"The more rationalized become the means of living - the more irrational will finally become the end product, man himself. In short, power and order, pushed to their final limit, lead to their self-destructive inversion: disorganization, violence, mental aberration, subjective chaos.
"This tendency is already expressed in America through the motion picture [and] television screen. These forms of amusement are all increasingly committed to enactment of cold-blooded brutality and physical violence."
We now risk the destruction of our own species and large portions of the Biosphere. Eckhart Tolle puts it this way:
"Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness.
Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet. What do you think will happen on this planet if human consciousness remains unchanged?"
Will we have to hit, as A.A. says, "rock bottom?"
An Outmoded Paradigm
Until recently religion had such a powerful hold on the human imagination that for whole cultures, the material world was much less real than the worlds of the Gods or God. Idealism, in turn, was superseded by a new worldview - an immersion in practical materialism.
Materialism brought technology, which in turn created many comforts, while simultaneously explaining phenomena that religion preferred to regard as a mystery, known only to God. Today, for countless people, the triumph of rationalism, materialism and technology is so complete that even showing why we should concern themselves with God (or similar designations) is a tough sell. For many, "God" is irrelevant.
Yet, the progress of science itself has led to baffling questions, implying the need for yet a fresh worldview. It appears that the paradigm by which we have been operating - the reductionistic, scientific materialist lens for viewing the world, has become outmoded.
Systems theorist and sociologist Edgar Morin suggests that our current mode of thinking is"
"simplistic in the extreme, which underlies so many dialogues, [leading] inevitably to dead-ends"[This occurs in part because it is] blind to inter-retro actions and circular causality."
Morin argues that, whether we realize it or not, problems are spatially and temporally interdependent; therefore, only a complex kind of thinking (which he also describes as "holographic," "recursive," and "dialogic") can "deal with the inseparability of problems in which each depends on the other." Such a reform in thinking, Morin concludes, implies a mental revolution "of considerably greater proportions than the Copernican revolution."
Much like Medieval doctors who, unaware of microbes, focused instead on demons as the cause of disease, we are victimized by our own explanations. Paradigms which we are ready to outgrow, solve less and less problems. At the same time, it commonplace for us to cling to the current paradigm more forcefully, insisting on its validity and refusing to question what we have come to embrace as fixed beliefs.
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