man-technology transition

Above ground and commitment

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No doubt many of you have experienced the versatility of human relationships and the difficulty of meeting commitments. There are a number of concomitant factors and a consequence on the transition we are making.
 

Symbolic Above Ground

We are living in a period of our humanity, the anthropocene...[1]which is characterized in particular by the notion of "above ground".[2] in the sense of being cut off from the living by living in cities and this in ever-increasing numbers.
This means no longer being in touch with the cycles of life, the seasons, the cycle of plant growth, i.e. with moments of acceleration and others of apparent slowing down where growth is not always visible as in winter. However, the process of transformation of living things takes place, partly visibly and partly not visibly.
 
On the other hand, urban life, essentially asphalted, no longer allows this contact with the rhythms of the earth. Moreover, by creating the Internet and its connections, particularly via electrical energy, these connections lead us to experience a continuous rhythm, which is only interrupted when the switches go off. Information in BIT mode is continuous, fast and requires human beings to follow a constantly accelerating speed both in the quantity of information and in the speed of transmission. Two components that collide with the human biorhythm and which participate in the burn-out people.
 

Psychological weakening in connection with the paradigm shift

In addition to this last phenomenon, the weakest among us are becoming more and more psychologically fragile. In fact, there has been a significant increase in borderline, bipolar and schizophrenic profiles, as an echo to our trans-paradigmatic period.[3]. In a society that is reinventing itself, the criteria of the dominant model are disintegrating and those of the emerging model are not yet fixed to be structuring, since they are in co-elaboration.
The transitions then become the space for all the possibilities as well as for all the fragilities that are aggregating: special fragility, difficulty to insert oneself into a system that has lost meaning and that excludes, economic fragility and psychological fragility. Each one is obviously reinforced.
A paradox that grows with the fact that it is often those who dare to leave the system who are best able to conceive of prospective possibilities. However, they are not the only ones, and it is the cooperation of all the actors working to design tomorrow that will shape our future, but that is another matter.
 

A model to be reformed

The modern paradigm of our society is unquestionably being revisited and gradually disintegrating, if only because it is based on an unlimited use of the earth's resources, which are obviously limited. So the impasse is only a matter of time, as some people have been calling it for the past few years. Collapse[4], Degrowth[5] or Collapsology[6] to make us aware of the consequences of such excesses.
 
Perspective of an anxiety-provoking future which results on the one hand in withdrawal and conservatism, on the other hand in attempts to co-create differently tomorrow and finally in regular explosions of fragility which no longer find a framework to reassure them.
So faced with an exclusionary model, deregulated liberalism favouring the richest everywhere and contributing to the increase in inequalities and the impoverishment of a greater number of people, those who had difficulty with a demanding economic model find themselves even more on the sidelines and dreaming of a sustainable future.
 

Understanding complexity: a holistic understanding

Understanding complexity requires a holistic understanding of reality, which consists of being interested in all the fields of reality without knowing how to steer them or accept the wisdom of time to embrace them.
So this multidisciplinary approach opens up a wide variety of fields, some of which do not have the instructions for mastering them - this requires many years of research and practice. This then contributes to global chaos.
 

Evolution of consciousness and lack of anchoring / reality principle

From the need to reinvent themselves, to the dream of a better and sustainable future for all, part of the population is replacing Hobbes' theoretical anchors "man is a wolf for man" with Spinoza's anchors on joy and, in the quest for happiness for all, are looking for an exciting and mobilizing perspective in the face of an agonizing future.
 
We had shown in The imaginary of September 11th[7] that, in the face of the challenges of our globalization, the complexity of the parameters is such as to co-create the future that it has condemned many to impotence. This has contributed to some people refocusing on themselves and exploring, through personal development, therapy and spiritual quest, both paths that make sense and also allow for personal fulfilment in the absence of professional or societal achievement and, above all, to have a significant influence on the major changes in our civilization.
 
In this quest for the self, it is also the opening to spiritual awareness and the exploration, without too many guides, of "invisible" fields of energies, of ancestral "shamanic" practices with the exotic infatuation for what is new, unexplored and without taking the precaution of knowing the rules and safeguards.
In our fast-paced society, obviously for personal change, it is the same, to seek a radical change in a few days.
 
If these roles - sages, sorcerers, shamans, guardians of wisdom - throughout all societies and civilizations of humanity have required years, even decades of learning, it is because going into the fields of the invisible requires delicate and time-consuming keys to be acquired so that practitioners are both in touch with subtle skills and rooted in reality, on the one hand to avoid egotistical drifts and on the other, those of the above ground.
 
What does that mean?
Let's take an image of the qualities of the earth and the sky.
The cycles of the earth, as we have seen, are long and when a tree seed grows and takes root, it will become sustainable in its "commitment" to make a tree, it follows its genetic program, adapts to its environment and does not deviate from the promise of embodying what it is. On the contrary, in the sky, we see how the wind makes the movements of clouds labile, it takes a few minutes for air masses to be moved from one space to another.
Thus, if when we open ourselves to ethereal, volatile, subtle dimensions like energies and this without training, guides and safeguards, then like the clouds we wander from one gust of wind to another, and our relational commitments as well as those of our actions undergo the same versatility. One jolt in the universe and we change course radially.
A phenomenon enhanced by the zapping effects made possible by new television technologies with remote control to the Internet and social networks.
So let's add the two phenomena and we get what in common parlance we call "perched" people.
Three weekends of Reiki and you heal humanity and on top of that you are masters ! This does not call into question the content of the practice but rather the transmission curricula.
 

Anchoring and commitments

When we were mostly in the agricultural world, we were forced to make long-term commitments or else nothing would grow. Agricultural transmissions are spread over years and decades. Whereas today, changing a website as part of a business sale, nowadays, takes from a few hours to just a few days.
 
So if we combine the factors we have mentioned: acceleration of information, zapping, labile effects, both of the economy and of the transmission of information, as well as of people's characters, we obtain as a result a significant increase in the number of people who no longer manage to keep their commitments because they get caught up in uncontrolled ethereal dimensions and do not have the resources to manage the volume of information passing through, particularly in social networks. Everything is disappearing at the speed of the flow of electricity. This leads, initially, to a certain inertia due to the flow of information which makes people forget the previous day's post.
 

Delicate transition[8]

However, our transition of society requires us to reach a fairly stable diagnosis in order to take lasting action to make significant changes.
If we are constantly changing our minds and questioning the decisions taken, we are taking a big risk of not being able to achieve the alternative paths to the dominant model that is breaking up. And in doing so, to continue, like the Titanic, on the same basis and to enter even more quickly into the wall of excesses (withdrawal of resources, pollution, deterioration of biodiversity...).
 
Consequently, the more unstable we are, the more volatile our commitments become and the more fragile the transition becomes, which is in fact even more worrying.
 
This is why, in the face of these accumulated uncertainties, some people prefer conservative folds in which values are more binary, with clear oppositions and sufficient means of control to constrain people and ensure the sustainability of systems that wish to be sustainable, even if they hold promises for the future of the earth and humanity that are probably not very exciting.[9].
 
Thus, if we want to bring about the inevitable RenaiSens - an emerging paradigm shift - we have to reinvent ourselves, to take into account new modes of interaction (digital, Internet, connection, etc.), to become aware of our human mechanisms and those of the living and to approach eco-modernity.[10] from a point of anchorage in reality that allows it to meet its commitments in the medium and long term. The term "anchoring" comes from the field of personal development, it is more than pragmatism, the ability to remain stable, regardless of economic, psychological, numerical or other turbulence. It is not by chance that the GAFA, Google mainly, have put in place the most sophisticated meditation programs, secular, to give the necessary resources to be able to develop our cognitive abilities and our "anchoring" and to face the most important destabilizations.
 
An evolution towards a Humanity 3.0[11] A need to reinvent ourselves in the face of Artificial Intelligence and transhumanism as a future, which are for the moment our main representations of the future.
 


[1]https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocènewhere humans have a decisive influence on the planet.

[2]Pierre Rabhi mentioned this notion in several of his books.

[3]Christine Marsan, Entrer dans un monde de coopération, Chronique Sociale, 2013.

[4]Jared Diamond, Collapse, Folio Essays, 2009.

[5]Cédric Biagini, David Murray, Aux origines de la décroissance : cinquante penseurs, L'Echappée, 2017.

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[6]Pablo Servigne Raphael Stevens, How everything can fall apart. Little manual of collapsology for the use of present generations, Seuil, 2015.

[7]Christine Marsan, The Imagination of 9/11. From the ashes a new world emerges, Camion Noir, 2012.

[8]For more details and references, we have detailed this point in Christine Marsan, Delicate Transition, Acatl, 2017.

[10]Notion carried by Eric Julien and Thierry Geffray from the Ecole Pratique de la Nature et des Savoirs.

[11]Argument developed in Christine Marsan Entrer dans un monde de coopération, Chronique Sociale, 2013.
 

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