Western Civilization: Specially Created with Cosmic Purpose

Today, I’m sitting in a Starbuck’s in downtown Chicago.  It’s daytime so the thin veneer of what remains of western civilization is thicker with the light of day.  At night, or with the force of an organized mob, there are only the rules Hobbes, Darwin or Nietzsche explored.  I’m in the “The City that Works”….sometimes. With a limp. 

In 1966, when I was a grade schooler in St. Louis, Missouri, my family traveled to Chicago, the center of midwest culture and power, to tour the museums and have dinner at Jack Diamond’s Steakhouse (after a two-hour wait in the bar).  Today, there’s a woman (I think) obviously on meth or some legal psychotropic shadow boxing and holding conversation with unseen friends while roaming the Starbuck’s and no one is paying attention.  There’s 15 or 20 mostly millennial laptop surfers and five employees who all know the wisest course of action is to not pay attention to the scene.  How did we get here? We lost the thread of what western civilization was designed for. Let us review.

Step one. Raise the dead.  Phase one. Infrastructure. No city in our great civilization was better than Chicago in taking the dead sea creatures and dinosaurs and ancient flora dug out or pumped out of the earth and turning them into more new physical building blocks of life.  This was the number two American city, but only after the landing zone for all european immigration and for “hot” money, New York.  So really, Chicago, was the heart of active life on the north american continent for decades.  Western civilization was designed to raise the dead as chemicals and minerals and nutrients just laying dormant in the soil or in the deeper layers of rock and build factories and homes and cars and ships to support a lot of humans looking for a new world of political and religious freedom.  Chicago was our crown jewel. 

Step one, phase two.  Expression.  Once life becomes “civilized” and we are not fighting every winter for survival or other tribes for hunting lands then humans become more inventive and expressive.  Of what? We express our unconscious selves for our souls to grow through experience. Our hidden desires and the soul’s growth path are passed to us through our blood and our race and our history.  Dead memories that nature resurrects and feeds us via dreams and thru the mystery of desire to be relived. 

In phase two, the harvest, the invention of mass communications and electrification allows a human to program light and feed it to the masses.  And the most successful ‘ideas’ arise from the collective unconscious to guide the programming of the light. For example, war movies.  Each war movie, depending on the need to process or glorify the suffering, is a tool for expression of the trapped feelings, perhaps beings, hidden in the unconscious until our souls are ready for its next ‘opportunity’.

So step one of western civilization was to create the container and the mechanisms to raise the dead from both the spiritual above and the physical below and bring it into life to be expressed as art, music, drama, industriousness and inventiveness.  By design via western civilization, the expressions of feelings creates culture that should short circuit war and more violent deaths. Step two was to take all these expressions and refine them into what cosmonomics calls the neutral force. Other names are love, harmony, reconciliation and my favorite…the peace that surpasses all understanding.  Waking the dead and giving it life is much safer when there is an ethos of love and forgiveness preached throughout the land, if only on Sundays, to guide “the food of the gods” to this reality’s exit point, at the center of the human heart.

The Christian mystery and the foundational religion of western civilization at its core is a technology to cleanse the heart of humans and of humanity’s sins through forgiveness.  And for true devotees, to ‘die before you die’.  Every true spiritual path is the journey to free yourself of sin before you die. Think of the grandma who has seen, and forgiven, it all.  When humanity hits its worst cycle of inhumanity there must be some humans who remember an eye for an eye ends up with everyone blind.  How valuable is the bravery to say no?  Christianity was designed to deal with patterns of abuse of each other and of nature and to teach us how to ground them out.  Step two, in all its forms, is especially necessary if the main part of your civilization is doing its best to wake up as much death as it can and turn it into life as fast as it can.

Here in the heartland of western civilization, Chicago, there was everything.  Before.  The windy politicians. The mob. The mothers. The craftsmen.  The night clubs. The churches.  Good and evil living side by side.  What is missing now is that mystical center and the honor of the system “that worked”.  There was a feeling inside each person’s heart that they were all part of a living city revolving around an ethos as reliable and as powerful as the forges stamping out crankshafts for V8 engines.  Literal power to the people. On installment. Chicago had its own magic spell any Kansas farm girl could feel as soon as she set one foot inside the city limits.

Western civilization was a magic spell upon humanity that went thru its dark ages of colonialism and inquisition before it invented the renaissance and the enlightenment.  It’s peak expression was globalization, the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism.  We were born and lived for generations to carry the torch of freedom and a messianic willingness to die for our ideals.  God loved us as His good Son and still does as His prodigal son.  We can still enjoy heaven individually.  But every creation given to man eventually becomes the opposite of its creative intent.  Today, our civilization has woken up more ‘issues’ than we have the heart to bare and clear.  Western civilization, today, is both constipated and covered in demons.  And, we are the next hard lesson for all humanity, as well as ourselves.

There comes a point in every sacred healing circle, when it becomes obvious ‘the healing spirit’ has descended upon the neediest soul to carry them as close to death as necessary to cleanse them without killing the body.  The wailing and gnashing make it obvious. We Americans have watched from up close and a far as Russia, China and Europe went through their near death experiences last century.  We even assisted.  Now, it is our turn.

Western civilization will become something new.  It must. The vomit. The sneeze. The orgasm are all uncontrolled explosions by nature’s design to create space for life to return anew.  Chicago will show us the way again, if, we don’t hide our eyes from both the disease and the cure…and have the hearts to forgive our sins, love this sacred journey and cast a new spell.