Chapter 1: Life Is Tough

“Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.”

—SUSAN GRIFFIN

“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

—DR. SUESS

This is a tumultuous and uncertain time to be living in planet Earth. We’re experiencing an accelerating convergence of change in all aspects of our existence. The intricately woven tapestry of the natural world and the human community is fraying and ripping, and it isn’t difficult to imagine the current social, political, and ecological chaos swirling into catastrophe. Indeed, we could make a good case that catastrophes of our own making are already upon us: endless war, random violence, terrorism, financial crises, social unrest, illness and disease. It isn’t life as usual anymore.

We sometimes find ourselves silently asking, “Does it have to be this way?” In modern society, our deepest and most essential concerns regarding the world and all of life are routinely marginalized. Although we may not always notice this marginalization, it’s breaking our hearts. We’ve all been carefully trained—and have trained ourselves—to avoid acknowledging or speaking out loud those things that might jostle our social networks or that might make us feel uncomfortable or vulnerable. We sense that our deepest concerns will have unsettling consequences if they rise to the surface of consciousness, and that if we fully recognize and voice our concerns about this rapid, unpredictable change that’s unfolding in our world, we’ll trigger invisible tripwires in our social relations and in the subterranean regions of our own psyche. It’s frowned upon to speak of our modern global and local infrastructures as the fragile house of cards that the most rational part of us increasingly recognizes them to be. It’s unsettling to think about extreme climate change, accelerating species extinction, and dwindling resources. It’s awkward to articulate how daily life has the potential to make our minds and emotions reel. It’s inconvenient to directly face how unpredictable and stressful our lives can be in modern society, and how much more unstable life can become in the blink of an eye. We’ve learned, often without being fully aware of it, that we’ll be dismissed or disadvantaged in some way for breaking this internalized code of conformity. We sense that we might be ignored—just as we’ve learned to ignore, silence, and medicate away our intuitions and sensitivities. So we keep our heads down, focus on life’s immediate needs, and stay busy, distracting ourselves from the tsunami of intensifying change.

This anesthetization of our sensitivity and intuition has left us alienated, infantilized, dependent, and vulnerable to exploitation. The banishment of our deep whispering concerns effectively undermines the ability to identify, assess, and manage the inevitable risks that accompany great change. Our institutions of education, religion, politics, commerce, entertainment, health, media, and advertising continually define for us, with great certainty and assumed authority, what the appropriate concerns and questions are, and they provide us with many insubstantial answers. We internalize this received certainty with a sense of hopeful relief, and we turn our backs on the whispering deep voice.

 
What We All Want

All living beings want to be contented and happy, but the human community no longer has a clear understanding of these states of being or how to experience them. The orthodox institutions and corporate organizations that dominate our society bombard us with seductive ready-to-wear narratives that attempt to define contentment and happiness for us. We appropriate these narratives and use them to construct complex narratives about ourselves and our world that we try hard to believe and try to convince other people to believe as well. We invest great amounts of time, energy, and money to create an impressive personal brand, with a color-coordinated lifestyle and a customized living environment that match the templates transmitted to us through our media devices.

These convenient templates for the mind reduce our lives to two discrete segments: a lovingly tended garden of desires and a junkyard of dissatisfactions. An ever-shifting thin line separates the garden from the junkyard. We’re incessantly told, via a steady bombardment of media messages, that “more is better,” but increasingly we’re finding that more is never enough, and that the cost of more is dangerously high. A life of grabbing at what we want and pushing away whatever prevents us from getting what we want distances and distracts us from the quiet voice of the deep and the realities of this quickly changing time. Those who have accumulated possessions and position, and who have experienced substantial pleasures and achievements, are frequently surprised and disappointed to discover that these highly valued ideals in our modern society only bring a shallow, fleeting satisfaction.

Like children, we move rapidly from one seemingly pleasurable or profitable experience to the next, attempting to acquire more status, possessions, and pleasant sensory stimulations. However, none of this results in consistent contentment or enduring happiness. American philosopher Cornel West notes that our constant consumer mentality leads to a personal, social, and ecological catastrophe, which, he says, is “promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists” (West 2011). Yet we’re unable to find a way to extricate ourselves from the discontenting and anxiety-producing patterns of daily life that consume our time and energy.

The Madness of Certainty

In this strange and quickly changing time, madness lurks everywhere. Madness is the inevitable result of the incompatibility between the conditioned and entrenched patterns of thought that drive our lives, and the reality of how things actually work in the natural world within which we exist. In our unexamined certainty, we’ve become dangerously disconnected from the very processes of the earth and sky that we depend on for our life and sustenance. We’re actively inflicting great harm on our bodies and on the fragile membrane of life in this planet to which we owe our existence. We’ve become consumed by personal and societal patterns that are out of sync with the realities of Earth and sky. We continuously cultivate this madness of alienation, while remaining nearly completely unaware of it, its effects, and our daily participation in its creation.

Increasingly, many of us sense that something larger than our habitual pursuit of pleasure and escape from displeasure is taking place all around us and within us. Nevertheless, we tend to confine ourselves to the dark cave of our habits, preferring the madness of our familiar narratives over uncertainty, even if truth and clarity are found within that uncertainty. We try to allay our constant discontentment with the balms of prescribed mood stabilizers, alcohol, and “recreational” substances. We subdue it under more and more work. We quell the whispering voice of truth with the raucous banter on our television screens and the endless entertainment offered by our media devices. We bury it in full shopping bags. But the resolution of our gnawing, whispering discontentment won’t be found in a pill, a bottle, a shopping bag, or on a screen. We’ve been lulled by media and the status quo into thinking that everything will be fine if we just buy more and work harder. We’re continually reassured by the experts of orthodox institutions and corporate organizations that they have everything under control and that we can, and should, just continue with our habits. But are they right?

 Introduction to No Solid Ground: Renewable Contentment and Sustainable Happiness in an Age of Uncertainty

I ran to the rocks

 To hide my face

 The rocks cried out,

 No hiding place

 There’s no hiding place

 Down here

 My Lord, what a morning

 My Lord, what a morning

 My Lord, what a morning

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 In that great gitting-up morning

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 The stars will fall from heaven

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 Like wax the mountain meltin’

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 The seas they’ll be a boilin’

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 The moon with blood a drippin’

 Fare thee well

 Fare thee well

 — Eighteenth-century African-American folk song

 For who so list into the heauns looke,

 And search the courses of the rowling spheares,

 Shall find that from the point, where they first tooke

 Their setting forth, in these few thousand yeares

 They are all wandred much: that plaine appeares.

 For that same golden fleecy Ram, which bore

 Phrixus and Helle from their stepdames feares,

 Hath now forgot, where he was plast of yore,

 And shoudred hat the Bull, which fayre Europa bore.

 And eke the Bull hath with his bow-bent horne

 So Hardly butted those two twines of loue,

 That they haue crusht the Crab, and quite him borne

 Into the great Nemaean lions groue.

 So now all range, and doe at random roué

 Out of their proper places farre away,

 And all this world with them amisse doe moue,

 And all his creatures from their course astray,

 Till they arriue at their last ruinous decay.

 — Edmund Spenser, from the Proem to Book V of The Faerie Queene

Something is dying, and something new is being born. We’re now coming to the end of a great cycle of time, known as the Piscean Era, and many of us are starting to sense the subtle beginnings of a new era, the Age of Aquarius. We’re also coming to the end of an even greater cycle that the human community now has very little memory of. This forgotten grand cycle of time is a pivotal theme of this book. These two cycles of time, and their effects on the earth and life, were well known to antiquity. Knowledge of them is codified in many of the oral and written records from around the globe that have been preserved by our ancestors and handed down to us for tens of thousands of years, though our modern interpretation and understanding of these records blur and diminish their important messages. As a result, the human community now fails to recognize the effects of these profound transitions taking place during this time at the end of time, before time begins anew; transitions that we’re not separate from in any real way.

In Part I of this journey: A Very Modern Madness, we’ll examine a fast-moving convergence of change taking place in Earth that is resulting in increasing uncertainty in human society. We’ll also discover our ancestor’s profound oral traditions and texts, symbols, objects, and architectural structures that are intimately linked to the cycling nature of time and space. And we’ll look closely at these cycles and the transition zones that exist between segments of them. The end zone of each great cycle, the ancients tell us, brings a wide range of potential catastrophes and cataclysm: climate extremes, seismic and volcanic activity, falling meteors, rising seas, species die-off, social disorder, malaise, and madness. This section of the journey will remind us that we have faced many, and we will face many more of these convergent events in the future, as we move deeper into the currently unfolding transitions. And as we’ll see, modern science is increasingly confirming what our ancient ancestors knew and carefully preserved for us for tens of thousands of years.

Our ancestors, around the globe and extending far back into the mists of time, were acutely aware of these cycles and cultivated ways of life that emphasized the intimate and innate relationship that exists between us, Earth, and the sky, in order to build fluid, adaptable societies that protected health and wellbeing and that furthered the chances of human survival during periodic celestial and terrestrial upheavals. They possessed a vast and precise knowledge, accumulated over countless thousands of years, of the rhythmic patterns of existence that periodically result in disorder, decline, and catastrophe here in Earth. In stark contrast to our ancestors’ clear perception of the earth and sky, and their place within them, modern people have forgotten that we exist within continuously regenerating and degenerating patterns and processes over which we have no control. In our alienated state of being, we’ve built a towering, mediatized, global society that depends on a stable Earth and sky, but when we look carefully at the archaeological, geological, climatological, historical, mythological, and cosmological record, we see that no such stability has ever existed. This lack of awareness means human society will relatively soon face upheaval without knowledge or preparation. A strong argument exists that we are already in the midst of upheaval, but that we are unaware of its current extent, toll, and threat. This alienation from the actuality of the meta-environments that we exist in and depend on for our survival is a very modern madness that keeps us from experiencing authentic contentment and happiness.

In Part II of this journey: Being Sane, we’ll look at our society’s conditioned patterns of thought that are the common cause of this madness. These patterns of thought, dissociated from Earth and sky, and cultivated by people and institutions that are not working in our best interests, are resulting in growing confusion, discontent, anxiety, disease, and endangerment. We’ll examine the subtle messages we regularly receive from orthodox institutions and corporate organizations, and the accumulative effects of these messages that make us think life should be about speed, consumption, and a relentless pursuit of individualism. We’ll also look at ways of recovering a clear understanding of where we really are so that we can begin to relate to the patterns and processes of the earth and sky as they really are, and to ourselves as we really are. By cultivating a clear and direct relationship with the earth and sky that we’re inseparably embedded in, which was central to our ancestor’s vision of life and existence, we can create the internal conditions for a renewable contentment and a sustainable, even profound, happiness. These states of being then inform our intentions and actions in ways that skillfully benefit our life and society, no matter how unstable the world becomes in this Age of Uncertainty.

In modern society, we tend to be skeptical of contentment and happiness, even as we persistently pursue them in often futile and misguided ways. Our ancient ancestors knew that real contentment and happiness are the only things that make living worthwhile and that prevent us from collectively going mad and destroying life on a grand scale. To become acquainted with these elusive birthright states of being, individually and collectively, we’re going to have to face habitually overlooked elements of the natural world, society, and our own lives. This book explores what has been forgotten and carefully avoided. It looks at the evidence in both ancient records and contemporary scientific data, as well as other interesting and sometimes surprising places, for a remembrance of forgotten cycles of time and their effects on all life. It presents the ancient understanding that there is no solid ground to be found in any aspect of existence. It observes that in this uncertain in-between zone that we find ourselves in, which is both an ending and a beginning, enduring contentment and genuine happiness are rare experiences. And it concludes that it is our forgetfulness of where we actually are and our denial and ignorance of what is actually taking place that make them rare.

This is a challenging book that potentially has a happy ending (it’s up to you). The journey it maps leads outward and upward as well as inward and downward, for the purpose of cultivating an effective and renewable contentment that organically gives birth to a sustainable, even profound happiness. During this journey, we’ll look underneath rocks, peer into deep shadows, and return to long-forgotten and carefully avoided places. Some of what we encounter on the path may be unfamiliar territory and difficult to comprehend, acknowledge, or accept. We’ll discover truths that are inconvenient, even unsettling, about our world, our society, and ourselves: well-kept secrets that have been hidden right in front of us and deep within us. If we have the courage and commitment to make this uncertain journey and see it through, it will move us: it has the potential to dissolve the amnesia and blindness that alienate us from our human birthright of renewable contentment and sustainable happiness. But, as will become evident during the journey, the clock is ticking. Let’s get started …