Perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity today is that evolution since the most recent big bang about 13.7 billion years ago has been more divergent that convergent. First, large and small material objects were formed, such as stars, galaxies, atoms, and electrons in a process we can call hylogenesis. Then during the last three and a half billion years on Earth, we have seen the wondrous diversity of the species evolve. Biogenesis then gradually gave way to noogenesis—the evolution of the mind—about 25,000 years ago, the analytical mind becoming predominant at the dawn of history about 5,000 years ago. As a result, our minds have become fragmented and society has become divided into religious and national factions, academic specialization, and the division of labour in the workplace.
Not only this. We have become separate from Divine Reality, a split that occurred very early in human learning, as we see in the root of human, which is Latin humus ‘ground, earth’, from the PIE base *dhghem- ‘earth’. This etymology shows that our forebears some 7,000 years ago conceived of human beings as earthlings in contrast to the divine residents of the heavens. So the split between the human and the Divine lies deep in the collective unconscious. To be humble, which derives from the same root, is therefore to deny our Divinity. Conversely, it is arrogant to realize and acknowledge our True Nature as Divine Beings, arrogance being the opposite of humility.
It is not therefore surprising that Erich Fromm, among others, has written extensively about our sick society and how it could be cured. First, we need to recognize the symptoms, that whenever we feel separate from the Immortal Ground of Being, we suffer from schizophrenia ‘split mind’, cognate with science. And evolutionary divergence has led us into delusion, grossly distorting our maps of ourselves, society, and the Cosmos.
To heal our fragmented, split minds, and hence our sick society, we need to transform the seven pillars of unwisdom that underlie Western civilization and much of the rest of the world into the seven pillars of wisdom. Such a radical transformation involves a contextual inversion of the scientific worldview into the mystical worldview, going much further than the paradigm shift being advocated today. Being then grounded in the Ineffable Truth, we can cocreate the Sharing Economy, living in love, peace, and harmony with each other and our environment, the great dream of humanity through the ages.