What is an adequate response to man’s unprecedented polycrisis? It’s clear that protests and mass movements aren’t sufficient to meet the multi-faceted crisis. And retreating into our separate cocoons of “self-care” only makes things worse.

Unlike in the past, protests aren’t even ending the plunge toward fascism in the “sole remaining superpower” since America went off the rails.

Conventional thinkers on the left dispute this perception and premise of course. They argue, against the evidence, that the immense challenges facing people all over the world today aren’t unprecedented, but simply another turn of the wheel of history.

It comes down to the question: Will we muddle through the polycrisis as people have muddled through the many particular crises of the past? Or is the hydra-headed challenge that humans face today sui generis, requiring an unparalleled response?

To my mind, the assertion that the mobilisations and tactics of the civil rights movement and the suffragette movement, to name two, still apply and can meet the challenges of the climate crisis, increasing authoritarianism and economic injustice, is simply false.

It rings hollow when progressives say things like, “We should reflect on the red-hot battles that forged our society,” because “protest isn’t just confrontation, it’s an imagination weaponised.” There is a refusal to see that the current regression on all fronts is not just a bump in the road, but the end of the road of incremental progress.

Thus the idea that all we need to do is find more imaginative stunts, “because history shows the stunt is never a sideshow, it is the main act of change” is either very naïve, or willfully blind.

The disturbing truth is that the converging crises of man mean that history, and the cycles of the past, offer little guide to the intensifying climacteric of Homo sapiens.

Rather than an ascending spiral toward a mythical “Omega Point,” man is descending with increasing speed toward a state of maximal fragmentation of the Earth, and humanity in direct proportion.

Our situation is not hopeless however. Though we have missed many opportunities to change course as a species, I feel humankind will change at the ultimate or penultimate crossroads. And we stand at one of the two now.

The multi-faceted crisis of man’s making is no longer local and national, but global and planetary. The destruction of the diversity of life and the disintegration of the Earth’s climatic equilibrium are the result of human activity as a whole.

Therefore continuing to think in terms of nations, and identifying with particular groups out of an ancient psychological deformity of tribalism, has become lethal to the individual and humankind.

That much is clear to a growing number of global citizens. But there’s a much more subtle philosophical insight that needs to be widely understood: We cannot employ time to solve our individual problems and global challenges.

The paradox is that though things take time, thinking in terms of time inevitably invokes the illusion of gradual change and progress. Whatever positive social and political outcomes resulted from incremental change over time in the past, that mode is no longer an option.

Not just because the Earth is burning in one place and flooding in another, and our beleaguered planet no longer allows the luxury of space and time. But more importantly because time as the means to change has always been the great psychological delusion.

Time is the means by which humans have psychologically and emotionally held off the actuality of death. However death is inseparable from life, the ground of all energy, matter and being. So to grow into a human being, we have to make a friend of death.

This spiritual dimension is not a luxury, or as politicos insist, irrelevant navel staring. It’s the wellspring of life-saving insight for the individual and humanity.

When the mind is totally, attentively quiet, one drinks from the infinite well of wholeness. Over the years I’ve discovered with deepening insight that the ground of being is complete stillness, silence and emptiness.

With the complete quieting of thought, time ends. A non-personal feeling of union and love arises within one, and the heart, mind and brain are renewed.

Because states of insight cannot be repeated or replicated, previous experiences of the inviolable have to be negated for experiencing to occur anew and deepen.

That seems straightforward enough for a serious and self-knowing human being to embark on his or her endless voyage of discovery. Can such non-accumulative learning become the norm? Can it be taught and conveyed to children?

The human brain is capable of generating both unspeakable evil, and being directly aware of indescribable sacredness. The mystery is not how good and evil can coexist in the universe, but why does the human brain continue to produce increasing levels of darkness and evil when life is immeasurably good?

I’m not an apocalypticist, but it sure looks like we’re in the end game. Self-knowing and insight is the way through the darkness, and into the light.

- Martin LeFevre

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