Merrilee, your analysis is frighteningly correct in that we may be at a crossroads unlike any humanity has ever faced. And you are also correct in that it’s all moving too fast for almost everyone to assimilate in any kind of coherent way, causing many to throw up their hands and say to the various powers that be: just fix it; make the chaos go away; give me peace. And by abandoning our ability to direct our lives, we tumble into the darkest parts of man’s mind where power becomes absolute and woe be it to anyone who chaffs or resists that power. We’ve seen it many times before, and always with disastrous results. Can anything be done? Are we facing various forms of extinction - environmental, cultural, psychological, and physical - that cannot be stopped? Have we moved beyond the point of no return? It would be hard to argue that we have not. My singular question is what does it really take for humanity to transform itself; what did it take? Have we been at this nexus before? I have one glimmer of hope. The transformation of humanity has always been, it seems, the result of it being at death’s door with no obvious way to avoid total destruction. Merrilee speaks of prehistoric peoples who drew images with sharpened stones and pigments made from dirt, charcoal, and animal fat. It is unknown what were they trying to say, but what they rendered on the cave walls in those simple but powerful images activates our imagination. We look back through a blurry portal in time and try to grasp their mystical visions, their hopes, their fears, and their uniquely human sense that tomorrow need not be like today, that what is done today can alter what happens tomorrow. What a revelation that must have been. What power could be wielded if the future could be changed. Draw a galloping beast and stare at it in the dim firelight as a hunting tutorial in how to avoid it or kill it tomorrow. Conjure up in the cave’s dark recesses a mystical vision that imports a talisman with magical powers that promise a coming good fortune. Gather around a fertility image as a group initiation into the mysteries of birth and death. If our ancestors were not trying to glimpse into the unknowns of their world, if they were not trying to alter their future, if they were not trying to prepare themselves for battle with some demon or beast that could suddenly appear in the mist, then there would have been no need to summon magical powers from the rocks and drawings. Only in our dreams can we modern humans drift back to those ancient caves and have some sense of the intensity and immediacy of our ancestor’s waking lives. Only in our nightmares can we feel the paralyzing fears they faced in the darkness of the cave, and only in our comforting fantasies can we exalt in their ecstasy when, in the firelight, they triumphed over all that awaited them. But in the reality of the daylight, they must have felt defeated facing down the terrors of their day. Since then, humanity has constantly reinvented itself to face down the terrors that each age presented. And this points to what truly separates us from all other forms of life, and that is, unlike the wild beasts, our behavior is not driven solely by our environment, but by our imagination and by our deep desire to anticipate the future so we can alter its outcome. Can we alter the future before it is too late? That depends on what we consider as being ’too late.’ Maybe it will take an apocalyptic event to catalyze a ’new’ version of humanity. It seems we have come finally to the brink of deciding that question. We are at the stage now that has gone far beyond corrupting our physical environment to the point where we can literally recreate a variant human species using frighteningly simple and available genetic technology. There is no roadmap and nowhere near enough psychological and emotional acuity to be able to handle this almost unlimited God-like power we have invented. So the question is how do we deal with this duality of our minds: on one hand our visions and our dreams, as Jung points out, are always trying to drive us out of our unconscious selves towards a future where everything in the unconscious is realized; and on the other hand we stand helpless and paralyzed in front of this shapeless vague future that is shrouded in all same fears as our prehistoric ancestors had. I think Russ and Paco, and each of you who have been sending in eloquent and meaningful comments, have been intuitively providing an answer to this question. We humans have a strong need to try to link our days on Earth as if they are a string of pearls, each one connected to the other forming a circle around our intuitive sense of wholeness, of our understanding where we are in space and time. It is an illusion. We are more like dotted lines on a map. Here there is a known path, a clear direction; then over there the path and the lines peter out and we find ourselves going in circles or retracing our steps unknowingly, only to find we are back at the start or, more likely, lost and forced to find another route, another set of dotted lines. And in this way, we make our way through life doggedly trying to make sense of it all, to nail down our futures, to revisit our pasts in a new, more benign light. But deep down, buried towards the very back of the cave wall in our minds, we ‘know’ there is something coming; its reflected in our fantasies, in our wisps of intuition, in our rare moments of great joy or sorrow, and always in our dreams that we discard and discount. Early man had dreams too and they meant more to them than to us. They must have seen something in those dreams that we do not, and they played out the meaning of their dreams in vivid drawings and rituals that carried them through the night and helped prepare them for the coming day. It is people like you that will help create a viable answer to the question of where do we go from here. Humanity will rise or fall not because of any modern weapons or biological entities, but whether or not we have lost all ability to change ourselves and our future and to decide once and for all if we want to be, as Paco discusses in his book, members of the ‘universe community,’ and where his ‘feeling of fellowship’ extends to all things whether seen or unseen. Paco so beautifully anticipates this in his book when he says, “There may come a time in which new and deeper structures of consciousness will compensate this historical imbalance we have all inherited. There may come a come a time in which significant numbers of us learn to accept and differentiate our own inner darkness, healing our inner divisions and recovering in the process the discarded values of the soul.’ Well said, Paco. Al through his book, Paco speaks of love as an all-enveloping resurrected vapor that encased him as a result of his collision with destiny in Caborca and his confrontation with himself as a result. As Merrilee fears, we are heading for a collision on a global level and that may finally propel all of us towards are own ‘Caborcas.’ And as that goes, so goes the world. And finally, the stimulation you all are providing me keeps careening off into poetry. So here is a shorter, poetic response to this latest series of comments.