Palden Jenkins

Civilisation
Arnold Toynbee, a giant of an Oxford historian, pointed out in his remarkable Study of History [10] how a civilisation rises from one humble localised point and time of origin to expand and develop toward an eventual climax of achievement. On attaining it, it then suffers a crisis of motivation, purpose and identity – with its goals achieved, it needs a new goal. The instigators – whether classical Greeks, Han Chinese, Meccan Arabs, Mayans or post-Renaissance Europeans – come to lose steam and grow decadent, increasingly habituated to time-worn custom and incrementally imprisoned in the unresolved dilemmas created during their ascendant journey spanning generations or centuries. Their instinct, rather than moving forward to new horizons, is to enjoy the fruits of their efforts and to emulate successful patterns established in the past (which, at the beginning, was the future).

Regeneration and transformation of civilisation, the finding of new goals starting from the point of climax achieved, involves much disruption, questioning and honesty – it involves identifying what went right and what went wrong, and finding a new spark of life to generate new momentum in a different direction. Meanwhile, subject peoples, colonised, overwhelmed and cloned by that efflorescent civilisation, make its ways their own, in their own way. They become a new vital force, with impetus to 'make it' in terms of the now-presiding culture – often with success. Thus it was that most of the emperors of Rome were 'provincials', and many dynasties of China derived from barbarian, foreign and regional stock. This is how civilisation reproduces itself, to be upheld by its clients and subjects, who become the new masters.

Recognise the symptoms? This culturally-arthritic tendency now is with Europeans, followed close behind by Americans, as the achievements of modern urban-industrial civilisation are replicated with great energy by Asians, Latin Americans, Muslims and Africans in an increasingly complex global market. When Europe was gathering steam in the 1500s-1800s, it was never thought that Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bombay, Kuwait, Johannesburg or Rio would become determinant players in the European game. The globalisation we now see are an extrapolation of principles and ideas long established, though they are not a transformation of civilisation into a fundamentally new form – transformative undercurrents lurk beneath the surface, muttering words like 'sustainability', 'quality of life', 'universal human rights' or 'spiritual awakening' – though the dominant culture ignores them.

We are today faced with a choice – a choice visible since at least the 1960s: to set a course to thoroughly transform modern civilisation or to continue on a course of extrapolating past achievements and traditions with little fundamental re-examination. This civilisation has spread from its origination-point in Europe and the originators have ceased to dominate. At this point, the original civilisation-building impulse is more or less complete – it has become so during the 20th century. It stands at the beginning of something else, building on the foundations of what has already arisen.

Arabic oil-sheikhs, Japanese corporate magnates and businesslike drug-barons have become dominant financiers to the world. Multinational corporations keep only nominal roots in their highly-regulated home-countries. The main areas of economic growth are now Pacific-Rim Asia and Latin America. Europe no longer dominates America and America no longer dominates the world – though neither have grasped the gravity and implications of the situation. Consumption-fatigued Euro-Americans invest assets in leisure activities and money-making artifices, argue a lot or stand in unemployment queues – hardly an example of a goal-oriented, dynamic culture.

Western civilisation gathered strength in the cathedral cloisters and trade fairs of medieval England, Holland, Lombardy, Bavaria and Bohemia, and propagated itself through the Renaissance (1450s-1520s), Reformation (1520s-70s), Scientific Revolution (1600s) and Age of Reason (1700s), spreading through colonialism (1600s-1900s) and industrialism (1750-1960). In the 20th century it has become what Toynbee called a universal civilisation – one which no longer emanates from its original centre, no longer ruled by its originators.

The emperors of the Roman Empire in its last 400 years were Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards and Arabs, while Romans and Italians themselves lived in an increasingly Las Vegas reality. Similarly, the financiers of Hong Kong and Singapore, the mullahs of Islam and the formerly-oppressed South African blacks provide the dynamism of a global economy based on long-forgotten principles laid down by Luther, Newton and Descartes, bless their 70% cotton-rich socks.

This has happened very quickly: Europe was the dominant force in the world in 1900, and USA-USSR by 1950, and none of these by 2000. If we go back but one century to look at the 1890s, the picture was very different to that of today. By the 1890s, the late Victorian age, the world had been carved up by European powers, and the growing dual superpower influence of USA and Russia was visible only to forward-thinkers. Yet, important things were happening which grew to characterise what we now look on as modern life.

Technologies being thought up and developed in the 1890s were rapidly (within half a century) to become normal aspects of modern reality: motor cars, airplanes, electrical systems, telegraphs and radio, plastics, vacuum cleaners, canned and refrigerated foods, assembly lines, laboratory pharmaceuticals and antibiotics, chemical fertilisers and film – to name but a few. In parallel, potent ideas were emerging: socialism, atomic physics, evolutionism, psychotherapy, feminism, widening democratic ideals, theosophy, parapsychology and spiritualism. The final unexplored (by whites) territories were being penetrated and mapped by intrepid western gentlemen at the Poles, in 'darkest' Africa, the remoter Americas and High Asia.

The world was becoming threaded together by a rampant force called progress. Railways, steamships and telegraph wires spanned the world, rendering it perceptually smaller. While, in event-oriented history books, historically-notable episodes in the 1890s were unremarkable, in profounder terms the basis for a post-industrial global civilisation was being formulated and set in motion – focused in but one decade [11]. Society had already lost many of its roots and traditions in the overwhelming tide of urbanisation. The past was being ripped away, rendered into 'bad old days'. It is from this crucial decade that the 'global village' was germinated – even though it took until the 1960s for it to be given this name. This is an example of an important historical 'seed-time' where trends are set, even though they take decades to unfold. The 1960s constituted another 'seed-time' for future realities which will become normalised in the 21st century.

The implications of these changes were enormous. Progress was so fast that it had to be assimilated in new ways. Changeful periods had been experienced previously, and massive wrenchings were not unknown, but never with the incessant intensity and widespread thoroughness as seen in the 20th century. Many traditional values, fundamentals and mores were siphoned into new-fangled garbage cans and dumped in museums, theme-parks and landfills. Societies underwent cruel transitions: two world wars, an inter-war depression and a relentless post-war 'economic miracle' – accompanied by parallel wrenches worldwide, such as the final destruction of most traditional societies. It could even be construed that these trends of structured chaos might have been deliberately or semi-consciously fomented, as ways of suspending social norms, restraints and niceties to force painful changes against which people otherwise might resist or protest.

Some 185 million people died in war, 85 million of them civilians [12], during the 'short twentieth century' between 1914 and 1989 – a period identified by the historian Eric Hobsbawm [13]. Customary social communities, identities and standards were suspended, replaced by state provisions, help-lines or diversionary entertainments. Basic decency and communal mutuality were forgotten, and the concept of 'human rights' was invented as a substitute. Real life-experience was vicariously substituted with insured package holidays, TV and film, drugs and cyber-space. Products were manufactured in container-loads, untouched by human hand. Coca-Cola and Hollywood led the way into the hearts and bodies of all people worldwide, and the remaining gaps were stuffed with Big Macs, TVs, CDs and BMWs – or aspirations to consume them – even in the ancient jungles of New Guinea and Amazonia.

Yet, behind all this progress lies its own inherent undoing: destruction of social bonds, of physical and psychological health, of natural environments, of soil and the agricultural base, of the air we breathe and of longterm ecological, economic and social sustainability. Expansive psychological changes engendered by education, TV, jumbo-jets, computers, faxes and credit cards have brought growing globalisation of awareness and a wholesale value-shift based on liberal urban economic principles – moral relativism. Identity-groups cleave increasingly along lifestyle- or belief-faultlines rather than along ethnic or geographical lines, in an emotional adjustment to the standardising multinational sweep of techno-business. Amidst rapidly-encroaching contradictions, an underlying awakening has grown, a searching for spiritual roots, for justice, purpose and meaning in life.

As yet, these apparently-isolated factors have been seen to exist independently, and few people have made conscious connections which allow them to see that they are all symptoms of the same single issue. What issue? Humanity is about to go through fundamental rebirth.

This awakening surfaced unexpectedly in the 1960s in Euro-America, catalysed by a creative and ideological impetus unleashed by LSD and electronic mass culture – though atomic and space technologies, a torrent of newsprint, big and small screens, new ideas, products and jumbo-jet travel have played a large part. With this outburst came a growing movement for propagation of women's and minority rights, for community living, regional and ethnic autonomy, back-to-roots spirituality, natural diets and lifestyles, nature conservation and holistic medicine – each of them aspects of a non-specific, holistic world-view which suggests a total change in the nature of world society. The world public also has become aware of global dangers never before acknowledged – dangers from pesticides, radiation, the 'population bomb', food additives, ozone depletion, military overkill, social permissiveness or unrestrained economic growth.

This uncoordinated popular movement was initially an 'underground' movement, yet it began furtively disseminating into the public domain during the 1970s and 1980s. The ongoing 20th century erosion of secure social structures led to a new impetus seeking to revive genuine security and sanity in fundamental and different ways. Parallel developments took place in the rest of the world too, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in the new-found independence of former colonies, in the 1970s dictatorships of Latin America and in the oil-rich Arab states. And everywhere, Toyotas and Sonys!

From the mid-1960s onwards, something has shifted. Transnational techno-economic driving-forces have relied on weakness of memory, on fascination with perpetually-new gizmos and on the nation-based, sometimes xenophobic myopia of the world public, to carry forward its unstoppable momentum. This is done behind the cover of sovereign governments, regulatory bodies and patrician world institutions. A social and moral rudderlessness has grown, blamed on social degenerates yet driven by unregulated business forces working on a single key axiom: if it makes a profit, it is good. Connections between growing social violence and nightly bloodshed shown on TV have been avidly denied, connections between modern illnesses and today's factory-farmed diets and tense lifestyles are avoided, and connections between weapons production and widespread warfare are suppressed – yet the connections are there.

Yet, such driving forces, penetrating the Soviet and Chinese orbits by the 1990s and elevating to prosperity some formerly-poor Third World countries, leave forward-thinking people looking at the future with qualms and trepidation, not with pride of achievement or guilt-free hands. Despite all we are told about the benefits to be gained from modern life, wholehearted belief in the correctness of current ways is infirm. It relies on collective doublethink more than on truth and integrity. The 'free world' defines freedom in terms of consumer preference and democratic appearances – freedom has been reduced to a choice between brand-names and vacation destinations. Yet we exercise little choice over whether or not we participate in this all-encompassing system. We feel compelled to participate – if we don't, we lose out.

The ills and discontents which civilisation produces point to solutions hardly researched, hardly mooted, waiting to be unearthed. The global village is not just an emporium, it is humanity's home – and homes are ruled by feminine, feelingful values. We complete the 20th century with an unclear vision of the future, with no easy answers. We know not where we are heading. Freedom remains elusive, and we remain chained to routines, products and beliefs whose intrinsic worth is forgotten. All we aspire towards is more and better. Yet, amongst us, small minorities of eccentric pioneers beaver away at developing new ideas, technologies, healing methods, farming techniques and ways of shifting the very nature of consciousness. These are the unsung heroes of our time.

Nextology
Looking towards the future, it is impossible to predict exactly what might befall during the coming hundred years – yet it is possible to gain an overall impression of likely scenarios, based on an historical sense of probabilities and on considered speculation. Indeed this is necessary. Our historical habit is to stumble backwards into the future. It is as if we as individuals make little difference, as if history and the future just happen at us. Paradoxically, religious, Marxist or visionary grand-plans which have guided people forward in the past have rendered themselves invalid. There are no known, reliable maps to show pathways into the future.

We're going to have to drive 'by the seat of our pants', without prepared answers, consulting back not to formulated ideologies but to our hearts, our commonsense and our basic human qualities. We need to consider the deep issues at stake in our time and to make deep choices about them. Otherwise, it looks like disaster – of some kind or another. This threat of disaster is actually a helper: it activates inventive survival instincts.

The human race needs to change course – this much is visible to many thoughtful people, even though many of these might not know how to bring it about. We witness atrocities, abuses, scandals and horrors in news broadcasts, and we encounter many similar issues in the details of our personal lives. "Someone ought to do something about it!". Perhaps the next government might make a difference, or perhaps the media might expose the corruption and insidiousness of it all, or perhaps an aid organisation or influential person or pressure-group might crack it. However, it turns out that, with some bright exceptions, little fundamental difference is genuinely made. So we lapse back into an insidious form of resignation. "Perhaps I'm wrong to think things could change... perhaps I'm too idealistic...". Or, alternatively, we strain at the leash, burning ourselves up in noble efforts which can seem in the end to have but limited effects, faced with an onslaught of counterproductive inertia, resistance and complexity.

Meanwhile, the world situation grows more and more complex and worrying. There is a general public awareness that things need to change, yet in many people's eyes such a change needs to happen without inconvenience or sacrifice: changes are necessary, but not in my back yard. Someone else ought to start it. 1980s-90s cynical conservatism thrives in a situation where radical solutions are called for. As a result of this circular illogic, fundamental issues stay essentially the same, just getting worse year by year. In recent decades many people have dedicated immense time and energy to change and transformation, to campaigning, education and good works, yet it seems only marginal differences have resulted. There's some enormous indefinable inertia at work. It's a consensus of busy inactivity. "Sorry, I haven't the time..."

If we accept the proposition that the current direction of mainstream civilisation is auto-destructive unless radically metamorphosed, then it follows that we ourselves are part of this auto-destruction. Simply buying food at the supermarket reinforces the current mass-suicidal system. Yet opting out is difficult, and working to change the system from within comes a-cropper when the system itself and even our own colleagues and neighbours resist change. The temptation is to drop one's principles and isolate oneself in one's own little life. The system has its ways of making life difficult for detractors. In the end, money decides.

Questioning the state of the world keeps us awake at nights – a sure recipe for burn-out and loss. So, the tendency is to settle into one's niche, do one's little best and forget about the big questions. However, we keep returning, in moments of honesty, to a basic truth: the way things look, without drastic change the human race is likely, during the coming century, to suffer greatly. It could even possibly become extinct – together with many other species on Earth except perhaps vegetation and insects. Some survivors might remain – do you want to be one of the 'lucky' ones? It's difficult to rest easy with the prospect of our offspring saying to us "Look at the world you've left us! Why didn't you do something while you had the chance?"

Sooner or later, life as we know it, according to the information we have, will no longer be able to continue. Delaying and evasion tactics have been successful in recent decades, yet world problems have not gone away. We're still busy working on Maggie's Farm, and we still haven't found the love the Beatles reminded us is all that we need. Gaia is crying for attention, but everyone's gone to the latest movie.

Various identifiable changes need to take place within coming decades. Not just legislation of a few laws or tinkerings with interest-rate settings: something fundamental. Something much, much more. Many great and wonderful things have been created by our civilisation – yet the basis on which 'progress' has been made is in itself destructive, relentless, directionless. Who's in charge? Shall we institute corrective world changes by choice – an enormous historic step, itself a redemptive factor – or shall we have changes foisted on us by circumstances beyond our control, in dire states of emergency? The latter is our customary pattern. The jury is out, and the future is dauntingly in the balance.

So here we stand, at the turn of a millennium, looking at the coming century and wishing that time would leave us alone and let us get on with our own lives. While there are great glimmers of hope, the Old Order still remains, perpetually dressing itself in new clothing.

Many readers of this book will already be convinced of the need for world change, or will at least be open to the notion. Nowadays in new age circles the terms 'world transformation' and 'planetary healing' are bandied around with enthusiasm, intermixed with varieties of millennialism and apocalyptic catastrophism. Few have thought how world change and the awakening of humanity might actually come to pass, in greater detail. Many invoke geological, climatic or astronomical catastrophe, massive social reorientation, divine dispensation, extraterrestrial intervention or other dramas, without fully grasping how such phenomena might realistically affect us all. If our incomes, comforts, children, morning cup of coffee or annual holiday are hit by such a change, how will we feel?

Rain falls on saints and sinners alike, and it is unlikely that simple black-and-white solutions will prevail. Bad Guys will probably not awaken one morning with the inspiration to change their ways, and Good Guys might not be fired up with clarity and instant answers. There might be no descent of angelic hosts or star-people, and there could be an almighty shoot-out. The potential details of the situation and the specific events which could arise mysteriously become more elusive the closer you look at them. Nevertheless, as real-estate agents are wont to describe dilapidated houses, this property has great potential for renovation.

Predicting possibilities has its value if it widens our horizons, yet if we omit to see reality because we're waiting for the predicted signs, we'll get nowhere. If we wait for a massively-forceful prompt to get us moving on world transformation, we'll conceivably blow our chances. Our approach to change must be proactive – it needs to come from us in advance of final need. There is no map to follow, yet we must start somewhere. So we're faced with an enigma, an all-embracing, stacked queue of competing priorities, and approaching this logically and rationally is a demonstrable non-starter – logic and rationality have become part of the problem. So how to proceed? That's what this book is about!

The coming century is likely to be characterised by multiple hair-raising close shaves and crunches with reality, mammoth changes in economics, politics, social structures, nature, human values and beliefs. Tragedies, wrenches, shocks, hard medicine, withdrawal-symptoms from the past, cultural frictions and change-fatigue are on the agenda. It could be a tough century – although, for those choosing to be born into the 21st century, this will be their normality. However, underpinning this, there might well be counteractive relief, a resolution of age-old issues, a simplification, growing human integrity, cooperation, consciousness-growth and the dawning of an utterly new and unprecedented world civilisation. There could be much more happiness in coming times. Perhaps that's what many of the bright young souls being born today are coming for.

The nexus of world change lies with us now, at the turn of the millennium, in our current societies and situations. Whether or not it is because it is the turn of a millennium, this acute situation nevertheless exists. Whether we like or want it or not, we are organised into groupings, nations and cultures which are being forced to square up with each other, and with the natural world and universe which contain us. This is our starting-point.

Our options are proactive change or received crisis. Will we be willing to go through the necessary wrenches, breakthroughs and sacrifices to allow a manageable though rapid transition over several decades? Or are we going to wait, gritting our teeth for a massive storm which tragically clears many issues in one go? Destruction is not really an option: like the suicide of a teenager, it is a meaningless fate met before there has been a chance to find out what life is really about. It doesn't make sense of our history.

Current reality maintains itself as long as everyone continues to agree to it. It all hangs around confidence in the existing system, in defined consensual reality. If there is enough confidence that tomorrow is just going to be another ordinary day, like yesterday, and that everything is going to work out just fine, the ship carries on sailing. Yet we approach a milestone, a mammoth pause for thought, an occasion for peering into the foggy future. This is the Millennium. What a mess! Yet what an opportunity!

NOTES
(1) Manichaeism was a teaching expounded by the prophet Manes or Mani, a psychic who worked in the 240s-270s in India and at the court of Shapur I of Persia. Mani evoked B reaction from orthodox Zoroastrans in Iran, eventually being put to death. His teaching became known as Manichaeism – based on the conflict between dark and light. The world was seen to be a manifestation of light, infiltrated by the forces of darkness. Manichaeism aimed to release particles of light imprisoned in matter, bringing about an ascension or refinement of the world to a new level of being. This involved a regimen of strict asceticism and rejection of the things of the world. The Persian persecution of Manichaeists led to the westward flight of its adherents, mixing into the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean philosophical melting pot as dualism. This was disapproved of by many Church Fathers: the ascetic and mendicant lifestyle advocated ran counter to the growing formalism, wealth and power-structures of the Church. By underground channels, the idea spread into Europe in the 300s, especially amongst Cathars in SW France, who followed the teachings of the Roman bishop Novatian, and the Bogomils, following the Byzantine monk Bogomilus. Both sects became exceptionally critical of the Catholic and Orthodox churches – and, worse, their ideals appealed politically to many ordinary people who resented the impositions of the Church on their local ways. Manichaean ideas nevertheless infiltrated Christian, Hebrew and Muslim thinking, living on to this day even in New Age circles – amongst Ascensionists in particular.
(2) Eschatology is the theological study of the overall spiritual destiny and ending of existence. (Greek eskhatos = last).
(3) Keller, Werner, The Bible as History, London, 1956. Hassnain, Prof Fida M, A Search for the Historical Jesus, Gateway, Bath, 1993.
(4) The more important of the 26 missing gospels are the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of James and the Gospel of Barnabas. They are to be found in:
Robinson, James M, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, E J Brill, Leiden, 1984.
James, Montague, The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford, 1924.
Schonfield, Hugh, The Authentic New Testament, London, 1956.
The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 25 vols, Edinburgh, 1869.
(5) This is the argument pursued by Henry Lincoln et al in the book The Messianic Legacy, London, 1986. It is a B argument, though not proven conclusively.
(6) Keller, Werner, The Bible as History, Hodder & Stoughton, 1956.
(7) Jenkins, Palden, A Historical Ephemeris, privately published, 1993. Cannon, Dolores, Jesus and the Essenes, Gateway Books, Bath, UK, 1992.
(8) Derek S Allan & J Bernard Delair, When the Earth Nearly Died, section IV:15ff, Gateway Books, Bath, UK, 1994.
(9) Nostradamus (Michel de Notredame, 1503-66), was a physician, seer and astrologer, born in Provence and working largely in Lyons. He grew famous as a healer of plague victims. In 1555-58 he published his Centuries in two volumes, containing predictions in rhymed quatrains. This being the time of the Inquisition and significant abuses of power, he disguised his predictions in arcane riddles to avoid prosecution, leading to a long history of interpretative misunderstanding which continues today. He became court astrologer and physician to Catherine de Medici and Charles IX. The most intelligible interpretation of his work I have met derives from past-life regression (see Conversations with Nostradamus by Dolores Cannon, Ozark, USA, 1989), in which he gives an accurate interpretation his own quatrains. Though this method of acquiring historical information is easily disputed by rationalists, the quality of the material gathered is exceptional. Mrs Cannon's work even explains how Nostradamus gleaned his insights, and why he did it. She states that she does not believe he wanted his prophecies to come true: he wanted us to utilise freedom of choice to change history and prove him wrong.
(10) Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, abridged version, Oxford Univ Press, 1946/1974.
(11) Astrologers would attribute this to the Neptune-Pluto conjunction of 1892 – the previous one was in the 1380s, at the very beginning of the Renaissance.
(12) A statistic given on BBC radio on 28 October 1994 by Denis Healey, former Foreign Secretary to the British government.
(13) Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994.

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