When I was young, I looked forward to a life as a Navy aviator, scientist and educator in an essentially stable culture that, despite change, would endure long past my life. Science, literature and art seemed, in themselves, of enduring value - a refuge for subtle perceptions and subversive ideas that could influence the broader culture over time. Like most people, I accepted the concrete solidity of modern civilization and believed its institutions would remain in place. I no longer have that perspective. Mulling over the facts, and considering our situation over time, I concluded, sadly, that our current civilization is not a machine built to last..

The cultural critic and mystic: William Irwin Thompson thinks we are approaching an iminent "catastrophic bifurication" of the species, " the hominid movement is not a state that can be perfected, it is a process, and to arrest that process is probably not possible. Once we were prokaryotic bacteria then we were dinosaurs and now we are human about to become through a catastrophic bifurication, subhuman or posthuman,... From the greenhouse effect to the ozone hole, or from sex, drugs and rock and roll to fundamentalist purifications, or from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence, everything we like to call human and, even the planet as we know it, are being taken away from us by our own actions whether conscious or unconscious".

A former humanities professor at MIT and practicing yogi, Thompson is one of a small number of originial thinkers who not only understand our present impasse but realizes that it is not the whole story. That something else is taking place as well - a movement of consciousness returning us to a level of awareness denied and repressed by the materialistic thrust of our current civilization. Essential to that process is a change in our understanding of myth.

The physcists Heisenberg wrote, " natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between us and nature". It is an interesting paradox that science has studied the world, attaining deeper levels of understanding, the technology produced by our scientific knowledge has simultaneously torn it apart. The bio-spheric crisis we have unleashed is entirely man made.

Myth based civilizations and traditional cultures believe that human beings are inseparable from natural laws and cosmic cycles. The pattern of the growth of human societies might be viewed as an aspect or expression of nature. Even the development of our individual capacities and the evolution of self awareness unfold from the capacities contained within the potential of the natural world.

Often I have felt less like a person than the convenient intersection for ideas to meet and mesh, a magnet or strange attractor, compelled or fated - perhaps tragically misguided. None the less, my friends and life partner have bugged me for some time to write something down, rather than just poo pooing them. So this is the start of a crude attempt on my part to do that. I hope to lift the veils in order that you might see what I see. That what is coming is not "the end of the world" but rather the end of a world and the begginning of the next

more to follow