ABSTRACT
Consciousness and its enormous powers are a temptation to achieve dominance over the earth, its resources, and its life, which leads to the creation of vast economic systems for the accumulation of wealth and the invention of weapons. Human consciousness can self-destruct, constituting not a death instinct but a death potential within consciousness itself. Humankind faces species-threat via a number of routes, including, first, the world economic machine destroying the ecology of the planet; second, the technologies produced by the Enlightenment and capitalist project destroying not only human civilisation but possibly all life on the planet. A reduced impact scenario is that a proportion of the human race is wiped out and survivors reorganise their existence. It is perhaps possible that such a reduced, fortunate, though traumatised population could reorganise itself in the light of a new vision of human existence.
