But it didn't stop there (as if that wasn't enough) because, when unleashed, the powerful force of narcissistic lust only wants to continue its course of annihilation. The momentum that I had allowed this force to generate was accelerating. Rapidly moving beyond the capacity to feel, I was losing my heart and connection with all that I loved. I was numb. And I didn't care about anything; I couldn't even care about my own life. "It's ego!" a friend nearly shouted at me. "It's ego, and all it wants is to numb you out, to cut you off from everything you care about, from your own heart. It wants to kill the you that cares." I knew this was true. Deep within this force is a violence against love that is completely blind in its destructive rage. It scared me. I knew I had to stop. Boomeritis was killing me. Something had to change in me—fast.

The deepest dangers of boomeritis are only revealed when we actually begin to take seriously the evolutionary demand of real transformation. Only then does the contrast between the call of the spirit to evolve and the force of narcissism become starkly clear. Only then is it possible to see that the narcissistic ego-mind's use of the sacred to create a safe, known world and positive identity is an act of deep corruption in our motivation for seeking. My crisis came from having to know—to know who I am, to know where I am, and, finally, to know that I am a good person and therefore I am better and smarter than everyone—and taking all that I experienced for my own self-reflection. This is the double whammy of boomeritis: the highly developed mind covering the low narcissism. The end result is nihilism. Emptying the sacred of its depth, life becomes flat, meaningless, and devoid of the possibility for real transformation. Turning the untouchable and ineffable mystery of life itself into material for our own gratification, we gut the sacred, and our lives, of meaning, in order to create something to hang on to in the face of how vast and truly unknown it all is. "We know by the year about 2020, the greatest disabling phenomenon for the health of the human race will be depression," says Dr. Max Bennett, world-renowned neurologist from the University of Sydney. "Not cancer, not heart disease, but depression." We have not become the Prozac nation for nothing; we've become the Prozac nation for nihilism. Boomeritis leaves us in a world of spiritual pretense that robs the sacred of its power and goodness by trying to make it serve us and our personal need for control.

The truth is actually the complete opposite: we exist to serve the sacred, and deeper meaning and purpose can only come from this recognition. My spiritual teacher has written, "What would you do if you realized it was all up to you? What would you do if suddenly you realized that the entire evolution of the whole human race rested on your shoulders alone? What would you do?" My heart has always been pulled by these questions—perhaps because mine is the heart of a paradigm-busting boomer—and they have also left me reeling: it's just too big! But, actually, life itself is that big. Yours and mine.

The narcissistic rage that I gave myself to when I refused to surrender is enormous. While its violent intensity is hidden from view until we find ourselves up against the wall, the mess that the world is in—even the everyday mess of relationship and disorder and wastefulness—comes from one choice after another made from that same narcissism that wants only for itself and doesn't care about the consequences. But the force of evolution, of life, is even more enormous. For fifteen billion years this force has been moving toward this moment of consciousness where we are now able to choose our fate and that of this world. In contemplating these questions, the very real immensity of life and of the fact that I am here, living in a twenty-first century laboratory of the spirit, exploring the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment, opens up a different perspective, another consciousness somehow above or beyond the ego-mind with its ceaseless need to know. Like exercising an unused muscle, I cannot hold this perspective for very long—but I understand deeply that it is always there. And in the clarity of this perspective, I can see that I have taken the call of the spirit, the universal pull of evolution, entirely personally, when it simply is as it is—an obligation that comes with the extraordinary virtue of our human birth. Stepping out of the confines of my particular life to see it in the light of our collective evolution, the movement of the stream of life creates a radically different context for making choices. To act from this, from the biggest possible truth of what it means to be human and alive now, holds a revolutionary possibility that takes us beyond boomeritis into what may, in fact, end up being a truly paradigm-busting transformation for all of humanity. And that would make any boomer's heart truly sing.
Quotations from: Ken Wilber, Boomeritis, Shambhala Publications, Boston, 2002, pp. 35, 36, 44, 178, 338; "What Buddhists Know about Science," by Daithí Ó hAnluain, www.wired.com/news; Andrew Cohen, Freedom Has No History, Moksha Press, Lenox, MA, 1997, p. 101.