The Great Initiation

Already in college, I became aware of my own inner conflicts and the distorted emotional dynamics of people around me. I started drawing diagrams of these dynamics which began many decades of inner research which eventually lead to the understanding of what we call the human predicament and it’s origins. About 100,000 years ago, at the beginning of “consciousness” [actually the origins of the new “memory of voluntary recall] a critical side-effect brought about self-interpretation and self-identity: the ego [my early diagrams show this as attention unnaturally bent inwards]. Many compounding changes resulted over the millennia that brought us to our present unsustainable Cascade of Crises [Ch.5]. We explore them in detail, and note the urgent shift we must take out of this juvenile Ego Era, into the Post-Ego Era and human species maturity.

The book was written mostly longhand in the wilderness and has morphed through several editions, this being the last version. It is informed scientifically by the principles of paleontology, extensive personal experience in nature, and many teaching workshops. It contains discoveries made during a five-year practice in emotional-release therapy. Presented here are some of the key insights of this research.

Nature is broadly self-balancing, self-recycling, self-healing, self-renewing, self-diversifying, self-organizing and self-cleaning. This is effortless, spontaneous, authentic and life-enhancing.

I was born an alien, by European parents, in Kashmir, Himalayas, into a mellow Medieval culture of several different ethnic races and religions. In 1935, my parents had fled the Nazi uprising in Europe in a Ford Model A Station Wagon. My parents suffered from culture shock, relationship shock and child-rearing shock. I was unhappy.

I spent my first nine years in the Orient, then Europe for nine years, mostly Switzerland. And came to the USA as an Exchange Student in 1959. I graduated with honors in geology/paleontology, hitchhiked around the world for nearly 2 years, raise a family in New Mexico, where I built the first solar house and lived for 20 years, I founded the Taos Ssolar Energy Association which I ran for six years, then transferred solar- and appropriate technology to nine developing countries. I moved to Hawaii in 1987, where I have lived for 30 years. I made a living as an emotional release therapist and an award-winning watercolorist and photographer.

Superego dominance result in global imbalances, which show up psycho-somatically in the body, in families, in societies and eventually in all of nature as well. These compounding imbalances threaten all life. They are magnified by overpopulation, fossil fuels, pollution and technology. Ego-mind once seemed to be an evolutionary advantage. But the resulting imbalances prove otherwise as we can now witness. We face a mega-storm brewing on the horizon: the looming Cascade of Crises.

The instability of ego-mind results in wrenching instability. To survive, re-balancing is now inevitable. This current Revolution of Consciousness discussed here is much greater than Copernicus’ “Revolution of the Spheres”, which proved the solar system. Unlike conventional mechanical science, this new revolution is psychological, requiring individual incentive. “We are approaching a very small door, so small that the ego cannot get through”. Survival depends on breaking free from ego-mind dominance. That inevitable shift, [if we are to survive] launches the Post-Ego Era and human maturity.

When we wake up from the Ego Era nightmare, we will understand the suffering and destruction we have created. In our remorse we will shed a century of tears. This era is the lifting of the Veil, as centuries of repression, psychological garbage and confusion percolate up to the surface, to be cleansed by the light of truth. It is a cosmic joke that the supposedly “most intelligent species on earth” has imprisoned itself in the addictive ego-mind trap created by its own “superior” intelligence. We see, and can clear, this compounding error of ego-mind dominance. By this radical shift, the ego becomes a useful ally, freed from compulsive dominance.

“The party is over! It is time to clean up the mess and pay the piper”. Huge instabilities within ourselves, within our communities and within nature demand huge creative re-balancing with nature to achieve mental-emotional hygiene. This rebalancing is something that nature does innocently, effectively and effortlessly any time that any species goes out of balance, for instance, when a virus sweeps through a species and prunes out the old, sick, compromised and weak. The result is always a fitter, more humble, more resilient and more adaptable population: spring cleaning nature-style. It also cleans out ego-mind preferences that want reality to show up in a favored way.

After the great spring cleaning comes a re-birth celebration. After a hurricane, Forest fire or flood, the forest regrows, effortlessly and with surprising freshness. This is also a time to examine many highly effectiv Healing Tools, that nurture and strengthen our Authentic and Original selves, which had been repressed into the unconscious, resulting in stunted growth. Life needs loving care to nurture it back to strength. Healing is a personal quest for mental-emotional hygiene, sobriety, equanimity, sweetness and fierceness. We become fully sovereign adults, finally, the mature phase of Homo sapiens: the Post-Ego Era.

Notes, quotes, mini-bio, book reviews and lots more.