O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark......... T S Eliot, The Four Quartets
Can we just face it already? We are fucked. Humanity is not going to clever its way out of the mess that it has made on the planet.
Change is not going to come from any of the expected places. The moralists are not going to shame us into it by banging on about our original sin. The scientists are not going to reason us into it with sophisticated conclusive climate data. The IT specialists are not gong to solve everything with whizz bang new technology. The psychologists are not going to get us through our addictive behaviour with more self love. We are not going to elect politicians to legislate us into it. The radicals are not going to overthrow the status quo with their righteous anger. The environmentalists are not going to break us out of our human-centric focus with yet another image of a cute species going extinct. Even our children are not going to break our hearts open into radical change by their longing for a future on a globe that is still habitable.
We are fucked. Finally. That is so good. It’s an authentic place to start to listen to what is not known and cannot be known. Only when we are fucked and know that we are fucked can we truly open to a radical intervention. Einstein said that a problem can’t be solved at the same level that it was created. He also gave us E=mc2 and the theory of relativity. Space, time, mass energy all intertwined and tied up with a constant - the speed of light. Nothing travels faster. Except quantum entanglement - something he himself labelled ‘ spooky action at a distance.’
On earth the speed of light doesn’t seem too limiting. Light travels around the earth seven times a second and so to all intents and purposes its fast enough for communication. A galaxy is different. Light takes 30,000 years to reach us from the centre of the galaxy and will never arrive from other galaxies travelling away from us in space at light speed. A hell of a way to run a universe. What coheres such a vast entity if light can’t communicate between its component parts? Enter the dark. Dark matter and dark energy comprise 95% of that universe according our latest theories. What is the relationship between this dark substrate and the surface vibrations of light and substance? How does the dark communicate? Are all black holes simply one black hole? Are atoms black holes at their core too? Does the dark cohere everything so that when one thing changes, everything does?
Light is the symbol for consciousness and we have been in love with it at least since the renaissance. We believed and many still do that more consciousness is the answer. Education, reason, enlightenment. Get humans to a certain level of consciousness and then boom, a tipping point, the hundredth monkey wakes up one bright morning in a new world. Except that its quite obvious now that consciousness is not enough. Even whole communities of well educated and informed people who meditate regularly, recycle their plastic, don’t discriminate against minorities and have mastered their orgasmic potential - are not vibrating fast enough to escape the gravity of our collective narcissism. Back to we are fucked.
What if we directed our attention to the dark instead of light? Not the dark of ignorance but the divine dark, the holy dark that lives under, in and between both light and matter, consciousness and form. Perhaps this dark is a portal to a wild love that operates outside of space and time as we know them. Which is handy because we are almost out of both time and space. What if there is a power that we have not yet tapped into, a power that can transform humanity from voracious caterpillar into graceful butterfly? What if it could change things instantly, irrevocably? What if it is the only thing that ever can and ever has in spite of what we think about the causes of our evolution?
What if it only required the same thing it has always required to operate? That we stop trying to find a solution at the level we know. We admit we are fucked. We ask for help from the mystery. Kind of like a global 12 step programme except there are only really three steps. And it is collective as well as personal. Humanity as a whole needs to find its way to its knees before the dark. Can we do that? Or will parts of us resist to the end trying to figure out how to escape our need for an ultimate act of humility.
Have you ever watched a friend or family member on a determined self-destruct path and tried to help them? Thought that reason, your love and compassion or even your radical intervention could make the difference? How painful it must be for cosmic consciousness watching humanity on earth go through its contortions. Like watching an addict at the casino or a businessman maxing out his credit cards to pay interest on his overwhelming debt. When do we declare our bankruptcy of spirit? When do we admit that our society has lost connection with the sacred well springs of civilisation? How much more farcical and tragic does it need to get?
Human free will. What a wonderful fire. Nothing can take it away from us. But we can consent to surrender. We can let the dark descend upon us. The darkness of god. We can let the darkness well up inside us. The darkness of the goddess. We can let the darkness pour through the centre of our hearts. The darkness of wild love.