1
A TV memory from childhood: some early black and white footage of an earthquake - I have an idea it was from the San Francisco quake of 1906. A crack suddenly runs through a pavement and then the ground literally opens up beneath people’s feet, so that one man is left hanging for dear life from the edge of a newly opened crevice. It’s an image that’s come back to me a couple of times recently - maybe it has some kind of symbolic resonance with what is happening in the world at the present time.
Very likely we have all had the experience, especially in the last few years, of talking to someone amiably enough, and then feeling a crack fissuring the ground we seemed to be sharing, and the next thing it’s like the earth is splitting apart beneath us, some kind of contentious issue having been touched on that sets us on opposite sides of a larger divide. And so either we stop trying to communicate, or we feel we can only make ourselves heard, as the distance opens between us, by shouting at each other, and not necessarily in a friendly way.
To cross swords or to hold one’s peace - so often those seem to be the only alternatives available, and what’s more, choosing one option only reinforces the other. If you suspect that things have the potential to get antagonistic then you may feel well advised to avoid conflict, yet doing so only makes for a build-up of pressure around the unspoken issue, so that again the latent animosity is liable to splurge should it finally get an airing. And so one may end up feeling frustrated if one doesn’t speak out, while getting branded as a troublemaker if one does.
It turns out there’s a thin line between the muting of controversy in the interests of us all getting along together, and the closing down of debate as a tacit act of power. It’s a line that can easily be crossed without anyone needing to feel accountable, especially if no words of judgment have been uttered that could be contested by the aggrieved party, the one who has been carved out of the space of allowable discourse.
The upshot of all of this is a kind of micro-censorship of private speech which is strongly analogous to the macro-censorship of communication in the public sphere. And undoubtedly these twin phenomena are mutually reinforcing. This is because the micro-censors of everyday life feel themselves validated by the macro-censors and hence support the latter, tacitly or otherwise. And so a line gets drawn, or to go back to my initial image, a fissure runs across the pavement, setting on one side those who go along with the prefabricated consensus, and on the other those who hold out against it. Anyone who upheld the minority view during the Covid imposture will know exactly what I’m talking about here.
There is a silence then in the interest supposedly of not stirring things up, reinforced on occasion by a weaponised silence aimed at shutting dissidents down. But also in our post-Covid world there is something else, which is a shamefaced silence: the “let’s not talk about it and move on swiftly to the next thing” variation. Except that among those “next things” there are plenty of other issues which are almost as fractious as Covid itself: the seemingly endless tide of mass immigration, for example, or the supposed menace of “far right populism”, or the favouring of “protected groups” as leverage to divide and conquer the prostrate mass of the population, and so on and so forth.
And so it turns out that it was not a once-off, that shutdown of debate which we saw during Covid, as much in the private as in the public sphere; far from being exceptional, it has set a pattern for what was already in evidence prior to the beginning of 2020, and has become only more so since. And so one of the many vital lessons that the Covid experience ought to have taught us is that rational and informed debate is not something to be turned off like a tap, then turned back on again at a later time when it is deemed suitable to do so. On the contrary, if it is turned off once, and especially if that turning off is met with widespread acquiescence, it may prove quite difficult to restore it.
One of the lessons of Covid is that rational and informed debate is not something to be turned off like a tap, to be turned back on again at a later time when it is deemed suitable to do so. On the contrary, if it is shut down even once, it may prove quite difficult to restore it.
That is what we are seeing at the present time. The tap has been turned back on, rather reluctantly it must be said and certainly not to the full, so that the water for the moment is spluttering in a rather spasmodic and unpredictable manner. Yet instead of that being seen as an inevitable consequence of the previous cut, the Powers That Be are suggesting, as usual through their media mouthpieces, that that’s a persuasive reason for turning the tap off again, only this time for good.
2
It’s not hard to see why avoidance in one form or another should be so common right now, for how could anyone contemplate the current state of the world without feeling overwhelmed with foreboding if not downright horror? And so the reflex to turn away from it is a strong one, except no sooner have we averted our gaze from one aspect of the spectacle than we find it resting on another that is equally bad. Hence the craving for distraction, which of course is provided these days in unprecedented variety, or failing that, the reflex of blame and hostility. If only it wasn’t for a certain kind of person, a warped way of thinking, or even a particular individual - Trump, Putin, Biden and so on, take your pick - the world would be such a better place!
It’s a reflex that is not easily avoided. The triggering mechanism has long been established in our psychic make-up, and there are so many ways now of setting it off. Furthermore there is a greater virulence in the general atmosphere, born of a reaction of fear to the sense of a fracturing reality. But eventually we must begin to sense the futility of it all, the misery of being so triggerable, to call it that, and hence the need for a different way forward. Viewed in a positive light, much of our current confusion and loss of bearings can be seen as unavoidable if a new orientation is to take shape.
This groping for a new way forward can be greatly helped if we can discern, beneath the surface effects of what’s going on in the world, something of the deeper impulses that are producing them. Think again of how an earthquake comes about through the marginal adjustments of tectonic plates grating against each other, and then consider how thin the topmost layer of human life will appear compared to those deep impersonal shifts. This I believe is something like what we are experiencing at the present time: a palpable fear and helplessness as the surface of our reality fissures, but also a budding realisation, in a minority to start with, that the break-up of the surface may be a pre-requisite for the emergence of powerfully creative forces from the depths.
Here we reach the limits of our earthquake analogy, for the tremors of a quake appear to be frighteningly unconscious to us - whether they really are so or not is another matter. The tremors that are disintegrating our current world set-up, however, are imbued with a latent consciousness, if we could but attune to it; a consciousness which can express itself freely only when the previous spectacle of decay has been cleared from its path.
Those very forces which have been most active in promoting disintegration may find themselves confounded in their malign intentions by the good which they unwittingly produce.
Seen in this perspective, those very forces which have been most active in promoting disintegration may find themselves confounded in their malign intentions by the good which they unwittingly produce. That would be one reason why we should not obsess too much about those forces, for by doing so we attribute to them an agency which ultimately they do not possess. Yes, they do manipulate us ruthlessly for as long as we remain below a certain threshold of conscious awareness; in doing so, however, they also provide the incentive, the goad if need be, to rise above that threshold into a broader and more clear-sighted view of things.
At a certain point the tables will turn, and the forces of evil that manipulated us before will be revealed as nothing other than unwitting instruments promoting the birth of a qualitatively higher level of global consciousness. Instead of being their tools as we might have been hitherto, they will be the ones that are utilised by a transformation whose reach and grandeur lie well beyond their darkened minds.
As we have seen, avoidance is one common response to our current state of affairs. But there is another kind of reaction, an anxious probing to get to the bottom of things, which may seem just like the opposite of avoidance, yet which turns out to be its flip side. For what tends to be common to both cases is a reliance on the surface mind for bearings. In the case of the avoider, concerned only with the superficial and blocking out uncomfortable awarenesses, such a reliance makes some kind of sense. But using that same narrow mental functionality when attempting to probe the depths is bound to cause problems, as seen so often nowadays when people “go down the rabbit hole” and get lost there in a warren of unresolvable doubt and suspiciousness.
Only the depths of man can hope to probe the depths of the reality he has made in his own image, and that have shaped him in turn. But the depths of man can safely be explored only by eliciting the corresponding heights of man, for the latter informs and harmonises the former. That is why by rising higher we can probe deeper without fear of losing ourselves in the process. Then we may realise that each of us is a potential mythic hero venturing down into the depths of their own personal Hades, one that has its own particular features yet which merges at every turn into the expanse of the collective. At the present time that expanse is a gloomy one indeed, yet there is no reason why it should remain so. For we descend only to ascend once more, just as we ascend to the currently reachable heights of ourselves only to bring down from there the faculties required for sounding the depths, and illumining them as we do so.
We would do well to be armed appropriately for the descent into those depths. The heights of man, what appeared to him in mythic times as his gods, can provide the fitting arms; but if we rely on a mind that is adapted only to surface appearances, we will be kitted out with nothing but a tin sword and cardboard shield, and our predictable fate on venturing down to slay the monsters of the deep will be tragic at best, if not pitiable and absurd.
Only the depths of man can hope to probe the depths of the reality he has made in his own image, and that have shaped him in turn. But the depths of man can safely be explored only by eliciting the corresponding heights of man, for the latter informs and harmonises the former.
So those are the options. We can cling to the fracturing surfaces of life, which is the recourse of those who have made of this pitiable reality a standard by which all else is to be judged. Alternatively we can probe beneath those surfaces but led on by an ill-adapted mental instrument, thereby getting lost in a warren of conceptual rabbit holes. The paradox is that this too could be seen as a kind of avoidance, for in the end one is “holed up” beneath the ground, “protected” by one’s mental constructs; one has found bearings of sorts, but they serve to confine more than to liberate.
The third way is to avoid nothing and receive everything exactly as it shows up for us, without exaggeration or mitigation. That is when we can grow in stature, not by puffing ourselves up but by reconnecting with the true dimensions of ourselves which are always there, but which we had lost sight of in our surface-adapted mode of being. Such an expansion can become an invitation to others, a holding of space for them to step into, which in its own quiet way is always the most persuasive form of argument.
Things are looking so bad now because the murky depths are being stirred as never before. But they are our own depths in the end. If we try to avoid them they will remain alien to us, hostile and threatening; but if we meet them unflinching they can be transmuted and reabsorbed, and ourselves achieve thereby a higher integration. This is the difficult alchemical task that proposes itself to us at the present time.
Thank you!