of global change now happening.

Something is being born and we don’t yet know what it is.

This reflection started today with fatigue. I am tired this morning and my back/leg hurts, as they do most of the time. It will only get more persistent until I cannot walk without a walker or a wheelchair. The body, this body, my body, or the physical container I possess for now, is gradually giving up. The wheels are slowly coming off. And I wonder what I am giving birth to.

My lover Ali was telling me yesterday about butterflies. The caterpillar that gives birth to the butterfly transforms itself by melting away. The old body just turns into goo or ooze and the butterfly is reconstituted from that.

Perhaps I am becoming a butterfly. Melting or crumbling away only to emerge on the other side as some other, beautiful, feathery being that flaps its orange wings – or blue or purple, or rainbow, even – and flits from pollen source to pollen source, supping on the sweetness of the earth.

Ali knows things like that, like the names of bones and muscles. She seems in touch with the universe. And our universe is evolving through the same kind of melting process.

I am a non-dualist – the world view that preceded Copernicus and Descartes – the lightning rods of science and logical, rational thinking.

Somewhere I came across this quote from Ervin Laszlo, an amazing philosopher of science:

At the cutting edge of contemporary science a remarkable insight is surfacing: The universe, with all things in it, is a quasi-living, coherent whole. All things in it are connected. . . . A cosmos that is connected, coherent and whole recalls an ancient notion that was present in the tradition of every civilization: It is an enchanted cosmos. . . . We are part of each other and of nature. We are a conscious part of the world, a being through which the cosmos comes to know itself. . . . We are at home in the universe.

Richard Tarnas writes in Cosmos and Psyche about how we are leaving the age of logic, science, and material thinking – and entering a new, entirely difference paradigm. To Laszlo’s conception, Tarnas adds the importance of knowing how the universe moves and changes, and the Jungian awareness of the power of archetypes in that universe.

Or, to come to a Buddhist concept, the world is evolving toward a non-dualistic state, where we can become conscious that we are not separate from each other, nor from the many species and living things that populate this earth.

Dualistic thinking brought great progress; it is reaching its limits with the simultaneous destruction of the planet on which we live. In its current form, the Copernican/Cartesian world has brought great productivity and, today, extremes of wealth and impoverishment.

It feels like we have reached a breaking point. Systemic change is on us. The concepts we have been using for the last 80 years to organize our perceptions – left/right, good states/rogue states, democracy/authoritarianism – no longer help us. The critical distinctions now begin to look like top/bottom, human spirit/submission, mindfulness/mindlessness, free spirit/repression, community/individuality.

These concepts don’t sort so easily; where any of us belongs is unclear. We are at sea, a sea of change. As William Bridges wrote in his compelling book Transitions, we cling to the shore we are leaving because we cannot see the shore toward which we swim. For a time, as the change sweeps over us, we are compelled to let go of that shore without seeing the answer, and swim/tread water, in a rough sea of change as things sort themselves out. That’s really hard to do; it means letting go without being sure of the alternative.

I look at the world I lived in from World War II to the “drole de guerre” of Iran in 2026 (a phony war from the air that changed nothing) and the echo of World War I in Ukraine, from notebooks to computers to artificial intelligence, from real food to processed food product, from hidden gender and sexual diversity to open(and contested) awareness of fluidity, and wonder at the world my 15 month old granddaughter will live in, a world I will not live to see, and can hardly forecast.

It could be pretty, accepting, responsive, free, absorbing technology to benefit all humankind. Or it could be a dark, repressive, frightened, cowl-wearing world of authoritarian repression signaled by the fear and anger revealed by the mutated version of fascism we see around us, not just in the USA. Or both at the same time.

Honest answer: anyone who says they can predict this future does not know what they are talking about.

The glass is very dark; my sight grows dimmer by the year when I stare into it. It will be something bigger than the next step for American democracy.

My granddaughter will find out.