A New Drink For An Emerging Consciousness?
Coffee should be a drink of the past. Our species needs to innovate a new kind of drink for the present.
In his audio book Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World, Michael Pollan shares that coffee fueled The Age of Reason/Enlightenment.
It was the perfect drink for a consciousness that was becoming industrialized because it:
provided a surplus of energy
enabled people to focus on the task-at-hand by avoiding peripheral “distractions” that seemed to dominate the Middle Ages with the consumption of alcohol
facilitated the evolution of thought into the realm of scientific rationality, and out of the prior mode of magical mysticism
helped our species develop global infrastructure (e.g. railway system)
I’m sure most of us recognize that humanity no longer requires an industrial mode of consciousness. The Information Age has enabled us to evolve into something completely new. We now live in a post-modern world that is birthing a new mode of consciousness.
What kind of consciousness might that be?
I believe it is one that resides in the word “integral” meaning that this new consciousness will be one that integrates scientific rationality and magical mysticism.
Whatever this new consciousness may be, something interesting is brewing in the collective psyche which is on the cusp of emergence.
So if coffee (and other caffeinated substances) was the drink of reason, what could be the drink of integral—the new and emerging consciousness of humanity?
