The first time I came visit America, I saw one of their huge pink cake in a diner. It seemed almost a foot high, with colossal piles of cream on top. I just had to look around the overweight customers to understand they were actually eating 2 pounds of cake in one sitting. I thought: If you would let a child design its favorite cake, this is what it would look like. Children eat until they puke. They function purely according to the maximize-pleasure principle. They don’t know any restraints when something “feels good”. They throw tamper tantrums and have stubborn fits if they don’t get what they want. They want it all and they want it now. It’s the American way.
Children, if left to their own devices, don’t clean up their room. They gang up on each other and possibly hurt or kill each other mercilessly if peer pressure is sufficiently high. It might not be a great idea to leave a child in charge of a family. Nor a country. It’s definitely not a great idea to leave a child in charge of the world.
I’m going to venture a comparison of this world’s continents and a family system: the father is Europe, the mother Africa. Asia and Australia are the grand parents. North America is the teenage son, South America the teenage girl. The melting polar caps are the ancestors. The father mistreated and left the mother. The children grew up as emotional orphans, separated by distance from their grandparents. The parents failed to teach their children about the value of grandparents and of the ancestral system.
The teenage boy has physically outgrown his father. The boy has put himself in charge of the family system (the world). He feels orphaned, without guidance.
I am looking at America in 2017, “lead” by a spiritually and emotionally orphaned son called Donald Trump. I see the disrespectful treatment of women and people of color as a result of the “mother continent” being enslaved, it’s feminine energy subjugated. Trump is the perfect symbol of a materially spoilt, but emotionally deserted and isolated child. He has his fingers trembling with infantile rage and phantasies of revenge on the video game controls. Only in this case, he is toying with actual armies and nuclear weapons. A child’s fantasy has become reality and he gets to dictate and decide. The world is silently listening and watching.
We hold our ears and eyes shut, fearful of when this out-of-control kid pushes the button. In our panic, we have forgotten something very important:
This world is not just an annoying material illusion to escape. It’s an intricate masterpiece created by a creative intelligence. Mom and dad have checked out for a while, but the forces that really maintain this world are getting ready to pay their struggling teenage son a little visit.
One of the basic lessons: you will need to learn to share your toys. Your space. And the attention you are getting. It’s not all about you.
We’ve been focusing on “this one world” as if our material reality is all there is and all that matters. We don’t ask questions about where we come from, where we go after death and what this life on earth is all about. We are too busy working and consuming, eating and sleeping. In that respect we are not further advanced than a worm that eats earth and shits earth. In some respects, the worm is far superior to us. For one, it doesn’t endanger the entire ecosystem with its process. Second: Animals (as plants) already know what we have refused to learn for the past 2000 years. They know about maintaining balance and about the necessity of sharing. They don’t leave their children in charge of the pack. Their children are socialized not by TVs and smart phones who don’t talk back. Their children learn to be productive members of the group or family. They don’t grow obese because they learn healthy eating patterns from their parents. They learn to respect elders, accept certain limits and they learn that the survival of the tribe overrides their own needs.
The importance of our current phase of humanity is evident: the short-lived values of winner-takes-all capitalism are exposing their ugly consequences. Trump (no matter if liked or criticized) is an important player on that stage: he represents unfettered capitalism with all its greed, corruption, lawlessness and selfishness. He became the face of lies, disappointment and reckless, unaccountable power. We need to witness this excess to be healed from the much-sold illusion that capitalism works. Trump is the perfect cast to make us finally refuse the narrative that “America must lead”, that Greed is Good and that Capitalism has no alternatives.
Capitalism could only exist for a relative short time – America as it’s representative has seen a century of unlimited power. It has treated the world to a century of warfare, exploitation and pollution. The natural limits of this earth don’t allow for every upstart culture to party so excessively as America has claimed the right to do, at everyone’s expense.
The time of breakdown is finally at hand: everything Americans held dear – their president, the Oscars, the Super Bowl, the media – has proven to be corrupt. Even Superman broke his back, became a paraplegic and died. From every direction, reality is poking into the American bubble. And now, we are witnessing this giant go down on his knees like many empires before him.
We who witness the inevitable, are trying our best to hang on. We’re working to steady ourselves in bigger realities: history continued despite the falls of empires. Others pray for rescue, hoping to secure a place in paradise.
Scientists and spiritual seekers are finally teaming up to discover “wormholes” into a bigger reality: into the non-material, spiritual intelligence all life sprung from. It seems non-sensical to let the great experiment “humanity on earth” just fade out without explanation. Old questions are rediscovered: why do we humans spend a third of our lifetime “asleep”, in a supposed unconscious state – there must be a reason for this –are we receiving instructions in our “downtime”?
Just like the “Creation of Adam” painting by Michelangelo suggests a point of inception, a longing for knowledge beyond the visible is remembered. When our so-called human leaders are lost and life seems increasingly pointless and confusing, the real questions come back. Capitalism can’t keep us busy and blind in the hamster wheel forever.
For hundreds of thousand of years, humans have focused on cultivating and understanding the connection with the spirit world that conceived the material reality surrounding us. In the past 2000 years, churches and politicians have successfully discouraged these “pointless” questions. Still, Shamen, sages, drug addicts, meditation practitioners and many others have experienced pathways between our material and the non-material existence.
The old consensus that we are “Spirits in a Material World” (The Police) and have ourselves built this playground to experience and feel what is not accessible to pure consciousness without a body. Near-death scientific researchers (like Elizabeth Kuebler Ross) are confirming what Hindu priests, Shamans and LSD-trippers long have known: that we lead a dual existence – with one leg, we stand in this material reality, our other leg is planted firmly in a time and space-less cosmic consciousness that never ends and that accumulates and shares all information ever experienced by anyone. The assumption of our co-creatorship in this amazing consciousness experiment is called “blasphemy” by religious zealots, even though even the bible reads: “God is in us and we are in God”, suggesting a shared identity. Their refusal of divinity is also a refusal of responsibility.
The Western World is currently experiencing its scheduled and necessary cultural meltdown. Too much hubris and narrow paradigms have gotten in the way of evolution. The earth is taking care of herself and I don’t blame her. Yes, millions of people are suffering and many will die young. But as the waves in the ocean, the ups and downs of our societal movements, hegemonies and fantasies of power are lessons in advanced learning. We all have our part to play in this downfall. And while I don’t envy Trump his difficult role of most-hated man in the world, I hope whoever has resources left can hold a loving space for the rest, so we can all take turns holding up the sky, prepare warm blankets and tea for the survivors and grow new gardens to share.