Caitlin, please don’t discount the practical power of meditation to facilitate anyone’s ability to “see through the untruths”. This is very important. Waving off that important tool is playing into a pervasive cultural Western resistance to meditation that portrays it a religious, cultish woo-woo, a story supported by the very manipulative, selfish and fearful corporate forces we decry who understand what a threat a *true* change in consciousness would present to them.
(As an important aside, please remember that the maladaptive stories come not just from political sources, but also commercial — stories about who we are and how we can find happiness by consuming the right products. For the future of the biosphere, both political and commercial stories absolutely must change.)
What does “seeing through the untruths” really mean? It means invalidating some aspect of a story as being false, or at least not sufficiently socially shared. Presumably one has at hand an alternative story in which to find a new identity and role, kind of like a hermit crab finding a new shell.
But what if moving into a new shell is hard to do? What if the available roles and identities in the new shell are, for practical purposes, hardly better than the old ones one supposedly just discarded? I’m just as crabbish as I was. Perhaps the government will have lost support for one position or another, but citizens would just continue on with relatively unchanged roles in stories emanating just from different media sources and having changed only in the details. Life doesn’t seem to promise much change in that scenario, just more crabs in the same old shells.
You described changing shells as a “change in consciousness”, but is not much of a change in consciousness to simply flit from one maladaptive shell to another. The practical effects of meditation are much more profound in facilitating truly significant changes in shells and the identities one takes on within them.
This is very much a battle for the story (narrative) and how we identify with the roles in those stories and how those stories carry a social sense of sharedness that legitimizes them. You are only really touching on the last bit, hitting on the legitimacy of a story. That is certainly very important, but there is much more we must work with in the rhelm of human consciousness if we want to be truly disruptive in a sufficiently short time frame.
I’m really glad you mentioned “human consciousness” in your title. I bet a lot of people are more likely to read your article because of that. You’re on to something. So let’s really do something with it.
