Why I Trust the Future
The weird worldview my mother taught me gives me cause to hope in the face of chaos.
I was not raised religious, not by a long shot. My mother was brought up Catholic in Texas and, as a result, wanted to keep my sister and I as far from the Church as she could. My father was brought up, I don’t know, vaguely Christian. He’s a retired physicist whose spiritual exodus was leaving small-town Missouri for CalTech. Mostly, we were brought up to be feminists.
My mother was the one who kept faith alive for us. She’d dabbled in a variety of spiritual practices and was committed that my sister and I find our own beliefs, but there was one spiritual teaching she imparted to me that’s shaped my entire life. I’m not quite sure where she got it from, but I still believe it today, and it paints such a clear picture of what’s happening in the world right now that I feel obliged to share it.
I’m laying it out here in both spiritual and secular sociological terms, so that those who are put off by anything too “woo woo” or New Age can find value in it as well.
My mother told me that human society evolves according to the Hindu chakra system. Right now, she said, we are in the breakdown of the majority of global society operating according to the concerns of the second chakra, and my…
