The Trauma Awakening

As I watch events unfold around me; as I watch children insisting on their lives, I wonder… are we splitting as a species? From the destructive, ravaging side of sapiens to a more aware, advanced homo illustratum? Are we in the throes of this cladogenesis? Are we amid speciation growing pains? Were the sixties actually the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?”

With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.

What I’m seeing now, with #MeToo, Times Up, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives—is survivors uniting through the shared experience of trauma. We know that trauma has specific effects on neural pathways, and that these play out in emotional injuries and physical illnesses. We know that trauma changes a living thing permanently. We know that trauma is handed from one generation to the next through conditioning, which in turn may affect our DNA. The science is out on that one, or rather—it is a parade of blindfolded travelers encountering Ganesha.

Our belief in our ability to “know” far exceeds the reality of our knowledge.

We are still a species that will kill one another over rocks. Anyone vaguely cognizant of our ravenous, profligate nature and its impact can see there’s a code flaw. As with conceptual, self-healing artificial intelligence, perhaps the dawning awareness is our frontal cortex trying to overtake the lizard brain before it gets us all killed. I wonder if, within my lifetime, there will be a rapid shift. Will we see ourselves becoming illustratum—a species that will reverse-engineer us back to the paradise earth once was?

With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.

The social movements we see now are the clarion call of enlightenment—the raised voice of suffering saying, “no more.” We have pilloried one another, ourselves, our earth and everything in it long enough. Saber-tooth tigers are no longer trying to chase us down and eat us. It would be good to stop behaving as if they are. This fear-based desperation drives toxic aggression. Toxic aggression drives racism, sexism, bullying, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, greed and violence of every sort—from the raised finger in traffic to the flooding of Glen Canyon to the caustic mentality behind nuclear destruction.

Those associations may seem like a stretch because violence is so utterly ingrained into so many things that we do that it requires deliberate attention. A willingness to investigate our own behaviors and the courage to face what we find rather than seek the ongoing comfort of delusion and drunken consumption. E.g., years ago, we discovered our use of plastics was creating a massive pestilent cesspool between the West Coast and Hawaii. We react by spending half a paycheck on plastic packaging at Costco and Trader Joe’s, because the larger reality of the impact has not yet touched us directly.

Am I equating incest, for example, with buying plastic-wrapped tubes of plastic? To a degree, yes. Both are a perpetration. Both cause trauma. Both come from a place in the human ego resistant to taking responsibility for the outcome. Each is an artifice of toxic aggression.

There may or may not still be time to change before the Garbage Patch reaches our front steps. The human ego does not awaken easily and is now subject to greater distraction than ever before. The one phenomenon known to rapidly expand awareness beyond ego is trauma. Waking up to a stinking, decaying landscape of refuse would be traumatic to most reasonable people, and I am of a mind that most people are reasonable.