As I read more about the booming crypto verse, I can’t help but gradually begin to see the larger connections and the path we are headed as humanity. Let me try and explain by looking at history in a way that embraces all aspects that make us human.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”- Alan Watts

The evolution of man

The natural world tends to move towards complexity. The universe itself seems to thrive on building complex worlds to create newer worlds which are increasingly complex. When we look at the furthest point in the universe with the help of the best technology we have of course, we see a star that is approximately 14.5 billion years old. But remember that when you look further into the universe, you also further look back in time. And then we see there are these gigantic swirling worlds within worlds like for instance, our solar system in the milky way galaxy. It is not until the planet earth came into being, approximately 4.6 billion years ago, that there has been the most complex world as far as humans are concerned. A billion year later, single celled life began on earth and the first multi cellular organism was formed nearly 1.5 billion years ago. It is only until a few million years ago the first beings similar to us, human beings, ever walked on earth. But that’s a really long time to produce a creature who is able to have these extra ordinary cognitive capabilities. Nature seems to create all sorts of life forms and kill all of them which do not have the sufficient skills to survive. The world back then seemed to be very hostile but what it brought forth are these incredibly complex beings who are able to think, communicate and rule the world.

Even though the Darwinian evolution theory tells us much about our physical evolution, there also seems to be another kind of evolution that has taken place simultaneously which is purely mental in nature. The bicameral hypothesis in psychology indicates that the human mind once operated in a non-dual state where the left brain and the right brain worked in unison. According to Julian Jaynes in his book, the widening division of the left and the right hemispheres of the brain which happened is what gave rise to consciousness. I am still skeptical about when it would have actually occurred but the theory makes a lot of sense. When we apply the same to animals, it becomes clearer. The animals do no seem to be self-conscious, although they may be conscious to the extent that their sensory abilities help them survive, they are definitely incapable being self-aware. It is only a human being who has developed the extra ability to reflect and a consciousness that he calls his own.

The contemporary crisis

It is Terence McKenna who said that the complexity of the universe rests within man. The human being is actually a work in progress and it took 3.5 billion years of biology for nature and 14.5 billion years of cosmology for the universe to create such complex creatures who has the capability of self-reflection. But only until the 20th century we have realized the devastating consequences that this unique extraordinary capability has caused for us and our planet. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of god, it was in tandem with what had happened in the course of the evolution of man. This announcement opened the way for mankind to the age of enlightenment and the modern era fueled by the scientific revolutions in the 19th century.  

Carl Jung, one of the pioneer psychologists, who is misunderstood to this day, was the person who had clearly demonstrated the ever-increasing split that has occurred within the man’s psyche. This split is analogous to what Julian Jaynes talked about in his theory of consciousness. Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” seems to be a response to this same split that has occurred. But what is this split? It is the divide between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. It is the split between ego and the self. It is the failure of the western and the eastern world in understanding each other. It is the departure of the unconscious from the conscious mind. And as a consequence, we have seen the devastating effects this had not only on our attitudes and social behavior with the two major world wars but also on our planet with the acidification of the oceans, degradation of the rainforests, toxification of the air and so on. But the unconscious can never be completely ignored. The expression of the unconscious aspects of the man’s psyche came through the rise of modern art as opposed to the sensual art that humans were accustomed to. Jung also points out the imbalance within the man’s psyche would be compensated with external catastrophic events and this imbalance can only be restored when man takes the responsibility and attempts to reconnect with the unconscious nature. By the 1960s, there was a rising consensus on what our obsession towards the rational mind and our ignorance of the irrational intuitive mind has costed us. The growing movements of environmentalism, feminism, human rights, psychedelics and so on have demonstrated our imminent need to reconnect with the unconscious. The discovery of the computer and the internet established the platform through which the unconscious and conscious could join hands to work together and create a new reality for all of us.

Rise of the blockchain

The 21st century looks like a very different place as compared to most of our history. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, it is our ability to communicate and cooperate with each other that has given us immense control of all the species and the world we live in. If you think about it, language is the most complex form of ability we have as the most complex beings in the world. It is with this ability which seemed to have spawned from small mouth noises to later take the form of increasingly sophisticated languages, that we have invented the current global economic and political systems. These global systems are the pinnacle of human cooperation. The world has become ever more connected with the internet boom which started in the 1980s. Time seems to be accelerating faster each day with a plethora of information generated, shared and accessed by billions of people across the globe. We saw the rise of big tech giants and the cloud computing technology has saved us from the pain of handling large information which requires a huge storage capacity. As this kind of technology was considered as a huge relief, we are also realizing that it is also the start of a new challenge. Many people see the rise of the big data as end all be all but fail to recognize its inherent faults and how this is contributing to the larger catastrophe we are in. But it doesn’t end here. As technological leaps help us re-establish the split of the man’s psyche, we still have a long way to go. But fortunately, the hope for a better future where we have complete control of our data and our lives is already here. Many of us see Blockchain as another technology. Yes, it will be making our transactions and systems ever more efficient. It is going to help us build a decentralized future. But most importantly, it is going to redefine what it means to be human as we learn more about the infinite potential of the universe, nature and ourselves.