RITES OF PASSAGE (Pt.1)

Something is dying, and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth.

Richard Tarnas

To continue the thread that was started in my last essay OUR INITIATION: Passing Through the Underworld, I will again throw a passing eye upon a part of the New Revolutions for a Small Planet book – this time, Chapter 3: Rites of Passage – A Collective Near-Death Experience.

The first part of Chapter 3 deals with the theme of a ‘rites of passage,’ which will be the focus of this essay (Part 2 of this essay will deal with ‘A Collective Near-Death Experience’). In this section of the book, I began to examine how the recent rapid cultural rise towards ‘a technological state of mind’ led into an epoch of scientific technique that is ‘in danger of rushing humanity towards an irreversible abyss.’ This rush towards an ‘abyss’ or transition will, I argued in 2010, involve a ‘collective ritual experience, not dissimilar to the initiation rites of indigenous societies: a species rite of passage.’ Further, I added that the technological shifts that have led human civilization to this state have also reconfigured ‘social relationships and the temporal-spatial perceptions of the time which, in turn, influences the way human brains perceive their reality.’ These alterations in how humans ‘perceive their reality’ have influenced an ‘underlying psychological consciousness.’ I stated that,

Our modern forms of warfare embody a mixture of ideological consciousness (nationality, religion, etc.) and psychological consciousness (fear of loss/scarcity, need for security, etc.) that have only exacerbated a mental warfare against individuals and pushed us collectively towards a global state of psychosis.

I continued by noting that in previous historical periods, human societies managed their time, work and social balance by integrating their activities with seasonal time and movements, whereas our mega-societies have now virtually abandoned these cycles and bodies of knowledge:

With this loss of functional cosmology and planet-solar-cosmic rhythm we have glided into a period of technical progress divorced from a grander significance and belonging. The once enchanted human mind, inspired by epiphany, revelation, intuition and cosmic connection, has ventured into disenchantment and what for many is drudgery. Despite having developed through various stages of consciousness, of states of mind, and having reached the final step in this sequence, we are now desperately in need of leaping into a new mind. In other words, our current psychological consciousness may seem to be a new mind, even a radical mind, yet I argue that it is a mindset that represents a successive growth of the old consciousness; as such, it is the final stage of the old sequence. Just as the octave of the musical scale needs an interval to ‘jump’ to the next pitch, so too does our present octave of consciousness require an interval in which to jump to a new sequence.

I stated that nothing short of a global revelatory experience is required. An experience that would be able to awaken a collective human consciousness towards the grand evolutionary journey ahead: both for our species and for planet Earth. I wrote that ‘we have moved into our Crisis Window – a period for intense change whereby we are called upon to make the leap from the octave of the old mind (characterized by the pathology of power) to the beginning sequence of a new integral mind.’ As mythologist Richard Heinberg notes:

As human consciousness lost contact with its internal, heavenly source of power, technology emerged as a power substitute. Its first appearance was as sympathetic magic and as the invocation of spiritual beings to change Nature for human benefit. However, as human awareness became increasingly restricted to the material world, purely mechanical technologies appeared.[1]

Similarly, Michael Grosso echoes the words of Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin when he says that:

… ours is a disintegrating sensate culture on the threshold of becoming a new ideational culture, a culture of higher consciousness. We are, we could say, in the midst of the near-death experience of our sensate civilization.[2]

The only alternative available to us if we do not wish to implode, I stated in 2010, is to undergo a rite of passage: an initiatory experience of death and renewal to mark our passage from species infancy to species adolescence:

In a play by Luigi Pirandello – The Man with a Flower in his Mouth – a man emerges from the doctor’s office with a fatal diagnosis; with this knowledge of impending death the man’s world suddenly changes and every small thing has significance. He undergoes a conversion of consciousness: a bleak diagnosis and shock followed by a courageous renewal. Similarly, humanity may be caught up in a forced fatal diagnosis for change as our global civilizations begin to enter their near-death throes. Perhaps ours is a world with a flower in its mouth.

Fifteen years ago, as I intuitively looked ahead to the incoming years, I speculated that, as a species, we may now be engaged in a race between initiation and catastrophe. And if we chose the path of initiation, then this would involve an intrinsic search for meaning: ‘the journey to the underworld and back is not only an external test of fortitude, willpower and determination, it is also a necessary journey to purge and prepare. The ordeal sets us up to emerge after the trial as a matured and, hopefully, wiser being.’ It seemed to me back then, and more so now, that humanity is teetering on the edge of the hero’s journey – the descent into the underworld and back – the initiation, rite of passage, our dark night of the soul.[3]

According to famed mythologist Joseph Campbell there are three phases in the rites of passage: separation, initiation and return. The middle phase – the initiation – is the transformative stage, the transitional impulse, the transfiguration that sets up the way forward for the return: a return to the world as a renewed force. As I mentioned in the previous essay, this initiation may very well be humanity’s collective ‘dark night of the soul.’ As I wrote in Chapter 3:

Our own global ‘dark night of the soul’ may very well symbolize humanity’s own death–rebirth ritual that shamanistic and indigenous cultures recognize during transitions, such as from childhood to adulthood; from dependence to independence; from innocence to maturity. By passing through a global initiation period, a mass psychical immersion, we may be provided with the energies and impulses to catalyse a growth in psychical awareness and understanding

My perspective on these transitional times was/is that we, as a sentient species, are experiencing a ‘mass psychical immersion’ that has the potential to catalyse a new spurt of evolutionary growth. Yet not so much a growth in physicality, or in physical limbs or biological appendages, but from a psychic perspective. In other words, the outer technological revolution (as a successor to the earlier industrial revolutions) would itself be a precursor to humanity’s true psychic revolution – an advancement in perceptual and cognitive capacities beyond our current range of senses.

I ended Part One of Chapter 3 with the words: ‘A shared psychological trauma combined with a series of profound physical crises may be the necessary requirements – the minimum price of admission – for the global initiatory immersion towards a psychophysical transformation of life on planet Earth.’ I wrote those words around fifteen years ago, and I stand by them today. What we are experiencing in these times may appear as trauma (and to some segments of human society it will be terribly real physical trauma), whilst this psychological trial will also facilitate a new opening for a collective comprehension and awakening to emerge. It will not unfold overnight, or in ways we expect, for the ‘collective near-death experience’ is multilayered. Yet, for some, it has been previously envisioned.

In Part Two of this essay, I will explore how, fifteen years ago, I laid out some of the coming crises that would trigger a collective entry into a dark night for the human soul.

Listen here to the track The Dark Night of the Soul by Dr.Dennis & Dedfela

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[1] Heinberg, R, Memories & Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age, 1990, The Aquarian Press

[2] Grosso, M, The Final Choice: Playing the Survival Game, 1985, Stillpoint Publishing, p5

[3] Dark Night of the Soul is the title of a poem and treatise written by 16th century Spanish Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross.