Ascent of Humanity

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The Ascent of Humanity.

URL = http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/


Description

"The Ascent of Humanity is about the history and future of civilization from a unique perspective: the evolution of the human sense of self. This book describes how all the expressions of our civilization—its miraculous technology as well as the pillage of earth, culture, goodness, and beauty—arise from our identity, our way of being, "the discrete and separate self". The gathering crises of our age demonstrate that this way of being is on the verge of collapse. And this collapse is setting the stage for a revolution in human beingness whose stirrings we already begin to feel."


Excerpts

From The Marvellous Case of the Piraha tribe: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/book/2-07-The_Marvellous_Case_of_the_Piraha.html

“The gathering crises of the modern age arise from a common origin, an original delusion that many have seen as an original blunder or an original sin, perhaps even the Original Sin. I name this delusion “the discrete and separate self," a fundamental misconception of who we are. From it arises the millennia-long course of separation that has brought us today’s world. The book and this blog are about separation in all its dimensions: Separation from nature, by which we treat the world as an other to manipulate, dominate, control and destroy.

Separation from each other, which we know as the loss of community and the growing superficiality of modern life. Separation from from spirit, our intuitions of wholeness and meaning, which generates the anxiety, alienation, and emptiness that characterize our society. But the regime of Separation is coming to an end. The signs are all around us: firstly, in the increasingly obvious failure of our civilization, but also in new ways of thinking, even new modes of technology, based on a radically different conception of self and world. This is the common thread that links so many of the “alternatives" mushrooming today: medicine, education, green technology, politics, spirituality, even science. The same thread of self-redefinition runs through our own lives, carrying vast implications for our health, work, and relationships. However, just as dramatic spiritual breakthroughs in our own lives usually must follow some sort of crisis, so also must the beautiful ideas of today’s activists wait for their fruition for the social, medical, environmental, political, and economic crises overtaking our planet. They will not have to wait much longer."