From: "John Michael Greer" <Mezla@hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 10:14:18 -0800

If I understand you correctly, you think that evolution (that is, the transformation of living forms through time) is the same thing as progress (the currently fashionable notion that things always improve over time), and you think that technological progress isgood in itself -- so good, in fact, that it justifies the "yoke of suffering and want" carried by the vast majority of human beings. I would like to question both of these ideas.

First, the "onward and upward" version of evolution-as-progress is mythology, not scientific fact.

What is commonly considered to be scientific fact is not the final arbiter in my understanding of knowledge. I know that it is held above all else by Western man, so enchanted with how it has enabled him to transform the physical environment. But it has left him without purpose, arrogant, and void of Way.

Evolution is the unfolding of the Divine contained within. Rare the Western mind whose experience will allow conceiving the universe thusly, but once attained, it is not renounced.

So then, how should conscious intelligence have manifested differently upon a spherical dimension? The gleam of pretty, pretty gold gave way to money and the ability to accumulate capital, that potential to invest in social endeavors beyond survival. Warring grows more lethal until it grows too lethal to fully pursue. Natural capital depletion fosters tool making, knowledge gathering, and gives the appearance of great wealth until the massive dependence upon continuing depletion is threatened by impossibility of continuation thereof.

What justice allows so much human misery beside such patent vanities? Only the greatness of the Evolution, and the fact that not one woman's tear is lost in that dimension which unites the distance of the stars with the trodding of bare feet upon the Earth.

We are here and we are the now. We have no other choice but to seek the intelligence we lack, to seek to evolve unto a greater degree of unfolding.

Second, our current technology has given us lots of neat powers, and endless supplies of consumer gewgaws. Has it made us better human beings? I don't think so. Has it made us more intelligent?

Our technology is part of the journey to where we are, no more. The evolved tools and particular knowledges must suffice, because they are what we have. We are evolution gradually becoming conscious of our responsibility to do so; we increasingly see the error of our present ways and absorb the fact that we are a singular manifestation upon a singular planet of finite dimension.

We will go the Way, but that does not mean it is predetermined. We can choose paths of unimaginable suffering, or paths of change profounder than the now imaginable. God is dead, but the Divine within is not, and we shall know Its manifestation even if we choose a darkest age of innumerable generations. For ours is the freedom, even if we should not wish it.

Progress now becomes in our relation to one another and to the Earth.

--
Steve Morningthunder

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