Outer jungle, inner balance: The challenge of postmodernity

Yes, our jobs are less certain than in the past. Messages about climate change, shortages of natural resources, food pollution, improper diets and wifi radition can be disturbing or confusing. Social media and Google bring information that we did not learn from regular media, school teachers and home doctors.

Trade unions, welfare arrangements, retirement funds and customer banks become weaker, unstable or outdated. Migrants, tourists, terrorists, goods, services, economic booms and depressions, money and exchange rates cross national borders like nation states hardly exist anymore and make national governments fairly helpless in coping with excesses.

All this and more, clubbed together under the heading of postmodernization, requires fundamental reorientations for large numbers of people.

We may consider that the certainties many of us are accustomed to, did not always exist. Oh no, not at all. In the human evolution of seven millions years, those certainties arose with agriculture only some 10,000 years ago and became stronger with the modern nation states just a few centuries ago.

That means, the collective certainties that we know exist for only about one-thousandth of the entire period. The other period we managed to survive in other ways and that survival management may still be very much in our DNA.

Perhaps we will revive those capacities and adjust them to present-day conditions.  Like our long gone ancestors we may become constantly alert again, always aware of details in our environment, with all senses and energy frequencies relating to what happens around us. For us, like for our ancestors, and for animals and plants, it will be a matter of life or death again to stay in contact with the environment.

This state of alertness is also called situational awareness. Most of us have lost that capacity as it was not direcly needed for survival anymore. We will have to rediscover it through deliberate efforts of overcoming our resistance against it.

Awareness training in spiritual circles may be rejected as unrealistic, but become seen as plain awareness needed to deal with the reality of growing uncertainties. It helps to regain inner balance in the face of outer dangers and uncertainties like in the old days of jungles and savannas. That opportunity is also the fruit of postmodernity.