Humanity is in the most precarious position ever experienced in the history of the human species. During the hundreds of thousands of years of the primarily feminine based childhood stage, humans went from being nomads, to farming and domesticating animals, to creating towns and cities. The transformative stage of childhood, adolescence, ushered in the Renaissance, during which, for much of humanity, "reason" and science became the dominant paradigm. The rate of change had increased dramatically by that time, as the Renaissance lasted only about 1400 years. Human beings were determined to become independent.

The industrial revolution ushered humanity into its young adulthood, bringing with it all the violent, adolescent, masculine energy we have experienced as a species since it's inception. Desirous of being independent of nature and one another, humanity came to depend upon machines and came to value money, power, and things more than other human beings or life itself. This devaluing of humanity and life was and continues to be expressed through war, environmental degradation, poverty, disease, hatred, racism, addictions, and more. Henry Ford put words to this world-view when he asked: "Why do I have to have a whole person when all I want is a pair of hands?" Human beings had come and continue to be seen as simply a tool to be exploited by the system.

We have stayed overlong in our adolescence. Evidence of this is everywhere. Global warming threatens every form of life on the planet. Environmental degradation threatens to destroy all life on earth. We are drowning in our own filth, breathing dirty air, and seem hell-bent on total destruction. Violence has become the order of the day. Dominance and hate have replaced any sort of agape. The human psyche is psychologically split from itself and from any sort of connection to the earth. Relationships of all sorts are often based upon self-benefiting reciprocity (I won't call you on your stuff if you don't call me on mine), in order to keep an economic machine going that is systematically destroying everything in its path. An emphasis on sex keeps us from facing the fact that we despise the human body. Institutionalized religion has ravaged true spirituality. Fundamentalism has become the order of the day and we are looking at the potential for worldwide totalitarianism that promises to kill off anything that smacks of creative, compassionate community. Our brutal narcissism and lust for power has become a lethal weapon and our world has become an insane asylum, thanks in large part to the behavior of the small group of individuals who control the United States of America. The vicious attitudes and the violent responses taken toward the lamentations expressed by so many threaten to drown us in an ocean of despair. This has only taken us about 250 years.

Today, we have been pushed into the river of death and rebirth. This is the most important, meaningful, and dangerous stage of life. In the two previous stages, childhood and young adulthood, life itself provides most of the impetus for growth and change. In the stage of mid-life, however, life comes to us and says: "I've brought you this far, and I am now going to go sit in my rocking chair and rest. I will do my best to keep your body alive, however, from now on; your life is entirely up to you. I've grown you up. Now you have to decide whether you will become an adult with the potential of becoming a wise elder. It is up to you whether you make meaning of your life or not."

Every individual human being gets thrown into this river at some point, usually sometime between the ages of 40 and 55. Most people, faced with the agonizing pain, loss, and humiliation associated with the process, try to go backward into a stage in which they knew what the rules were and how things were done in order to have some safety again. The problem is that they are forever dead. They will never grow, learn, or evolve again in their lives. Carl Jung said it best: "Whoever carries over into the afternoon (of life) the law of the morning, must pay for doing so with damage to his soul."

The only choice for continued evolution is to risk everything - and move ahead into the dark territory. This, most people are not willing to do. And I see this being played out across the land. Few individuals ever do the hard, inner work necessary to take the journey to the other side, and there is no guarantee that one will actually survive the trip. This is precisely where we are as a species. We will either take this journey individually and together or we will become extinct. At issue here is the lack of cultural appreciation for those taking the journey to wisdom. We all have to die to our previous ways of being in order to be reborn into renewed life on the other side of the river of death and rebirth. In order to continue to survive, we must evolve.

The stunningly simple truth is that the paradigm that controls our current system will seek to marginalize, disempower, and kill off anyone who has done or is doing this work for it sees them as a threat, not realizing that by hanging on to what it considers to be it's life and by silencing the voices calling for conscious evolution, it signs it's own warrant of death, and millions of human beings are complicitous due to a hostage mentality. The Stockholm Syndrome is controlling us as we give up our basic human rights, our freedom, and our hope for a brighter future due to the fact that we snarl and fight over crumbs from our captor's table, giving away in every moment the very things that would set us free: compassionate, collaborative community, creativity, imagination, and love.

Though the need to remove George Bush and his handlers from the White House is critical, it will in no way solve our fundamental difficulty which is based upon our continuing to hold on to belief systems that not only no longer serve us, but that will kill us if we don't mature and become wise. We have to completely revision our world and our participation with one another and with all life. We must create a completely different kind of world community. Human beings have the capacity to grow in consciousness and are enormously creative and imaginative. We can do this. There is no other alternative.

There are thousands upon thousands of organizations devoted to all sorts of progressive ideas, environmental and sustainability issues, human rights concerns, human creativity, spirituality, and human freedom. These choruses give power away every single day by competing with one another for members and for operating capital. The tragedy is that the vast majority of these organizations are so focused upon their individual missions that they ignore the fact that most of them have, at their core, similar visions. It is imperative that, as they retain their individual missions, they come together in interdependence, with a common vision, in order to create a massive symphonic choir determined to create an entirely new paradigm for what it means to be a human being living a life on this planet.

The clock continues to tick faster and faster. We are now down to weeks and days of change, and we have run out of options. If we do not wake up very soon, we will find that world soul will not be able to handle any more abuse and grief, and we will become extinct. Will a critical mass of human beings have the intelligence, courage, and grace to grow up? Time will surely tell.

Martha White (marthawhite1@comcast.net) is director of The Big Enough House project at Legacy Properties in Brentwood, Tennessee, a former consultant to Fortune 500companies in the areas of creativity, learning, and as a futurist, a strategic scenario game designer, and an ordained interfaith minister.

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