I’m about a third of the way through the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. As I mentioned in my previous post “not so ordinary wolves” I took this book on as a bit of a challenge, an opportunity to turn my thinking on its head for a while. To this point in the book there has been lots of intellectual conjecture about what the future holds, how various unexplained phenomena might be signaling a shift in our consciousness, a step in human evolution.
This is all very interesting.
However, I am disappointed in the leaps of logic on display throughout the book, not always by the author, for whom the gaps are often filled in by psychedelic episodes, but also by the people the author references. Not having the advantage of a psychedelic drug to fill in the blanks, I’m left looking at the metaphysical and spiritual musings in the book as nothing more than matters of faith. More appropriately, leaps of faith.
Maybe the chapter dividers should be tabs of acid.
In essence, the focus of the book is that humanity is nearing, or in the process of, becoming a more consciousness based creature. The scientific research used to substantiate this line of thinking is in line with creationist science, only on acid, so it is much more colorful.
The problem I’m struggling with is this approach is the metaphysical equivalent of the Apocalypse. In the Christian version, God reclaims the earth and saves the righteous, damning the wrongeous (I know, that’s not a word. But it should be.). In this metaphysical version, evolved humans (not all humans, just those who have evolved enough- i.e. taken psychedelics), under the stress of global crises will evolve into a higher level of consciousness, possibly communal in nature.
In both cases, the supernatural comes to the rescue to save us poor humans and bail us out of our own mess.
And that is where my viewpoint diverges from both the Christian and metaphysical models. I think we (god’s children, humanity, spawn of space aliens, whatever else we may be) are on our own until we solve our own crises.
Success in that endeavor may give us the metaphysical believer’s their evolution and the religious zealots their second coming.
Until then, we need to stop looking for the easy way out, roll up our sleeves, and clean up our mess.
(I’ll do a final review of the book once I complete it, though you may have to wait for next summer’s mushroom crop to understand it.)
Discontinuous Permafrost 