In a world that’s gone exponential — in virtually every way — how do we predict what happens next?
We don’t.
We invent it. And to do that, we strengthen our capacity for positive imagination. We focus on healing ourselves from stress, trauma and the culturally-entrained mistrust of life.
And we allow our own transformation to emerge; it’s latent within us.
Metaphorically, at a species level, I like to think that we’re like the caterpillar that has just eaten everything in sight. It doesn’t know that it’s going to become a butterfly, although the potential within it has been there all along, hidden in its imaginal discs.
It just eats and eats and eats; at a certain point it can consume no more, and an internal hormonal process triggers its transformation — which at first looks and feels like self-annihilation. It moults several times, then goes through the strange and mysterious chrysalis phase, where it effectively digests itself (yikes!) and dissolves. Eventually an utterly different creature, a butterfly, emerges.
A key uniqueness that distinguishes us from our fellow species on the planet is not just our toolmaking capacity (other creatures make and use tools), but our ability to abstract concepts (e.g., power) and then massively scale those tools, based on our abstractions.
This capacity is on the yang side of our global cultures, and it is very well-developed (arguably overly so, at this point).
From my perspective the corollary to the endlessly-eating caterpillar is our endless conquest, extraction and exploitation of what we call resources, both real-world and economic (which have real impact in the real world, too, as we well know). Economics is our wildest tool/abstraction to date; it’s a completely fabricated thing which, ironically enough, we call “reality.”
Because of our unique capacity to abstract concepts, the metaphorical moment in which we find ourselves is as if the caterpillars, whilst eating with wild abandon, suddenly woke up and noticed all the other caterpillars around them eating in the same way. “Uh-oh,” they realize, “if we keep eating like this we’ll eat up everything there is, and we’ll die. What do we do? We’re caterpillars, all we know is eating.”
My sense now is that it is the yin side of our cultures (I’m speaking figuratively) that has contained the triggering mechanism for our transformation all along. It’s been dormant, just as the imaginal cells are, present the whole time with the model for the future innate within them, waiting for the proper moment in the growth and maturation process to be activated.
When the time comes we must shed our skins (our ideas of who we thought we were) multiple times, enter the chrysalis (the unknown), and surrender ourselves to what looks more and more like death/species extinction (but may really be our metamorphosis).
What if the signaling mechanism for humanity’s transformation has just not yet been released? (Feels like it’s about time, though, doesn’t it?)
🐛✨⚡️🦋
p.s.: another potential difference between our world and that of caterpillars and butterflies is that one of our greatest abstractions — and gifts — is choice. Individual, and collective.
That’s where my own work is focused.
