What if you are living someone else’s life, someone else’s story? Someone else’s WAR. Only you just didn’t realise it? And what has all this got to do with the connection between singer Elvis Costello and English Civil war figure, Oliver Cromwell? I answer these questions in my latest video on YouTube.
It’s this historical and civilizational impasse that led me to write my latest book, Power and Presence, and I am delighted to announce that it is now available on Kindle and in hard copy format on Amazon. The book’s subtitle hints at my preferred approach to the sensemaking crisis: Reclaiming Your Authentic Self in a Digitized World. I believe that it is in developing a more conscious relationship with ourselves (including the body and mind), the world and technology itself that we can establish a genuine foundation for moving forward. Simply regulating everything and punishing people isn’t going to work, at least not by itself. We have to look deeper than that, right into the soul of humanity, and ask ourselves, “What does it mean to be human in the digital age?” So, as much as anything, this is a meaning crisis, one that long precedes the digital age, and which has been developing for centuries.
The date was September 16, 2017. The era: Trump’s America. That was the day that a group of Trump supporters assembled for “the Mother of All Rallies Patriot Unification Gathering” at the National Mall in Washington, DC. As was typical of the times, they were met by counterprotesters from Black Lives Matter, numbering 82 in total, who proceeded to shout at them. The Trump supporters shouted back. One individual onstage told the Trump supporters to ignore the hecklers, crying “They don’t exist!” Some might see something symbolic of the historical era in that statement.
The good faith inventory I include below is a simple way of assessing the degree to which a person, group or movement is acting in good faith or bad faith. By their fruits, ye shall know them. You can use this simple inventory in deciding whether to allow yourself to be emotionally or mentally taken into the cognitive wake of a particular person, debate, social/political movement, media channel or organisation. You ask yourself these questions. The answers are subjective, of course. Just answer them in good faith, so to speak. Each question has two options. Circle the left-hand column number if it is a positive, the right-hand number if it is the negative. Circle the question mark if you are undecided or neither applies. Then add up the total score.
South African author and lion tracker Boyd Varty learned early the deep knowing which life seeks to instil within each of us: that there is something profound which transcends and connects our discrete human minds.[ii]
Varty’s tale of the terrifying involves a single night, set in time a moment or two following the initial post-apartheid elections in South Africa, when chaos and violence were common bedfellows across the troubled nation.
In order to truly heal, you have to let go of your blame and anger, your rage towards your parents, siblings, teachers, the opposite sex, society, the nation, the other nation, the world and ultimately even to the universe and to God.
The most terrible thing that the Internet does is that it brings into full display the shadow, the dark and nasty projections that were once only ever seen in our darkest moments. The most wonderful thing about the Internet is that… it brings into full display the shadow, the darkness within us all. For as Jung once noted, long before Facebook and Twitter emerged from e-space, we become enlightened not by imaging figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Perhaps then, it is better to think of the Internet not a conspiracy designed to set us against one another, but the universe’s way of getting us to notice how we set ourselves against one another. How dark we can become.
The emergence of a self-generated solution to tribalism in the US and elsewhere is unlikely to emerge from those currently embedded within the system. The system itself promotes division and drama, which in turn sustains the minds within it (in their current small-s expression). In a kind of pathological, dark feedback loop, the system is then perpetuated by those minds and their projections.
Amidst all this we are foundering upon the collapse of sensemaking, the digitization and politicization of everything, systematically retarding our ability to understand the world and our relationship with it. We have lost touch with our inner knowing, set adrift upon a vast ocean of competing narratives and agendas. Which captains are we to believe, which shores are we to seek, and which winds are we to reset sail upon? These are questions that lie at the heart of this book.
– Higher levels of cognitive responsibility are positively correlated with expanded stages of consciousness evolution.
– The degree of our victim consciousness is inversely proportional to our level of cognitive responsibility.
– Our need for drama is directly related to our unwillingness to assume responsibility for our lives and especially our emotional experience.
– Our sense of personal empowerment (agency) is positively related to cognitive responsibility, and inversely related to our need for drama and identification as a victim.
– A key barrier to assuming higher levels of cognitive responsibility is the often unconscious fear of the emotional pain that we will (possibly) need to feel if we do so.