Humanity is Outgrowing The Old.

What happens next? You.

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Here’s how I remember it happening:

“Don’t ask me how I know this.”

Me: “How do you know this?”

“I found it on an FTP site.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s where people share files online.”

A blank stare.

“On the internet,” he said.

I shrugged. I still didn’t know.

I was 16 and my brother was 12. Between the two of us, he was the computer guy, always finding new and interesting things in the far-flung corners of chat forums. His latest discovery was a “recipe” for napalm, a gel created by dissolving styrofoam into gasoline. Imagine the slime kids make from mixing Borax and Elmer’s glue, but extremely flammable.

“Think we should try it?” he asked.

“I mean, yeah.” There was only one right answer to that question.

In hindsight, it was a bold choice, but those were peak latchkey kid days when we lived free-range, and setting things on fire was a normal after-school activity. A bygone era, indeed.

“Think it’s safe?” he asked.

“Definitely not.”

“No. Definitely not.”

“We should probably do it in the driveway then,” I said.

“Mhm. That’s what I was thinking.”

---

While my brother hunted down a block of styrofoam and matches, I plundered the backyard shed where our dad kept the lawnmower and gas, grabbed a beat-up metal bucket, a half-full red plastic gas can, and a cup to measure.

With everything set up in the driveway—bucket (check), Styrofoam in bucket (check), cup to measure the gas (check)—the moment of truth had arrived.

“Hold this,” I said and handed him the cup. “Once it’s full, pour it on the styrofoam in the bucket and then I’ll stir it up. After it turns to gel, we’ll light it.”

He nodded.

I tilted the gas can, aimed the spout into the cup, and poured. I misjudge, though, and the gas came out faster than I expected. That’s when the experiment went sideways. Time dilates in such moments when what you thought would happen and what actually happens snap into focus. I had two realizations at once:

1. I could’ve just poured the gas directly into the metal bucket. I didn’t need the cup.

2. The cup was a bad idea.

The cup was a bad idea because the one I’d grabbed from the shed was a white styrofoam cup. My still-developing teenage brain didn’t register this obvious contradiction with the laws of chemistry until the gasoline was already eating through the cup.

The bottom dissolved, the gas splashed onto the gravel, and my brother dropped what remained of the cup. We both stared at it for a few seconds.

“Well,” he finally said, “I think we’re gonna need a different cup.”

---

Gasoline and Goatskins

Recently, I remembered this story and my brother’s sage words—I think we’re gonna need a different cup—and in remembering that story, the words of Jesus came to mind. This is how my mind works.

“You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins. If you do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, you pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

Long before glass bottles were common, wine was stored in bags made of sewn goatskins with the seams sealed with resin. Over time, the leather would wear out and become brittle. New wine and old wineskins didn’t mix, you see. The chemistry, weight, and pressure of new wine reacted with old wineskins and caused the seams to burst. So you always stored new wine in new wineskins.

Jesus’ ideas were like new wine, potent and alive, and the people’s paradigm was an old wineskin. To put a finer, more modern point on it, his ideas were like gasoline but they were trying to hold them in styrofoam cups.

A World in Transition

Transformation is a disruptive process, whether it’s experienced by an individual, a society, or a species. There comes a time when the old must be replaced with the new, the new wine gets poured into the old containers, and the inevitable happens.

This process is playing out right now in front of us. Humanity is undergoing a shift in how it knows and understands itself. The world we inherited no longer works. The systems don’t work. The power structures are rotten from within. We need new wine, and we’re discovering it, though we’re also discovering it doesn’t play nice with what we have known.

What is this new wine, exactly?

It is the simple truth told by all the world’s spiritual traditions: everyone and everything shares in one Essential Nature. Life is a unity, not in a theoretical, “woo”, or philosophical sense, but literally.

But the world we inherited is built on the opposite assumption—that we are separate individuals, competing for scarce resources. This view of life no longer works. It never did. It has created the world we now have, one made in the image of our shadow selves.

Everyone you know you who is deconstructing their faith, trying psychedelics, or embracing non-duality, contemplation, and meditation is in the process of seeking new wineskins. So, too, is anyone who considers themselves part of the “creator economy”. They all know there is a different way to live, but it’s not this.

The Collapse of the Old, the Birth of the New

We need not only the new wine but new containers to hold it. How do we create a world where things like governments, corporations, economies, borders, and laws serve unity rather than division, though? That’s the question.

The sages tell us transformation at this scale only comes when we realize we can’t claim to be the light while holding others in darkness. When we see that harming another is harming ourselves. When war becomes a ridiculous idea because when you love an enemy, they cease to be one. These are all ideas that do not go silently in the night, and those who profit most from them seek to make sure of that.

Over the coming years and decades, humanity will embrace a new way of existing because it must. The old wineskins will burst. The stitches will dissolve, the wine will spill out, and many will scramble to slurp it off the floor while others tell them, “Leave it. There is a better way.” Progress will come in fits and starts. Several generations from now our world will be unrecognizable. We want change and so it will come.

I wish I could give you a listicle of helpful principles to speed up this process, but you don’t need any of those. There is only one thing to remember in moments when you wonder, “What happens next?” The answer is you are. You are what happens next.

Love your neighbor as your self. Love your enemies. Especially your enemies. Bless those who curse you, whether they do so online, under their breath, or to your face. See beyond what people do to the innocence they were born as before the world got to them. You don’t have to agree with them, but you must understand them if you want a better world.

Life is exhilarating and terrifying, and it always has been. I am a realistic optimist, and I agree with the words Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, penned in 1936:

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love.

And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

I believe we’re not far off from that day. Maybe it’s today. It could be in our individual lives at least, because we are what happens next.

Godspeed—and maybe pack a stainless steel cup. The styrofoam ones are worthless.

Cheers,

KSK
Kevin Kaiser