Richard Tarnas writes:
"Everything that Joseph Campbell described as the initiatory experience: the crisis of meaning, being isolated from the rest of the community, the sense of facing one's own mortality, the personal suffering, the deconstruction of the old identity, like an old self is dying – everything that I just described... is what's happening on the collective level to our human civilization. Except now we are looking at planetary mortality rather than just an individual person's mortality. We are having to go through a dying of our whole identity as to who we are in relation to nature. Who we are relative to the cosmos...
And the question is, will the kind of "near death experience" we are going through in slow motion right now, be sufficient to catalyze enough of a psycho-spiritual transformation, in enough people, that those people can serve as centers of insight and equilibrium, to inform the whole?"
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