Seeking Answers Amid Civilizational Collapse
(originally posted on the Doomer Optimism substack)
It was 2015 and I found myself in Peru scouting out a potential ecovillage location for an organization I was doing permaculture design work with. I was several years into an obsessive pursuit of the practical solutions we need to implement in order to ‘save the world’. This was the biggest, most ambitious project I had ever participated in, and I was fully committed to co-creating this vision of a new Earth, no matter where it led me. Up to this point, my search for answers had mostly left me jaded, but I wasn’t ready to give up.
I had one contact in Peru, an older Canadian bioarchitect whom I had only spoken to online before flying down to meet him in that small town on the edge of the Amazon. He had already been there for some time and made a few connections, one of which was an ayahuasca shaman. The chance to pay a visit to the shaman naturally arose, and I jumped at the opportunity. Could he help me on my quest for actionable solutions? Maybe the answers were in the jungle.
But first, I should tell you what led up this visit to an ayahuasca shaman’s hut.
In college, my search took the form of studying Environmental Science and Religion. With open eyes and a curious mind, I went through school seeking actionable solutions to the converging crises of our time. Polluted waterways, clear cut forests, industrial chemical agriculture, depression, suicide, overdose, obesity, poverty, climate change… what the hell is going on here? Instead of graduating with a powerful toolkit of solutions and a world ready for change, my classmates and I graduated with more of a solemn pat on the back and a parting message of “Good luck… we hope you can figure out how to avert these ecological and social catastrophes!” Clearly the solutions were not to be found in academia. I had to go deeper. I had to explore the fringes.
During these formative years, my self-study in the fields of unified physics, ancient civilizations, permaculture and breakthrough energy technologies uniquely prepared me to go outside of the mainstream thinking to continue my quest. I understood that the solutions we need to save the world are not going to come from the same type of thinking that created these problems in the first place. As Thomas Kuhn says in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.”
As a collective we seem to already have all the technology and skills needed to dawn a new and resilient human civilization (many of which are outlined in this Doomer Optimism series). So why isn’t it happening? Why is the dominant human culture on Earth still one that requires perpetual growth, warfare and desecration of the natural world? In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn shares that, “Every culture is a collection of individuals, and each individual has in his or her head a complete set of values, concepts, rules, and preferences that, taken together, constitute the building plans for that particular culture.” A consciousness shift within the individual is the building block of this emergent culture and is fundamental to bringing a new paradigm into being.
And so my search continued for this new culture of conscious individuals building in a new paradigm. I sought out a scientist that was developing a Unified Field Theory - the holy grail of physics that unifies the quantum realm with the cosmological. He even successfully connected his physics to ancient civilizations and spiritual traditions from around the world. Pretty impressive. I ended up flying over to Kauai, where I lived and worked at this research foundation for five months. While there, I combed through his life’s work and spent time with brilliant people that had defected from NASA and the CERN particle collider to join his team. They were building breakthrough technology that had the promise of changing everything as we know it for the better, and when released would make all current energy technologies obsolete overnight.
One glaring problem became clear while I was there - to build their technology and pursue their research required a large amount of outside funding, and that source of funding expected a significant return on investment. More than that, once this technology was created how was it to be sold? For it only to be available to the elites who could afford it would defeat the purpose of its creation. And even if it was made affordable, what was the plan? Sell it at Home Depot? Hell no! A technological breakthrough of this magnitude could not be marketed and sold in the same economic paradigm that had suppressed and shelved all other breakthrough technologies that preceded it.
So is economic reform the answer? Maybe it’s a money problem? This pushed me towards alternative economics, looking for a new value system that realigns the way money is allocated, in turn supporting breakthrough technologies, local economies and large-scale regenerative work. Remembering what Thomas Kuhn said about scientific paradigms, I figured the same must be true about economic paradigms.
The evolution of consciousness and the economic solutions we need to adopt for humanity to thrive are not separate, they’re intimately connected. Charles Eisenstein speaks directly to this in Sacred Economics when, regarding the idea that transforming human consciousness is more important than economic reform, he says, “I think this view is mistaken, for it is based on a false dichotomy of consciousness and action, and ultimately of spirit and matter. On a deep level, money and consciousness are intertwined. Each is bound up in the other.”
And so there I was, laying down on the worn mat of this shaman’s hut. With ayahuasca in my belly and the sounds of night in the jungle reverberating through every cell in my body, tears rolled down my face and over my smile as I received the medicinal wisdom of this sacred plant teacher. After a night of deep spiritual healing, the sun finally broke through the trees and I awoke feeling a renewed sense of clarity about my purpose and my mission.
The restless revelations of that night made me understand that the true breakthrough technologies and cultural systems needed to carry us away from inevitable doom and into an optimistic future will only emerge if there is a sufficient level of consciousness to receive them. I’m not saying that the external work isn’t important, just that the internal work is also critically important and is often overlooked. Our action externally will only make a meaningful impact if we also take action internally - building the empathy and resilience required to step up to the heavy challenges of our time. It requires a certain type of softness that comes from reconnecting with the natural world, but also a grittiness that comes from staring off the cliff of civilizational collapse and choosing to continue moving forward.
In the light of day I reconnected with the shaman, who had transformed from being the ceremonial guide of the realms beyond back to being a normal looking guy eating breakfast. Before heading to my home-base in the nearby town, I was able to ask one departing question to him. “What advice can you share as we work to facilitate the evolution of consciousness and a new paradigm for humanity?”
His answer was simple. “Bring it forth within yourself.”
