The main teacher (RW) in a healing modality (1) I am involved in sent out an email yesterday where he talks about humanity’s tendency to violence, and how humanity may be at a tipping point.
HUMANITY AND VIOLENCE
I am also concerned about humanity’s tendency to violence, especially in our culture and especially after we got nuclear weapons. There is nothing new there.
We have been at this tipping point for eight decades if not longer. We have gone through innumerable collective crises. Humanity could have wiped itself out at any point.
In this context, one of my concerns is missing nuclear weapons from the fall of the Soviet Union.
OVERSHOOT
But I am honestly more concerned about the bigger picture. (2)
For decades, we have been in global ecological overshoot – we use far more resources than Earth can replenish and keep up with. We would need two Earths to provide for humanity’s use, and it’s going in the wrong direction.
This is like spending money from our savings account. It looks more or less fine until it runs out and our lifestyle cannot be supported anymore.
In terms of ecology, it means that it all can come crashing down relatively fast, and there is no way to easily recover from it.
We are seeing the beginnings of that crash today.
(Climate change is just one aspect of this crisis, and that discussion is often a distraction from this bigger picture.)
FALL OF THE US EMPIRE
Since RW mentioned the US mass shootings in his email:
In the ’80s, the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung studied the fall of empires. Based on the patterns he found, and what he could see happening with the US, he predicted that the US empire would fall within a few decades. (3)
We also know some things about how it is likely to look.
Towards the end, there will likely be increased polarization and insanity – also in politics – and increased violence and even the possibility of a kind of civil war.
That’s what we are seeing in the US today. It’s what tends to happen when empires go downhill.
MISSING THE BIGGER PICTURE
As I see it, the email from RW is obviously well-meant. He sees something in the world he is concerned about and wants to share it with his students.
But he does take an anthropocentric view and even a quite US-centric view. He is missing the larger historical context, and he is missing the larger ecological context.
It’s important to include the bigger picture. (4)
NOTES
(1) The healing modality is Vortex Healing. He is obviously a very good teacher in energy healing.
(2) This is something I have studied since the 1980s and I have also connected with some of the leading experts in the field in my professional work.
(3) If I remember correctly, in the early 1980s, he also predicted the imminent fall of the Soviet Empire. It fell about a decade later.
(4) Ecological overshoot and the possibility of an imminent ecological collapse is the overarching crisis we are in today. And there is no lack of significant sub-crises: Poverty and massive inequality. Lack of clean water. Millions dying from preventable or curable diseases. Missing nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. Use of chemical or biological weapons. Plastics and toxins in just about every living being. Species extinction. Insect collapse. The list goes on.
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