The Third Matrix: Humanity’s Rite of Passage
The following is an excerpt from The Four Global Truths: Awakening to the Peril and Promise of Our Times.
When viewed through a wide lens, our current global situation can be framed as a kind of initiation process for humanity, similar to that faced by the archetypal hero. In many of the world’s myths, the hero is forced to confront some dangerous challenge, endure some difficult ordeal, or complete some seemingly impossible task, after which he usually emerges triumphant and transformed. Often the initiation involves dismemberment and death, followed by a re-membering and rebirth into a more fully integrated form in which the hero realizes his true calling or higher purpose. Typically the hero experiences a diminishment of his own ego-based identity and a connection with the larger collective to which he belongs.
The process of initiation, which appears not only in myths but in shamanic rituals and mystery cults of the ancient Near East, seems to hold symbolic significance for the modern human. Certainly the current global crisis represents the greatest challenge our species has ever faced, with stakes that could hardly be higher. The very structures that support life — the only known life in the universe — are being rapidly dismantled, and our daunting challenge is to come together as a human family in order to engage our collective wisdom, compassion, and creativity to preserve as much life as possible. This would seem to require an authentic, heroic humility; a softening of the rigidified ego structure; and a recognition of an intimate interconnectedness and interdependence with everything.
Not coincidentally, a softening of individual ego that allows for a deeper communion with other beings lies at the heart of Buddhist practice. Whether conceived as detachment from ego or an expansion of the self to include the whole world or even the entire Cosmos, the process involves a transformation of one’s usual identity as a “skin-encapsulated ego,” to borrow a phrase from philosopher Alan Watts. The degree to which one can break free — if even temporarily — from this self-imposed limitation is the degree to which inter-subjective communion can occur and compassion can manifest.






