Cultural awareness and expanded consciousness is separated by concentric rings with enlightened doers at the center blending out to the zombie masses of our culture on the outside. For those at the center it is a journey of a lifetime.

The New Cultural Enlightenment

It takes connecting so many dots about the nature of our existence, our past, present, and future to make it to the center that very few do. Once you can connect enough dots, can see them in your head, and even rotate the constellation of links, visioning and choosing the direction for your journey becomes effortless—live your truth.

A new kind of enlightenment is emerging. Classic enlightenment involves expansion of consciousness and dissolving the ego to realize our oneness with the universe. It is to step out of temporal and physical reality into nothingness and everythingness. We realize that we are not unique and that tens and hundreds of thousands of generations have lived and have experienced every emotion that we ever will.

The new enlightenment goes a step further in new directions through an early doorway of unveiling to being able to see our constructed or consensus reality culture for what it is—a trap of our own making. By constructing a realty apart from the ecosystem we cut ourselves off from our ability to live from it, we become trapped and are separated from the source or the divine.

The illusion of free will is essential to the perpetuation of modern culture. People have to believe they are able to control their lives when in reality the suburbs are just prisons without bars. Every job is wage slavery because the agricultural revolution locked up the food. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. Fear is the control system which cuts us off at the knees and prevents us from engaging in true self-exploration and expansion of consciousness. Fear is the fuel for modern Taker culture.

Schools are designed to break the individual and end creative thinking, “sit down, be quite, and do what what your told.” Despite education, knowledge and hierarchy remain deeply stratified. The new enlightenment sees through this trap, and sees the way out.

Animism and the Fire of Life

Classic enlightenment includes an appreciation for how thin the ice of consciousness that we skate on is. One recognizes how fragile, fleeting, and precious the fire of life is. We call this appreciation that our ancestors had before the agricultural revolution “animism.” All living beings experience reality to some level. Even plants “feel” sunlight and respond so it. One of the greatest tragedies of our Taker culture is it’s lack of empathy for all of our “relations,” and how it turns other species into commodities to be consumed.

For me, my god has a small “g”. It can be killed with a bulldozer. It is the fire of life in the meadow. I know that the grass, deer, rabbit, bird, and soil are all one. Birth, growth, death, regeneration—one. You can learn more about how the world works at a weekend gardening class on compost than from four years of seminary.

I know how I am also connected all the way back to the creation of the universe. The calcium in my bones, the iron in my blood, and the carbon in my body all came from stars that lived and died before our sun was even born. I know I am made of star dust.

The Unveiling

The unveiling is like taking the red pill in The Matrix and seeing our constructed reality, and its affect upon us and the ecosystem. New terms and revelations such as global warming, financial crisis, and the end of security have been added to earlier anti-cultural memes such as pollution, overpopulation, and fractional reserve banking. Some are even expanding such as peak oil is becoming peak everything.

The unveiling is more than recognizing the many problems of our culture, it also means connecting the dots back to how it began, why it succeeds, and forward to the solution for the individual and the local community. For instance, we learn that our culture succeeds because it is easy; all you have to do to perpetuate it is consume.

Finding Your Own Key to the Door

The new enlightenment is more than becoming a history buff and understanding what memes makes us us. The trick is to understand the significance of this knowledge and to find a solution to it for you and your community.

Leaving the matrix or our consensus culture is a journey of a lifetime; it will only happen in stages. Did Fukuoka go as far as he wanted? Those in indigenous culture are already on the outside; let’s hope they can stay there. We within the Taker culture have to find the doorway out. For me the next couple steps will be from traditional high energy organic farming to low energy permaculture. From learning, to doing, to writing, to teaching.

But, once you find your way back to the original or the next story, every cell in your body will know it, the greater the resonance.

The Will—Doers

What good is knowledge if you do not live it? There comes a point for those who are ready to turn their journey into a life of action and example. It will take everyone’s contributions to expand the ring of consciousness: depavers, permaculturists, teachers, activists, reporters, bloggers, healers, on and on.

This tool of the Internet, may be the lever that has been missing. We are at the forefront of a complete media and cultural consciousness replacement. Fringe ideas like this blog can be freely distributed globally, are uncontrolled, and entirely non-underwritten. For instance, this blog has been read in 72 countries this year in 2009.

Cultural Singularity

When we reach the tipping point where our culture dissolves away into may new visions or cultures, a cultural singularity will have been reached. It may take another 10,000 years to reach this point. It won’t happen soon because we are only beginning to realize that we have to find ways out of our Taker culture, let alone having to invent the alternative lifestyles needed to walk away.

Remember, you cannot encourage someone to leave modern culture unless you have a viable alternative to the constructed reality.

What many people feel is about to happen is actually a mass unveiling. Today, our first world society is broken into thirds or rings. One third thinks things will continue to get better, growth is the answer, and progress and a technological singularity will save us. The second third can feel it in their bones that something is wrong, but they cannot put their finger on it. The last third are a mix of everything from those starting to realize that growth is over, believing that going green will save us, doomers, and even conspiracy theorists. We all have a long way to go; many today are starting the journey to look first for answers and then for solutions.

Most doomers do agree that humanity will survive anything, adaptability is our skill. Conspiracy theorists have to realize that as long as our culture has among it goals maximizing profit and concentrate wealth, any group of people who have never even met will appear to coordinate their efforts.

Those ahead of the curve are not a gurus—they are just doers and teachers. We are the ones who have taken the risk to live our truth. We are the ones inventing the alternatives. Most of our ideas will fail, but eventually some will work, and will unlock the doors for the others to follow.

Dedication

This essay is dedicated to the Culturequake community, my loyal readers, the 3,000 new readers this month, and to my mentor the Hobbit—Thank you.

Essays will be less frequent during the farming season. We are working about six or seven days a week getting the Restoration Farm and permaculture site up and running. People are right when they say it takes three years to get an organic farm to show any form of profit. It takes three to five years to get fruit trees yielding and five to seven years for nuts. Thanks too everyone involved the project.

Also, the point of the Culturequake blog experience is first of course part of my self-discovery journey and living my truth, but for the reader it should not be about the “latest essay.” It should be about the body of work as a whole starting back in he archives up to the present.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

The Matrix
The Red Pill

Aeolus Kephas and Neil “the Cleaver” Kramer
Podcast Stormy Weather 22 and 22.5: The Reader & the Red