Writing as a guest columnist for the Economist magazine
a few months ago, musician and artist Brian Eno declared:
Right
now we are living through the emergence of a movement of unprecedented scale
and scope – the biggest movement in human history, facing up to the biggest
challenge in human history. Let’s call
it the “climate-change movement”, but then let’s acknowledge that it is not
just about climate change but impinges on every hot topic of the moment: the
rethinking of democracy, electoral systems, economics, migration, inequality,
agriculture, women’s rights, resource extraction, common ownership and personal
lifestyle.
You may
wonder why this planet-wide conversation about the future is not bigger news.
The problem is that it is good news, which, as everybody knows, does not sell
newspapers or drive clicks. Only the spectacular parts of the climate news (floods
and fires) are dramatic enough to make it onto television, so we get to see only
the bad news. Underneath the news, though, slow and deep, is a movement of long
horizons and structural rethinking, not attracting much attention until it gets
angry. But a rich and robust root system is growing, and its first green shoots
are starting to break the surface.
While I have the highest regard for Brian Eno, and respect his
artistic genius as well as his ideals, I must sadly say that I’ve heard all of
this talk before about an emergent movement on the cusp of changing the world. As I noted in an earlier entry: “Okay Boomer”
(https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2020/05/okay-boomer.html),
a similar ideal was expressed in Marilyn Ferguson’s 1980 book The Aquarian Conspiracy. In its opening chapter she writes:
A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring
about radical change in the United States.
Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and
they may have even broken continuity with history.
This network is the Aquarian Conspiracy. It is a conspiracy without a political
doctrine. Without a manifesto. With conspirators who seek power only to disperse
it, and whose strategies are pragmatic, even scientific, but whose perspective sounds
so mystical that they hesitate to discuss it.
Activists asking different kinds of questions, challenging the establishment
from within.
Broader than reform, deeper than revolution, this
benign conspiracy for a new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural
realignment in history. The great shuddering,
irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical
system. It is a new mind – the ascendance
of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science
and insights from earliest recorded thought.
As I noted then, the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by a number of
such ideas, which shared the common belief that through the collective enlightenment
of a growing number of individuals, a critical mass would emerge that would
change the world in a number of profoundly positive ways. There were a number of such “Aquarian”
movements around that time that stressed personal growth and enlightenment as a
vehicle for general social reform, but none of these led to the fundamental
social transformation that was hoped for or promised, in spite of the fact that
half a century has passed since the decade that spawned them.
And, as I survey events in the world and in my own country,
I find little evidence that such a widescale positive, enduring change is
imminent. In China, the most populous
nation in the world, the citizens are living under a condition of extreme
political repression, and its leadership is carrying out an international
agenda that is strictly pragmatic and devoid of any underlying basis of moral values. And in the United States, a prosperous nation
(it ranks 8th among all nations in terms of GDP per capita), where
citizens enjoy a large measure of personal liberties, one of the two major
political parties has all but denied that climate change is a serious problem,
and has offered little support for any significant measures to address it, and
has often resisted them outright. One
would expect that at least in countries where citizens are relatively prosperous
and/or free, there would be tangible evidence of a large and growing number of
enlightened persons actively engaged in improving the world. Perhaps Brian Eno is right when he says that
they are there, but are simply being ignored by the news media. But although I count many if not most of my
friends as having liberal sentiments, I see little evidence of the concerted activism
among them that would lead to significant positive change on a large scale. I don’t even harbor much hope that there will
be a large enough majority of them to enact enduring solutions through the
political process – at least in the foreseeable future.
And just what kind of enlightenment would convert a person
into a functional world-saver? Clearly,
just becoming more fully aware – and critical – of the world’s injustices and environmental
problems is not enough. There is no
shortage of “armchair liberals” (of which, admittedly, I must include
myself). There of course have been many
instances in history where bringing a problem into the public consciousness in
a stark or compelling way has galvanized the masses to demand reforms, as Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did with slavery, Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle did with unsanitary practices in the meat-packing industry, and
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring did with environmental issues. And while raising the awareness of a critical
issue in such a way that it leads to collective action cannot be discounted as
an effective catalyst for positive social change, I think that what is being envisioned
by the “Aquarians” and others like them is something broader and more
enduring. It would be a sort of enlightenment
that changes one’s entire perspective on life and existence, in a holistic sort
of way, but more than this, it creates a fundamental and life-altering shift in
one’s personality, compelling active, positive engagement with the world to a
very significant degree. It is not hard
to imagine that if a sufficient number of these individuals emerged, they could
reverse the downward spiral of our civilization and put it onto a healing
trajectory.
But the hope and promise of positive enlightenment growing
into a world-saving force has appeared many times in our history, long before
the present – even long before the hope and expectation of an “Aquarian age”
that infected the popular consciousness half a century ago. Perhaps the most significant historical
example of this is the rise of Christianity, whose central figure preached that
the most important two commandments are to love God and to love one’s neighbor
as oneself. Early converts to this movement
believed that their faith had changed them in a fundamental way: had enabled
them to become “reborn” in a spiritual sense.
Admittedly, the earliest Christians entertained no ambitions about growing
in numbers to a size large enough to transform their civilization, let alone
the world. Their hope was in a heavenly
kingdom that was yet to come, populated by a community of saints. But by the time the Emperor Constantine had personally
converted to Christianity in the early 4th century (and that otherworldly
kingdom of the early Christians, which many expected to arrive in their lifetime,
had failed to appear), there must have been growing hope among Christians that
as their religion continued to gain the tolerance and even support of the empire,
and won an increasing number of converts, then it would eventually create an
earthly version of that heavenly kingdom.
Saint Augustine, however, writing about a century after Constantine’s
conversion, continued to stress the importance to Christians of that otherworldly
kingdom, since Rome had been recently sacked by Visigoths, leaving the future
of its empire in doubt. Ironically, when
the Gothic invaders themselves eventually converted to Christianity, this made
the dream of an earthly Christian kingdom once again tenable. And in fact, for over a millennium, until 1806,
much of Europe was ruled by what was known as the “Holy Roman Empire”: a
Christianized version of the empire that had fallen to the Goths and other
Germanic invaders. Sadly, however, the
Christianized nations – both within and without the Holy Roman Empire – fell far
short of the ideals of the earliest Christian teachings. There were organized persecutions of pagans
and heretics, and mob-induced persecutions of Jews and other non-Christians. The Crusades were fought – at the Christian popes’
direction – against non-Christian nations.
And eventually, after the Protestant Reformation, there were extended, violent
wars between the Christians themselves, allied to different sects, and
Christians even found themselves persecuted by Christian monarchs, if they
failed to belong to that monarch’s particular sect. It is hard to fathom how a movement founded on
the ideal of universal brotherhood and devotion to a moral, benevolent deity
could – upon reaching a critical mass in civilization – have produced such
horrible results.
But those who blame all of the evils of western civilization
on the rise of Christianity go too far in their condemnation. At the very least, one can ask if that
civilization would have been more benign and less bloodthirsty if paganism had
remained the dominant religion of Europe.
I doubt it. I can attest, too,
from personal experience, that I have known many individuals whose Christian
beliefs have provided a solid moral compass in their lives. I am sure that this has been the case for
many persons who have lived by that faith.
As Brian Eno has said about his own movement, the rank-and-file benevolent
Christians are not “spectacular” and therefore not newsworthy. It is those in power who make the news, and throughout
history power has corrupted many a leader, warrior, or even preacher who has
called himself a Christian.
And of course it goes without saying that the evil done in
the name of Christianity, or even just by Christians themselves, runs contrary
to the teachings of Jesus and the writings of St. Paul. And this is not just true of
Christianity. Something just seems to
happen when a spiritual idea or discipline gets formalized into a religion –
particularly one that gains power in numbers.
Even Buddhism, a doctrine that is probably most associated in the general
public’s mind with the very word, “enlightenment”, contains dark episodes in
its history, as in imperial Japan in the 1930s, when many Buddhist leaders supported
and collaborated with the militaristic regime.
Ichikawa Hakugen, an eminent Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar who lived at
that time, reinterpreted many fundamental tenets of Buddhism in a way that
justified such collaboration. But much
earlier, in 9th-century China, Buddhists themselves had been the
targets of widescale persecution, culminating in the destruction of thousands
of monasteries and tens of thousands of Buddhist temples. Their persecutors, ironically, were practitioners
of Daoism – a philosophy famous for eschewing formal doctrines of any kind – because
they had grown jealous of the growing popularity of Buddhism in China.
This, then, seems to be an almost an inevitable outcome of mass
enlightenment: A system of beliefs
inspired by spiritual insights – usually originating from a wise, illuminated teacher
– gains a growing number of adherents, and with the growth of the movement and
the passage of time, there is a perceived need to formalize the system with a codified
set of laws and practices, and a clear division between clergy and laity –
between leaders and followers, but the organization that emerges becomes politicized,
both internally and externally, inviting all of the inherent risks of corruption,
abuse of power, and outright hostility toward “non-believers”.
A different – almost opposite – pitfall of enlightenment is the sort associated with Buddhists, Hindu yogis, Muslim Sufism, and Christian mysticism, in which the attainment of enlightenment becomes a sort of end in itself, and the “awakened” practitioner becomes divorced from the world of ordinary day-to-day activities, often as a recluse or a member of a monastic community. The purity of their lifestyles, as admirable as it might be in itself, provides little tangible service in improving the world, beyond extending their enlightenment to new converts and acolytes.
But has there ever been an activist enlightenment, in which an “awakened individual” actually becomes more engaged with the surrounding world, in an attempt to reform it, improve it, even save it? Sri Aurobindo, a pro-independence activist in early 20th-Century India, provides an interesting biographical example. After being imprisoned for a year in solitary confinement for suspected revolutionary activities, Aurobindo turned from politics to spirituality, receiving instruction from a Maharashtrian yogi. Over the next two decades, he developed a spiritual system called “Integral Yoga”, which at its core has his assertion that the physical world is not an illusion, as so many mystics contend, but is real, and in its reality is subject to evolution and transformation. The traditional attainment of higher consciousness, Aurobindo argued, is merely an intermediate step, which can be followed by a descent back into the world of day-to-day existence. He termed higher consciousness “Supermind”, which, once attained, can enable one to play an active role in evolving the entire world and its creatures to a greater level of spiritual advancement. In his words:
Supermind
is a plane of perfect knowledge, that has the full, integral truth of anything.
It is a plane that man can rise to, above his current limited mentality, and
have perfect understanding through revelations and power that is leaning down
on the earth's consciousness. One can open to it, in order to transform the
various aspects of one's being, as well as set right the conditions of
life, . . .
According to Aurobindo, one who has attained the Supermind,
or supramental consciousness, becomes, in his words, a “Gnostic being”, and he
believed that when a sufficient number of these Gnostic beings appeared – reaching
a critical mass – then a new world order would result. Aurobindo contended that his Integral Yoga
was actually based on ancient traditional Indian holy writings, such as the
Upanishads. And yet, he apparently
believed that very few if any human beings had ever moved beyond the
traditional, passive mode of mystical illumination to the next, activist stage
which would catalyze the spiritual evolution of the physical world. His anticipation, or hope, was that through
the practice of integral yoga, the widespread appearance of such individuals
would finally occur. While his spiritual
system attracted many followers in the 20th Century, it seems to have
run its course, falling fall short of a number capable of catalyzing global
spiritual evolution.
Occultism, in many of its branches and guises, has also been
touted as providing a path of higher learning and even transformation to its
adherents. Much of the popularity of occult
disciplines – such as astrology, alchemy, Hermeticism, and Tarot – can be
attributed to the common belief that they are ancient in origin: either relics
from some scientifically and spiritually advanced antediluvian civilization, or
wisdom passed down, through the ages, by an unbroken chain of Masters, perhaps
since the dawn of humanity. The belief
is generally unfounded, with most of these disciplines, at least in their
current form, having been introduced within the past two thousand years. In many cases, modern occultists have even
fraudulently credited works of their own creation to earlier sources, in order
to give them a greater air of authenticity.
But Carl Jung, and many psychologists and mythologists inspired by his
writings, have conferred a greater legitimacy on various forms of occultism by
suggesting that they provide universal symbols that have survived in the collective
unconscious of humanity, and periodically find expression in art, mysticism, and
religion, not to mention intense personal psychological experiences. Well-intentioned, scholarly occultists have
attempted to distill the deeper symbolic meanings of the various occult disciplines.
Some of these occultists, like Paul
Foster Case, went even further, by endeavoring to integrate the fundamental insights
of astrology, alchemy, Hermeticism, Tarot, and even the Jewish mystical tradition
of Kabbalah into a unified wisdom teaching.
In 1933, Case founded a school of thought called the “Builders of the
Adytum” which was dedicated to the passing on of “Ageless Wisdom” to those who
wished to seek it and thereby to ultimately find the “Way of Liberation”. As with Sri Aurobindo, Case and others who had
similar perspectives about the ultimate wisdom of occultism believed that by
attaining this wisdom, human beings would not only elevate themselves to a higher
spiritual and intellectual plane, but would then become agents for the elevation
of humankind in general. But, as with Aurobindo’s
followers, those associated with the “Builders of the Adytum” and similar occultic
movements seem to have fallen short of reaching any level of influence.
It is of interest to note, however, that there have been occultic fraternities, such as the Freemasons, which seemed to have lived up to the promise of enlightened individuals within their fold enacting positive social change. The rolls of famous Freemasons include Ben Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Voltaire, and Sir Alexander Fleming, and another occult fraternity, the Rosicrucians, counted as their members Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Francis Bacon. But it is an open question whether the actions of these individuals were actually shaped and motivated by their involvement in these organizations, or the fraternities simply attracted persons of character and merit at the time that they lived. Both the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians have certainly had members whose contributions to society are mixed, at best, such as the Freemason J. Edgar Hoover, and the Rosicrucian Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of course, there is and always have been many popular books
providing guidance on personal enlightenment, particularly during the past
century, including A Course in Miracles, published in 1976, and the works
of Eckhart Tolle, such as The Power of Now, published in 1997. Dr. Joseph Michael Levry, in his book Lifting
the Veil: The Divine Code, originally published in 1994, combined the
teachings of Jewish mystical Kabbalah with a brand of yoga (“Shakti Naam”) which,
he promised “will take away your fears, and empower you to reach your goals at the
same time helping others to reach theirs.
These teachings will expand your consciousness, purify your mind, and
illuminate your life.” But more than this,
he asserts that:
This book
is for Yogis, Kabbalists, doctors, serious health practitioners and everyone
who desires to walk the distance from the head to the heart, so as to contribute
to a positive evolution of the human race.
Even the Jewish Kabbalah itself, an ancient form of
mysticism which had been the subject of serious study among scholars such as Aryeh
Kaplan in the 20th century, was popularized by Philip Berg and the
Kabbalah Centre later in that century to give it a broader appeal, eventually
gaining popular celebrities as adherents, with promised benefits going beyond
simple spiritual illumination to more practical things like personal success,
good health, and the finding of an attractive mate. And conventional motivational speakers, who had
traditionally provided guidance on attaining these more practical things, have increasingly
moved from the opposite direction, expanding their list of promised benefits to
a heightened spirituality.
An intriguing variant of the enlightened activist has found
expression in a series of books authored by Bill Plotkin, most recently in his The
Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries
(2021). Plotkin believes that with
proper guidance, any person can proceed through a series of stages that will
ultimately result in his or her transformation to an “eco-soulcentric” being,
committed to saving and improving the earth by relying on a unique,
personally-tailored set of skills and insights that were obtained as a result
of that process of transformation. He
sees the process as occurring in 5 distinct stages – preparation, dissolution,
soul encounter, metamorphosis, and enactment – and likens it to the
transformation in nature that occurs when a caterpillar enters a cocoon, undergoes
a metamorphosis, and emerges as a butterfly.
This metaphor and its application to human transformation is not unique
to Plotkin, of course: As I described in
a previous blog entry, “The Invisible Hand” (https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2019/03/recently-i-happened-to-finish-abook.html),
Na’im Akbar uses the very same metaphor, and in a very similar way, in his book
Natural Psychology and Human Transformation (1977). In that entry, I drew parallels between Akbar’s
model of transformation and the “hero’s journey” described by mythologist Joseph
Campbell. Interestingly, Plotkin strives
to distance his own model of transformation from that of Campbell’s, contending
that Campbell’s is describing a rite of passage in which, after going through
an ordeal or some other unusual and overpowering experience while removed from
his familiar surroundings, a man (it is traditionally a man in these earlier rites
of passage) returns to his own people with the necessary insights and capabilities
to be a more functional member of his community. But I think that this distinction is forced,
and misses the point of Campbell’s fundamental insights. Campbell (along with Akbar) is also describing
a personal transformation that can only occur when one is thrown into a sort of
chaotic trauma and is forced to tap into a reality that is not grounded in the conventional
cause-and-effect, timebound, perceptible realm, but instead lies beyond this,
and contains a deeper, more profound wisdom that can be drawn upon to change oneself,
and perhaps change one’s community as well.
Whether the source of this wisdom lies in the collective unconscious – a
sort of genetic, primal, symbol-infused memory bank common to all human beings –
as Carl Jung would contend, or instead is a transpersonal intelligence that somehow
pervades the universe and can be drawn upon under certain propitious circumstances
(or both), this wellhead seems to be the source that enables those who tap into
it to produce great inventions or inspired works, or acquire world-changing personal
destinies, or at the very least to become a more fully functional, wiser human
being.
Plotkin also strives to make a distinction between the transformational
processes that initiates of his system undergo and the various shamanic
traditions and initiation rituals that have existed in various places since the
dawn of human history. But many of those
initiates who have undergone the processes described in his books have engaged
in shamanic-type things like extended wanderings in the desert or wilderness, and
what can only be described as mind-bending experiences brought on by unusual encounters
or mental episodes (these latter sometimes fueled by hallucinogenic substances). He concedes that similar shamanistic
practices in earlier ages might have produced “eco-soulcentric” human beings, which
he refers to as “Adults” or – in those who have attained the highest levels of this
form of enlightenment – “Elders”, but admits that there is no evidence to
confirm this.
In fact, Plotkin is among those individuals who believes
that in the primitive recesses of our past, we were living in a more paradisical
state, unsullied and uncorrupted, until:
. . .
[W]ith the advent of agriculture and farming – the domestication of selected
animal and plant species – came, inevitably, the pathogenic notion of personal
property and the inexorable outcome that some people would conclude that hoarding
things for themselves is a good idea. . . .
. . .
The Tribe becomes increasingly materialistic, competitive, anthropocentric, and
violent – and disconnected from the natural world in which everything shares
freely with everything else and there is no waste. . . .
He is, of course, not the first person to entertain this
idea of a Fall from Grace. (I describe
others in “Okay, Boomer”, https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2020/05/okay-boomer.html.) It is a pernicious myth that has gone beyond its
religious roots and infected many well-meaning secular intellectuals, as well.
I have heard it lamented that the oppressive encroachment of
civilization on indigenous cultures has run roughshod over the shamanistic
traditions that they often possessed, along with whatever eco-friendly wisdom that
were inherent in them, to our collective detriment, and I had once held at least
some sympathies with those views. But recently
I happened to watch a movie titled Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of
Shamans (filmed in 1997 and available for free viewing on the internet)
which documented a “ten day retreat of tribal elders, wisdom keepers, and
medicine women from five continents” and which was highlighted, at the end, by
a visit from the Dalai Lama. When I started
viewing the movie, I really intended to be personally moved and impressed by
these diverse, time-honored traditions that were in danger of
obliteration. But as I got into the
movie, I was shocked by my overall reaction.
It was one of derision. The
ramblings and ceremonies of these various groups of shamans, and the occasional
squabbles that erupted over conflicting world views between them, just looked profoundly
silly to me. I came to the sardonic
conclusion that it was no wonder that these traditions have been, or will be,
run over by the progress of civilization, because they are generally grounded
in nonsense. I also recently watched
another documentary titled Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing
Economy, which covered a retreat that took place for 5 days in 1990. This one, as the title indicates, featured
artists, scientists (at least some of whom, like biologist Rupert Sheldrake,
entertained theories outside of the mainstream), economists, and members of various
spiritual disciplines. This retreat,
too, featured a visit by the Dalai Lama (who seems to have made it a permanent
feature of his personal career to make cameo appearances like these). And it strangely echoed the one with the
shamans, with the general lamentation that our contemporary civilization, with
its scientific worldviews and ways of conducting business, has estranged itself
from the world (or universe) at large in a very toxic sort of way. This lamentation was expressed very
eloquently in both retreats, but what both completely lacked was the identification
of any concrete, practical solutions for rectifying this problem, or an
alternative comprehensive worldview from which such solutions might emerge.
The people of India, a land historically known for its deeply
mystical traditions and the yogis, fakirs, and other religious sages associated
with them, did not rise out of its general squalor and misery because these sages
reached a critical mass of numbers or influence. It happened when India’s political leaders
embraced market-based capitalism, which is often derided by people like those
who attended the retreats as one of the toxic byproducts of civilization. Nevertheless, there are real ecological
problems that we face, and that seem to be reaching the general crisis stage,
if they have not already. And while I am
frustrated by those who minimize the severity of these problems by expressing their
unbounded confidence that civilization and innovation – often induced or enhanced
by market-based mechanisms – will solve them in due time, I have to concede that
they have a history of examples to justify their optimism, when doomsayers in
the past, asserting that overpopulation, pollution, or large-scale extraction
of vital resources would lead to global calamities by such-and-such a date,
have been repeatedly proven wrong. But
even scientists are now expressing concerns that we are reaching the limits of
innovation, and that we might be on the cusp of facing global problems that
could overwhelm us. Perhaps we really
have reached a point where only a general reorientation to the world will
enable us to restore a sustainable balance between preserving both our
civilization and the general ecosystem of which it is a part. Plotkin believes so, and that his – if I may
coin the term – “neo-shamanism” will produce this reorientation among the “Adults”
and “Elders” who successfully undergo the transformation, but again, only if
they reach a critical mass:
. . . Once there enough true Adults and Elders
in a human community, their visionary projects link up in such a way that the whole
society goes through a developmental evolutionary unfolding. . . .
. . . [T]rue
Adults and Elders are the imaginal cells of emerging eco-soulcentric butterfly
societies. Taking this idea a step
further, we might imagine that these butterfly societies will eventually serve
as the imaginal cells of the next phase of human evolution – from a caterpillar
species to a butterfly species – and this might in turn result in the next major
step in Earth’s evolution. As a
species, we are now in a Cocoon. What percentage
of butterfly societies will be needed globally before Earth begins to transform
into a butterfly planet?
I still worry, however, about that final critical step from
personal enlightenment to enlightened action.
Even if these “Adults” and “Elders” have the motivation to do everything
in their power to change the world, or, in Plotkin’s words, to contribute to an
important major next step in Earth’s evolution, they still have to face the
naked power of the gun (as Mao Zedong famously said, “Political power grows out
of the barrel of a gun”), and those unenlightened leaders or militants who have
no reservations about using blatant force, not to mention subtler but equally
effective powers of aggression and suppression.
And for this reason, and the others I outlined above, I continue to be
skeptical about “critical masses”, in whatever form they take, from the early
Christians, to the New Agers of the 1970s and 1980s, to the contemporary followers
of those who are holding out the hope of a path to global reform by promoting
their own various programs of personal enlightenment.
Perhaps, in our present time, a modern-day Buddha, or Jesus, or even Mohammed might usher in a new phase of higher spirituality that will appeal to the masses and rock the foundations of civilization, in a good way. On the other hand, if a global crisis appears of sufficient severity, perhaps one or more capable and principled secular leaders will bring out the best in us: inspiring and motivating us to address and resolve the crisis in a substantial and enduring manner. But each of these hopeful alternatives, while not entirely implausible, also seem highly unlikely to me, and for this reason, I remain skeptical . . . and pessimistic, and am certainly not pinning my hopes on the emergence of a “critical mass” of wise and committed human beings to change the world. But my pessimism is not unbounded. While it is dangerously complacent to adopt the view that there will always be saviors and/or innovators who keep us from moving beyond the brink of destruction, it cannot be ignored that many in history who have tapped into that deep, mysterious well of sub/super-conscious wisdom have invented or accomplished some remarkable, often world-changing things. So maybe it is not a critical mass that is required, but simply the guidance and contributions of individuals who have taken a sufficiently deep dive into that well, and who can then usher us into a higher phase of civilization, or perhaps of evolution itself.
