I have a sister -in-law who says she wants answers to the 4 Big Questions,
There are 5 big questions (according to Alan Watts):
- Who started it?
- Are we going to make it?
- Where are we going to put it?
- Who's going to clean up?
- Is it serious?
but since it involves some things that she thinks are boring or scary, then never mind.
Her dopamine reward system is not sufficiently biased towards the satisfaction of curiosity.
Sit quietly for 10 minutes w/ Ur eyes closed while watching Ur breath? Why?
To gain control over the locus of control at the center of the feedback loop that is the self becoming increasingly conscious of the self.
So, is that a lack of development or do I need to offer more choices?
I hear you... not much you can do for someone else except to develop yourself and then if they decide they want what you've got, then you can help them to get it. Otherwise, all you can do is listen and... que sera sera.
A system (religious or otherwise) can provide some things an individual can't.
We certainly don't need a new religion if U mean a esoteric form: the hideous religious leaches that bar clear and critical thinking today don't deserve another second of existence.
I mean maybe the same old esoteric truths need a mythic makeover.
Any system, religious, political, military, etc, provides a self-organizing structure that removes some of the burden of critical thinking from the individual, and also has an interest in perpetuating itself at the expense of the individual. Just as you would not sacrifice your whole body for the lives of a few of your cells, the systemic organism has little regard for the individuals, but in exchange offers the individuals the opportunity to become more than mere cells.
The mystics and enlightened ones coming out of religions are the Gametes going out to create something new while the other more boring cells have their function as well.
What we do need is a simple set of moral guides like George Carlin's Two Commandments and the Golden Rule plus stern laws punishing deviation from them. No, I don't want a theocratic police state, but a return to common law tenets that remove many of the legal abuses we suffer from today. I guess I'm talking Libertarianism.
I don't think it is possible to return. We can only evolve. There is no more frontier, which is why we need to colonize the Moon and Mars ASAP... humanity needs a frontier where libertarianism can exist and those who wish to escape the aging ossifying structures can do so... and then return to reinvent the aging ossifying structures into something better.
At the frontier there can exist a high trust society. But as societal structures are built, then less and less trust and integrity is required of the individual as it is replaced by the institutions.
Like the frontier, war used to provide the necessary service of busting up old structures and restoring the needs of individual integrity and trust, but we can no longer have wars because they'll too quickly get out of hand and blow us all up.
I can see that we face the same fate as the Native Americans and I can see there will be short term pain and long term inevitable transformation. It is inevitable that everyone will get the "Mark of the Beast" and be entered into the global financial system with the vaccine registration, and everything will become systematized. Whether this will take 2 years or 20 years, I don't know... Will there be a shrinking reservation system where we can opt out for as long as possible?
We need something like a new religion: a story explaining how everything fell apart and how we can put it all back together and offering hope that there is a hierarchy extending beyond one life that is interested in putting it back together. And then we need a global catastrophe to break up all the structures and let this new religion form the new organizing principle.
I do firmly believe what many new spiritual leaders, like Eben Alexander, M. D. promotes: we are already well into the shedding of civilization's old skin, as is evident in the USA's and other countries' turmoil, and being prepared for its new and better form.
The image of a snake shedding a thin layer of skin and becoming slightly larger is too gradual... its more like Resident Evil where society has been injected with the T-Virus (Tyrant Virus) and the organism is rapidly transmogrified into a beast.