The Big Unconsciousness:  The Rain in Spain Has Come Here to Remain

As a desperate yet foolish humanity attempts to escape the fires and floods it set in motion, the likelihood is that it will follow the same ancient knee-jerk reactions it always has: looking for solutions in half-baked technology and “destroy-now, pay-later capitalism”, than look deep within itself. 

Worse even, it will continue to set off more fires and engage in even more irrational behaviour as it desperately seeks a release, a temporary relief from its unprocessed, self-inflicted civilisational trauma.   This civilisation is a rolling avalanche of mental illness, incarnated into an economic necrosystem which is killing itself and everything around it.  It is self-medicating on delusion, distraction, and deep, round-the-clock sedation.

These coping mechanisms, whether they are growth technologies, sly dictators or entertainment narcotics, will only monetize human existential fears rather than resolve them.  In fact, they will merely speed up a cycle of compounded trauma which originates back to the beginning of civilisation itself.  The successive trauma on the psyche which this society inflicted on itself again and again, has isolated most of us from our true nature and our potential to live happily and harmoniously with everything that surrounds us.  As we embraced the economic dogma of growth we collectively became deaf and blind to all the insights that could have helped us build a ladder out of this hole. 

Humanity today is not simply in denial of the dead-end predicament it continues to pursue. It has stopped paying attention altogether, self-medicating with celebrity news just as it circles the drain of a black hole of consciousness.  This civilisation will go down fast if we continue like this.  This civilisation has practiced so much self-harm, self-mutilation and self-abuse in its desperation to feel something, anything, but to no avail.  How much more pain do we need to sustain, how much more injustice do we need to inflict on others, before we can begin to actually feel anything? 

The restlessness and insecurity of this traumatized society have resulted in a civilization maddened with toxic ambition. In this “always on”, 24-hour society we have built to accommodate the dogma of predatory growth, we have forbidden ourselves to ever sit still in the fear that we might actually become aware of our hopeless situation – or at the very least, begin to question this manufactured consumer theme park reality we reside in, much like a goldfish circling the walls of a fishbowl. 

We despise sitting still and label it as “laziness”.  But this obsession with ambition and destruction has brought about not only a climate crisis but a global sleeplessness epidemic causing anxiety and depression to skyrocket.  We take mindfulness meditation courses just so that we can remember what it used to feel like to simply sit still, to need nothing else but our own breath and heartbeat to feel alive. As we deny ourselves of some of our most basic biological functions, we are becoming true consumatronic zombies incapable of genuine, raw emotion in the aware, conscious state.  The Big Unconsciousness is here.  But as we lose the ability to feel, we permanently shut the door to the most important compass which could have navigated us out of this polycrisis.  This civilisation needs to slow down, pause and look around: everything is either burning or flooding now, yet we are still heading nowhere at full speed.  

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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