The Ages of Humanity and Our Future
It seems to me that there have been psychological ages of humankind, which roughly parallel the stages of growth/development of a single, female, human. The first was before the Big Bang (Oneness, or being in the womb). Then came the Second Age, during which all was either yang (Asian light/active/masculine) or yin (Asian feminine, dark and passive), as the balanced creatures and forces messed around and grew—evolving.
Then, with more humans on the planet, came the Third Age, which lasted til say the year 2000, hand in hand with belief in the Trinity (male God, Jesus, & Holy Spirit) and the three pagan goddesses–Maiden, Mother, Crone–of woman’s life cycle. It appears that the Catholic faith and English and Spanish languages turned out to be psychological leaders, perhaps for the reason that they blossomed in popularity around the colonized world, connecting it. Today the two languages, the second and third-most spoken around the planet, are similar and utilize an almost identical alphabet (I’m talking about English and Spanish).
Others found faith in multiple male and female deities, such as the Ancient Greeks and today’s Nigerian Yoruba–or just one god, or one goddess, for only a few examples. Naturally, birth control was frowned upon amongst the Catholics of this Age, as folks around the world intuitively knew that their “mission in life” was to procreate, or at least that there weren’t too many people, like there are today. Or, perhaps, to make enough humans to start saving Earth from ourselves, and to progress through the fourth to the final (Fifth) Age, with a balance like the Second Age, which will last forevermore, it seems.
The next—Fourth—Age is where we are today—kind of like menopause (I call it metapause—“meta” being slang meaning referring to itself). We are slowing down our baby creation-focus as a planet and are beginning to turn outward to see what else is going on in our planetary home. We want to get through this uncomfortable time and (with all the people now on the planet) discover how to be connected to each other rather than living our lives separately but coincidentally in the same environment. We want to go into the next stage (I call it the Fifth, or Quintessence—“That of which all is made”) to take the world out for a dance, together! If we keep spoiling the planet, all humanity will be lost—for our individual selves, families, and our friends down the way (around the whole place); let’s not commit suicide here, even if we are feeling troubled!
I’ve figured out how to do it and how it will work, and it looks really, really very good, as comedian Jerry Seinfeld said in one episode of his series. However, I have a thought that if the world were alive, as some believe, it would want us to halt rapine (seizing property or body) and starvation—these are insults to our naturally bountiful and safe planet.
What I’ve come up with is that we need to move to the Fifth Age because it will take us to another second stage-type situation and leave us there forever, in the sense that it will be another balanced yin/yang-run time. We will come out of our Fourth Age, self-referential cocoons and, post-metapausally, fly around like butterflies!
I suggest that as people age, our experience of our bodies changes—and our concept of our body’s symbolism changes, too. We start off experiencing ourselves as being two-sided, think 2+2=4, 2×2=4—the Fourth stage of experience, in which we concentrate on thinking only of what we can do with our hands (2) and eyes (2). These body parts dominate our awareness until we proceed. Then we enter a new state: we grow to perceive the products of our fingers and toes and thus draw 5 into the picture. Two (sides) x 5=10.
Computer language is all 1s and 0s. We learn to type, play instruments or sew (for example) and walk, using fingers and toes, respectively. Focusing on the desire to grow into Quintessence, we can plan peaceful events—artworks (and musical accomplishments)—with others. Utilizing both sides of our body—i. e., exercising our faces, dancing, drumming with our hands, doing gentle martial arts such as the Brazilian capoeira—will bring us into a better—more mature—balance than that of four. This is the balance of 5, which takes us together into ten, then 0s and 1s—back to a two-beat rhythm, like our two sides (10 divided by 5=2). Thus we invoke yin’s and yang’s balanced interaction, like the first Second Age, an improvement on the Third Age and the Fourth Age, which were natural developments, given who humans evolved to be, but lacked the staying power, strength, and grace we humans are worth.
Post-metapause—Quintessence—the Fifth Age—is all about connecting with ourselves through others, learning how to be whole by sharing the planet benignly—playing together. This must be learned and practiced! We have a lot of play to do: my psychological journey—growing a self as if from a seed, doing stages of growth I should have accomplished as a kid in the last 30 years of my life—would not have happened without the ability to play. My therapist and I utilize our co-created space to do the psychological work, but it happens through our sharing our energies applied to issues of our relationship, in the spaces of the world that we encounter. It is creative and feels profoundly nourishing, as the pieces come together and my mind, heart and soul feel attended to. Play-working enables me to sort myself out, growing, and growing up. I hypothesize that our world is the same, and will not develop without our full panoply of emotion—including playing (we’ve been through the grief already, and now it’s time for the good stuff, what we’ve been waiting for! Furthermore, I’ve been insane for us, so we don’t have to go down that road again.).
Using hands and fingers for friendly and cooperative acts must be accomplished if we want to get out of this Fourth Age, it seems to me. Traveling on foot sounds like a good way to awaken our spirituality, to be able to get to someone to shake hands with. We can enjoy the sensation of helping each other, like holding hands, if we want a future for our human race. How to reset at peace? We must express and enjoy our natural body symbolism, instead of being stuck in a pathologically abstract psychological system. Imagine how computers and/or artificial intelligence could be involved—go ahead, this is a project for you! I think they’re helpful, but I don’t have all the answers– I hope you will start asking questions now, and be able to listen and play with others—play “together,” whatever that game or tune will be—and strive for our new stage. Get ready to feel, because I bet you will become like an adolescent, discovering real life—planetary world citizen experience will be new and exciting for us all! Let’s be brave and embrace our future, instead of hiding from it in our cocoons!
The Fourth Age is the phase to which we’ve developed because we’ve grown as a world, having created lots of humans with lots of problems. Why? Because we haven’t been globally connected in certain key ways. This age of growing up is natural, but we need to work and play in order to develop psychologically and get even healthier physically. Creative, peaceful interaction of humans on our planet has not yet become the norm. This metapausal age finds us stopping the widespread generation of life (as, on another level, in the U. S., for example, kids are simply too expensive to have, anyway!) and getting caught up in metaphors.
The year 2020 finds us in bad shape. There is less physical life around, and there are more built structures, in this young century and new millennium. As humans are dying from the Corona virus, we seem to be dwelling in a metaphorically as well as literally sick age, so I call the Fourth Age the metaphorical (or Metafourical). The landscape is not the only aspect that’s getting grossly overdeveloped. Unhealthy capitalism—money grows instead of love; our metaphorical American healthcare—as if free healthcare is not jusitfied, going hand in hand with our sick relationship to nutrition—as if knowledge about good food, and its availability, should not be birthrights—proceeds with metaphorically ill American interaction —racism, white “supremacy” and sexism. Yikes! If we utilize our body symbolism, however, we can make the progressive change we need to move forward.
That means cooperation with all nations/tribes for art-making and music-playing, utilizing our bodies’ parts and wholes. That may also mean, for all Americans, taking a medicine placebo for our sickly country, which has now suffered much PTSD from “Lump’s” (Trump’s) presidency and our dearth of feminine leadership–yes, a sugar pill, so we can become sweeter and catch up with some of the rest of the world; we need to feel like we are doing something to get better!
According to my preliminary research, conception may be self-controlled (see my essay, “Conception,” in the Feminist section of my website, in which I explain the role of vaginal acid balance in fertility and discuss the use of progesterone shots for birth control). This new natural skill of self-controlled conception, which could be perfected, would help us live with more control of ourselves for the future—so every child is a wanted child. Yet it is important to mention that abortion is a necessity in pregnancies in the USA these days, because couples often lack resources for raising children on their own in the current system of economic disaster.
Additionally, because of our flag, America has a special responsibility to the world. Number One, our flag is up there on the Moon. Number Two, it is full of space symbolism and metaphor. (It has seven red stripes, signifying bloodshed in war—also, the length of a woman’s period—and thirteen stripes in total— the amount of moon months, and feminine periods, in a year. It has five-pointed stars which in Ancient Egyptian culture stood for the brightest star, Sirius, which enters the visible sky every year at the exact same time. Sirius is a binary star, and the orbit of Sirius B is 50 years, like our fifty states.) Thirdly, many Americans don’t want our flag to be utilized for evil acts, anymore, such as terrorism against our own Capitol, or against small nations because businessmen want to steal their resources from them—let alone the crimes committed against our own people! It’s time for a new flag: a world flag!
The first woman will land on the moon in 2024, if the Artemis mission goes as planned—hopefully bearing an Earth flag with her, and reading aloud my “Poem to New Glory” (see “Patriotic” section of this site). A world flag, to be maintained on Earth and the Moon, would offer the USA a chance to formally lead the world in acting less rudely on the planetary stage, and more justly, getting back to our roots and decent values. We could focus on the pursuit of collective happiness, not just individual growth, acting sustainably for the good of all. As Albert Einstein said:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Also,
“‘We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in…’” (Aldo Leopold)