It is said that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out immediately and without hesitation, as any self-respecting amphibian would—but if you put it in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat one degree at a time, the poor thing will eventually boil to death, fatally oblivious to the increasing threat its environment portends. Though fairly macabre (no frogs were harmed in the making of this blog post), this analogy pretty aptly portrays the condition of our current place in history, in which our entire world seems to be coming to a boil right before our eyes—a slowly culminating but inevitable transformation of history from one state to another. And we have, until recently, been largely oblivious to this—but now we are beginning to take notice, and like the frog who suddenly realizes that it’s getting just a bit too warm for comfort, we are collectively faced with an existential ultimatum—either jump out of the pot, or boil alive.
But can we jump out? Is there any hope for us at all? Can we possibly transform in time—and if so, how? On the one hand, transformation is an utterly mysterious process, often happening suddenly, violently, and without any warning at all. On the other hand, Western science has very proficiently demonstrated that evolutionary leaps—both biological and psychological—tend to occur when environmental pressures demand them to. According to the biological fossil record, this has usually been due to such things as drastic climate change or the geological merging of two previously isolated ecosystems. In terms of psychological development, when asking the question “why do people transform?,” we can look to the concept of the “dialectic of progress,” which essentially states that every new stage of psychological growth brings with it its own “good news” and “bad news,” the good news of each stage being the resolution of the bad news from the previous stage. Or, as Albert Einstein famously quipped, “problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” We ascend the spire of psychological and cultural growth simply by solving our own problems—and every step forward comes with its own new set of emergent problems, which can only be addressed by taking yet another step forward, as consciousness continues to bootstrap itself ever closer to the evolutionary horizon. Read the rest of this entry
In the beginning, there is nothing. There is nothing at all. There are no stars, no moon, no mountains or ocean or sky. There isn’t even nothingness, not even the absence of absence. There is only pure reality—infinite, boundless, and silent. There is only pure unobstructed Awareness.