The Holocene Epoch: Our shadow and our glory

In Part 7 Shanti writes, “We may have shown our ugliest face to the mirror, to others and to life on the planet, but we have also expressed our potential.“

Leonardo da Vinci, The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485). Accademia, Venice, Public domain.

The quote of Tagore in the previous article of this series is my introduction to a different viewpoint on the Holocene. This recent period in our short history as human beings isn’t only a time of overpopulating and destroying our home, our planet Terra, of fighting each other in wars upon wars, ‘peace’ being nothing else than a preparation for another war, of women still being prey worldwide, without ever having known peace.

Yes, by living so we may have shown our ugliest face to the mirror, to others and to life on the planet, but we have also expressed our potential: our creativity, our loving care for and service to others without expecting anything in return, our enlightenment, our dance, our intelligence, our devotion and our daring and courageous action, so well described in Piero Ferrucci’s wonderful book Inevitable Grace, That is my guide in the next paragraphs.

Our recent history in the Holocene in general, and in it’s two most recent millenia in particular, isn’t only a history of conquerors like Alexander the Great, Qin Shi Huangdi, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, the Vikings, the Tang and Song dynasties, the Christian Crusaders, Genghis Khan, Zheng He, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, Napoleon, Europeans ‘going west’ taking the lives and robbing the land of hundreds of American Indian tribes, like the Pawnee and the Sioux, European states colonizing every continent, of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

There is a great danger in mentioning these names here, and the other names in part 8 as well! We might think that the ones mentioned first happen to be inhuman, rascals and scoundrels, just exceptionally bad guys, and those mentioned next happen to be superhuman, saints and geniuses, exceptionally good guys – while we consider ourselves as ordinary, middle-of-the-road guys.

In both cases we dehuminize ourselves!

It’s too easy, too cheap an escape to deny our valleys and/or our peaks or to project them on others. It shows a blindness both to our shadow as well as to our glory as a human being, because both the perversion as well as the flowering of our human nature belong to everyone’s possibilities.

The whole spectrum of both these extremes is ours.

As everyone’s body is made of the same starstuff, so is our humanness our common equipment and heritage!

All these names are just examples of what each one of us may become, may actualize in his or her own way and proportion. These names are not meant to refer to these individuals in order to blame or to praise them, but to point at our very own potential and to remind us of the moments in our lives when we are blessed with a glimpse of them.

Having said that and having explicitely confessed that all these names I mention not only show the limitations of my knowledge and maybe the ego of men too, but also the very unequal chances for women to become world-known celebrities, we will move to the other side of the human coin.

But before I do so, please remember Ferrucci’s next analogy.

Sometimes, toward the end of the winter, we may come across an early tree that already shows its first buds, while standing in the middle of other, yet bare trees. In the same way people like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart and Buddha show the very same characteristics that everyone’s humanness is able to develop.

From the origin of life on Earth all the way up to the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel, the Fifth Symphony and the Theory of Relativity, we are going to look at the Holocene also as a blessed period, in which we may see glimpses of this potential, of our grace and dignity, of our glory as
human beings! It may widen our too narrow conception of what has value in being human and offer us a more inclusive understanding of our dignity.

How completely different and much more encouraging our image of human beings – and of the Holocene as well – would be, if we had given our glory as much attention as our shadows!