I have felt a growing sense of dread about us, all of us. It is my firm belief that humankind is at a crossroads, and that our choices in the fairly near future will determine a great deal about our experience as a species for decades to come. My dread comes from a fear that we will not make the choices we need and ought to. To escape the social unrest and climatological disasters that I believe are looming on the near horizon, if not already upon us, I recently began considering moving from Los Angeles to a rural part of Canada.
I discussed this possibility with my mentor, and she asked me, “So you see the house is on fire, and your answer is to run away? Shouldn’t you try to help put it out?” I had only one answer, which made me feel helpless, because it seemed basically impossible: to try to spark a widespread increase in the connection to consciousness – to jog people from their slumber and ask of them what I also ask of myself: to be intentional and wise, and considered. I fail far more often than I succeed, as you’ll see. But this goal is valuable in itself – it acts like a compass that keeps me from drifting too far off the course I believe in.
Natural disasters are ever more frequent and increasingly devastating. Political and religious division, distrust of our neighbors, and anxiety and depression have never been more rampant. Everything around us and within us seems to be screaming at us to wake up and ask ourselves if this is the world that we want. Do we really want loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection? I will make the case that the root cause of us being where we are is that we have disconnected from ourselves, from each other, from the past, and from the future. And that the solution lies in reconnecting.
If my assessment of the dire state of the world is wrong, the practical ideas in this book are still useful. But if I’m right, there is real urgency to the call to action I’m making in this book. Either way, this belief is the reason that I sat down to write. It was my own catalyst. I didn’t set out to write a book about crisis. I set out to understand why things felt deeply wrong, and to do something about it.
Here’s what I believe lies beneath it all: our cognitive, and thus technological, power has vastly outpaced our emotional maturity, consciousness, self-awareness, and capability for intentional action (I’ll call these “wisdom,” collectively). In fact, if anything, I would guess that many societies we would judge as primitive, using today’s metrics, were in fact significantly more advanced than we are now, in terms of wisdom.
We modern humans are like children playing with supercharged flamethrowers–we possess immense power, but we lack the internal compass to use it wisely. And again, this wisdom seems like something we used to have, but that we’ve lost along the way. What has caused this shift?
I think it’s the marriage of two distinct trends: more division and shorter time horizons. These are both forms of disconnection.