"We are as highly developed in psychopathology as in technology. Psychosis is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture."
Jules Henry, Culture Against Man
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"There is both a moral and practical obligation for each of us to look beyond the surface of events to feel the ground swell underneath the events and perceive the direction they are taking: to perceive the evolutionary trend as it drives social change in our world."
Ervin Laszlo, The Choice
History/Context
Imagine the history of evolution as the tallest building (which was the 108-story World Trade Center; (I will leave it to you to contemplate the mytho-poetic dimension of its destruction).
The Earth was forming 4,600 million years ago. The simplest living cells do not appear until the 25th floor; photosynthesis occurs on the 50th.
Oxygen-breathing bacteria enter on the 60th floor; complex cells capable of reproduction on the 70th, and multicellular organisms on the 80th. Fish appear on the 97th floor and crawl out of the sea on the 99th. Dinosaurs rule the Earth from the 104th to the 107th.
Mammals do not appear until the penthouse at the very top of the building. Homo erectus shows up only a few inches from the ceiling. Neanderthals appear a quarter of an inch from ceiling, while Cro-magnon humans with language, clothes, and apparently religion. Christ is born at about the thickness of a layer of paint on the ceiling [while] all known history occupies the space of a microscopic bacterium trapped under the paint.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens
Examining human progress over millennia, Duane Elgin (who has shown himself to be both intuitively prescient and meticulously analytical) articulates a number of stages of humanity's growth, each of which has a distinctive tone and is built on the achievements of the stage that proceeded it.
Elgin sees our emergence from the animal kingdom lasting millions of years, as our ancestors struggled in a twilight of self-recognition and the very beginnings of a capacity for reflection.
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