During this time it would also be obvious that many sensitive souls would find themselves pushed past their ability to understand the chaos that has entered their lives. When this happens they will fall into despair, and commit suicide or other-directed violence (or both). Their culture offers them no appreciation of what is happening to them or to the world, and left to their own devices, the weaknesses in the soul become too much and they seek an extreme way out.
I wrote in detail about this aspect of matters several years ago in the essay: Beyond Columbine: appreciating the patterns of social meaning hidden in the Columbine tragedy.
The odd, yet strangely poignant aspect of this, is that most of these people are not so much evil as ignored. They live in a world where everyone wears masks, and behind their own mask they feel deeply unseen. It is as if they didn't exist. They live life, but nothing about that life recognizes their existence. Frustrated beyond endurance they are moved to act, by sub-conscious forces deep inside their souls. In a sense we could say that the soul implodes (suicide) and/or explodes (other-directed violence). They are the canaries in the coal mines of the metamorphosis of Western Civilization, which is dying into a new becoming.
Their numbers will grow as the social chaos increases. They need to be a warning to us all to place some of our energies not just in surviving this time in a material sense, but also in a spiritual (inner health) sense. The main thing we need for our souls is simple: company. We need to be able to speak, to share, to listen, and to recognize each other. They can't find this, for seeing themselves as ignored, and living in a culture of masks, what choices do they believe themselves to have?
The social chaos, experienced in acute aloneness, eats away at and crushes their essential being. Their susceptibility to this reveals their subtle inner beauty, for the sensitive souls among us have many gifts to give were we able to draw them out and into a social environment that genuinely wants to know them. They are not just a sign of social collapse, but of the basic social poverty of Western Civilization. It should pass away.
Instead, we see their differences as a wrongness. Their social environment judges them instead of appreciates them. We call them crazy or criminal, and leave them to the jails, the mental institutions, the streets and homelessness. We fire them from their jobs. We divorce them from the family hearth. Wanting to ignore our own pain at wearing a mask and not being recognized, we burrow into our own safe places. We think we too can survive by being alone, when the truth is that we really won't. We are social beings, and more than food and shelter we need each other. There is no greater nourishment for the soul than to be recognized and valued just for existing. Hopefully the next civilization will find a way to be better at this than we are today.
