like a wave rolling toward shore, the Age of Separation rears up to its maximum height even as it hollows out in the moment before it crashes. This crash, inevitable eons ago, is upon us today.
Thus writes
Charles Eisenstein in The Ascent of Humanity. He calls the old paradigm "the age of separation", and he calls the new paradigm which is replacing it "the age of reunion". This is reunion with our souls or inner selves, reunion with each other, and reunion with nature. Linear thinking and technologies are replaced by circular and regenerative approaches. Work and art merge into artistry: the creation of beauty, for the joy of doing so... and so work becomes play! Education becomes creative self discovery. Money becomes abundant and perishable. Nature becomes our teacher, rather than the object of our dominion. Science and religion fuse into holistic spiritual and ecological awareness. Eisenstein says:
The engineers of the future will design for sustainability, for dignity, and for beauty. They will, in other words, be artists, creating technologies for a world of artists on a garden earth. The conflict that all artists encounter between creating for the market and creating for the spirit will cease, when work and art, money and sustainability, come into alignment.
...
The gathering convergence of crises is bringing the Age of Separation to an end, and with it everything that we know as "civilization". Yet the end of civilization-as-we-know-it need not be a return to the past. We equate the ascent of humanity with an escalating domination of nature only because we deny the universe's inherent creative energy, sacredness, and purpose. When we recognize that nature is itself dynamic, creative, and growing, then we need no longer transcend it, but simply participate in it more fully.
