OUR LIFE LINE

Our existence is a transition between two periods, our natural, self-creative period and our unnatural, self-destructive period. 

Our self-creative period began at the conception of life millions of years ago. During it our predecessors, like all species, followed Nature’s order to “reach out to the limits of their capacities, to others, and to Nature’s God”, ‘Her’ natural activity. The result was, by about 200K years ago our predecessors, uniquely among all species, realized the mental capacity that enabled our ‘mother’ to ask “Why am I?”, the question of meaning that gave birth to humanity. Other species continued their natural activity as long as we allowed, during our period of self-destruction.

Our ‘parents’ searched their nascent minds for the answer to the question of meaning but didn’t find it. It remains unknown. Instinctively fearing the unknown they made up an answer with which they tried to fill the void. Since “trying to fill the void” within is opposed to our self-creative “reaching out…”, tries are logically defined as unnatural, self-destructive activity. Thus with the first try, the transition into our second period began.

The rate at which the transition from natural to unnatural, and thus from self-creative to self-destructive activity occurred, creates a line on a graph, in the shape of an exponential curve. The timeline, the x axis at the top of the graph, begins at the left end with the birth of humanity. Given the accumulating evidence of our apparent collapse, the last completed date on the time line is September 2024. How much longer it can be is unknown but guessed at not much. The y-axis on the left of the graft is our degree of life line. It begins with life at the top and ends with death at the bottom. It indicates two complementarily related variables. From top to bottom it measures the increase of unnatural activity and resulting self-destruction; and the complementary decrease in natural activity and the resulting self-creation.

Initially our line curves gently downward indicating a slowly, steadily increasing rate of transition from exclusive natural activity and self-creation to unnatural activity and self-destruction. At about 10,000 years ago our line began curving downward more quickly as the rate of transition was accelerated by the development of agriculture and our ‘civilization’. The curve shows a continuing gradual accelerating rate of transition until it was greatly accelerated by the industrial revolution about 250 years ago. Since then the curve has become closer to a vertical line indicating near the end of 2024 we are approaching entirely self-destructive activity at nearly terminal velocity, and complementarily decreasing to none the remnant of natural, self-creative activity we need to survive.

Until we hit bottom we can change our minds. If we do we can in an instant, discard the tries to fill the void we have accumulated over the past 200k years, restore Nature’s order and take our straightened line back to life at the top. We can’t recreate the life we have destroyed but we can quit destroying the life we have left.