I appreciate you watching/listening, Ed. It’s good to have another perspective on the discussion with the benefit of reflection. One thought I’ll add to your point about relationships: I am struck by how often I talk to people who seem very connected, yet tell me that a predominant experience in their life is isolation.
For all the various structures of consiousness and their geneologies that Gebser painstakingly examined, he also said: “In the end, everything is simple.” And indeed, sometimes I feel a simple faith that if we (in general) could just learn how to better relate to one another, everything else work work itself out eventually.
But of course, every simple truth comes with some fine print—in this case, a disclaimer that we find ourselves in the midst of accelerating processes that severely limit our ability to relate. There is an objective, entropic dynamic we are struggling against. Call it “civilization collapse,” but there’s also a cosmic dimension to it. Our souls have taken the shape of habits, attachments, and traumas accumulated over many millennia, which memetically and energetically propagate—unless contained, counteracted, or transmuted.
Ultimately, we struggle against…ourselves. Even our genetics (as @Alex_Blum argues) can be seen as powerful molecular-level habits that may be impossible to break without radical evolution. Until then: what we really need are “safe spaces”—for evil.
Yet in the end, everything is simple: there is little to do but to surrender to the struggle and work through all our millennia of karma, in very (inter)personal and specific ways, for as long as it takes, until we open to the richer realms of the relational and transpersonal…which attract, like a light in the darkness perhaps.
This is to say: “Collective Realization” might be a lot harder, and take a lot longer, than we think. Then again, time is not what we think, eh, @achronon?