Contact and Withdrawal

Our need and yearning for contact with each other, and our equally desired and required need to get the hell away from each other—withdrawal—leads to conflict between, among, and within us. We hardly ever all want the same thing at the same time. We are always disappointing and contradicting each other. We sometimes forgive each other and love again, and even lighten up on ourselves, but more often we become resigned and resentful and stupid.

Unfortunately, the message from both history and current times is the same: The speed of human evolution in the capacity to get over shit and be happy has been comparatively slow and is now way behind many other skills…for example, our capacity to destroy.

Unless we learn how to forgive more quickly, and get over things repeatedly and more frequently than ever before, we will soon go the way of thousands of other species that preceded us and passed away. If we learn to forgive each other and ourselves we’ll get longer to enjoy being here.

This book is about legitimate, transformative, psychological processes cumulatively called forgiveness. Our message is that we have to learn how to forgive more completely on a larger scale soon or our species will die out soon. Soon! No one knows exactly when, but in our estimation we will all be dead in the next twenty years or so.

And, we’re dying from lying! We need to create a new, more intimate culture of Radical Honesty or we will die soon. When we cultivate intimacy through reporting what we notice out loud to one another, we can live longer.

Sooner or later we will die, but it would be nice to have a more loving, exciting, enjoyable, and longer life.

We humans being must now choose: it’s either love or thinking. We either will keep failing in our efforts to create common unity through thinking (which would involve more ongoing protective lying and secrecy, conflict, divorce, and war, leading to our early destruction), or we face the sometimes even more terrifying prospect of ongoing vulnerable sharing, which we are beginning to do the painfully hard job of evolving into, at the moment.

How’s it going to turn out? I’ll be doomed if I know! (I’m doomed if I do not know as well. And you are too). On the one hand, our failure to honestly process hurt, anger, grief, and disappointment, and actually forgive each other and get over it, will soon bring about our final extinction. On the other hand, our ability to face and experience our experiences will eventually wear us out as well. Although it will take a little longer to grow our capacity to forgive, it will be much more rewarding. Until we die.

The tension between our ongoing desire for contact and our recurring need for withdrawal will never be resolved and never go away. It might lead to the evolution of a new capacity if we learn how to love big, wide, and honestly enough.

The question about whether humanity can survive humanity remains constant. And the answer, so far, apparently, is “probably not...”