In his book about Julian, Matthew Fox quotes from a book by Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker. The book is called Radical Regeneration: Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction. The quotes are from Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich, pp95-6
The ancient Hindu sages, we are told, “predicted the age in which we are now living. For them Kali Yuga represents the collapse of every kind of inner and outer coherence and personal and institutional forms of compassion, concern, and justice.” The current collapse of industrial civilizations all around us seems to mirror this reality. We are rapidly moving toward a “lethal stage” when “Kali’s dance will destroy ghastly amounts of human and animal life and a vast portion of the planet.”
Yet they believe that the “global dark night crisis is not the end of humanity but the birth of the new human.” The dark night, including a “savage grace of annihilation” can lead us to a new stage in our evolutionary journey.
This has given me something to do in this time of no energy and barely functional intellect. I can hold a vision of humans working to celebrate diversity, to gather groups of diverse humans and self-organize into a emergent phenomenon which will be a sustainable and healthy planetary — planetary what? “civilization” is related to the Latin for “city” depends on hierarchical structures, etc. I think we’re talking about something completely different here. I’d use the word community but that has connotations of being relatively small. I think what’s being talked about here is a planetary intelligence, at a higher level than the one that keeps Gaia’s life-support systems working.
My latest version of my prayer/vision: “I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is alive and intelligent, and works with us, teaching us to value diversity and self-organize into a higher level being.”
For “self-organize into a higher order being” see “We’re at Home in the Universe,” paragraph two.