Here's a report from the future, written in the year 2050 by a geo-paleontologist.

"...Before 2015, almost everyone believed that time’s arrow pointed in the direction of greater integration. Some hoped (and others feared) that the world was converging on ever-larger conglomerations of nations. The internationalists campaigned for a United Nations that had some actual political power. The free traders imagined a frictionless global market where identical superstores would sell the same products at all their global locations. The technotopians imagined a world united by Twitter and Instagram.

In 2015, people were so busy crossing borders -- real and conceptual -- that they barely registered the backlash against globalization. Officially, more and more countries had committed themselves to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty, solidarity, and equality. But everything began to change in 2015, a phenomenon I first chronicled in my landmark study Splinterlands (Dispatch Books, 2025). The movements that came to the fore in 2015 championed a historic turn inward: the erection of walls, the enforcement of homogeneity, and the trumpeting of exclusively national virtues.

...I would be remiss if I didn’t point out something that many have noted over the years. We have been fragmenting at precisely the time when we should be coming together, for the problems that face the planet cannot be solved by millions of individuals or masses of statelets acting alone. And yet how can we expect, with desperate millions on the move, the rise of pandemics, and the deepening of economic inequality globally, that people can unite against common existential threats? Only today can we all see clearly, as I wrote so many years ago, that the rise of the splinterlands has been humanity’s true tragedy. The inability of cultures to compromise within single states, it seems, anticipated our current moment when multiplying nation-states can’t compromise on a single planet to address our global scourges. The glue that once held us together -- namely, solidarity across religion, ethnicity, and class -- has lost its binding force.

At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. We all lived in a common home, I thought. Some rooms were in terrible disrepair. Those living in the attic were often exposed to the elements. The house as a whole needed better insulation, more efficient appliances, solar panels on the roof, and we had indeed fallen behind on the mortgage payments. But like so many of my peers, I seldom doubted that we could scrape together the funds and the will to make the necessary repairs by asking the richer residents of the house to pay their fair share.

Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker, less hospitable planet, it’s clear that we just weren’t paying sufficient attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites. There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air."

Read the entire piece here: On the Verge of the Great Unraveling, or Splintering: The View from 2050 by John Feffer.

So, what kind of post-metaphysical spirituality will be most appropriate for this future?

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This link backs up the first link above: 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/17/agents-of-the-apocalypse-fro...

and this one mentions the predictability of it all.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/onion_predicted_million...

There will only be 10 times the amount of muslim extremists after this round of insanity . Flatland will never get that you can't beat the crap out of god  (ask Jesus for confirmation.) But by all means let's stir up and aggravate every bodies race to the bottom of the spiral .

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What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?

This group is for anyone interested in exploring these questions and tracing out the horizons of an integral post-metaphysical spirituality.

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