Some ancient god seems to have cursed us with imagination...
“One of the biggest failings of modern, civilized man is his inability to fathom a conscious Universe, one that is alive and here, all the time, with every breath, willing to tell us stories about itself, willing to listen to us, willing to interact with us.”
This speaks to me even more clearly than than Dr. Albert Bartlett’s famous recognition of our inability to comprehend exponential functions. It speaks to our collective loss of connection at every level, our loss of moorings and compass, our self-congratulatory self-absorption. This sense of Separation has required the hive to erect supposedly impervious egoic defenses against pretty much everything, simply in order to preserve our last shreds of sanity.
In our heedless careen towards the edge of the cliff, the most horrifying realization for many will be that these defenses are simply conceptual. They offer no real protection against the countervailing forces unleashed by the Universe as we transgress her boundaries.
The problem, if problem there be, is not so much the simple fact that we have crossed those boundaries – after all, species do that all the time. Rather, it seems to be our unrivaled ability to imagine the world to be different than it actually is. That ability, it seems to me, may be the fertile seed that has germinated and matured into Catastrophe.