The process is like a wave, in that it builds as the driving energy accumulates and focuses, but then fades and comes back down, as the energy disperses.

Much of the fresh thinking is like small waves tackling the issues they can, while the larger structures and beliefs are enormous waves, built up over hundreds and thousands of years.

We evolved as mobile, fairly predatory organisms, so we tend to be very linear and goal oriented. Combined with our abilities to abstract and project, this has been magnified far beyond the confines our our livable spaces.

Nature, on the other hand, is cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback driven. Even natural predators only take what they need, keeping prey populations alert and finite. More a game of rock, paper, scissors, than winner take all.

Now that humanity has reached the edge of the global petri dish, it is getting time to reflect back on these essential realities, not just assume we can colonize the universe, after totally trashing this planet.

A spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and/or judgement, from which we fell. That we are aware, than the aspirations of our particular community. We are those passions, seeking every possibility, but we are also the judgement, selecting which is the more effective. Not every desire is healthy, nor is every decision wise, so the process fluctuates.

Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict, between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of life. Even bacteria sense that. So when we make the concept of good aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, as all that evolved complexity and nuance is suspect.

Money is the social contract and accounting device enabling mass societies, not a commodity to mine from them. Markets need money to circulate, but people see it as signal to extract and store. Consquently we think we can abstract value out of everything and store it as notational value, backed by debts incurred somewhere else in society. Ignoring the corruption this globalized medium enables.

I could go on, but even these issues go deeper into the social fabric than most people are wiling to acknowledge, so the fires will have to burn a bit longer, before we start coming to our senses.

Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline.

So the price we pay to feel, is that much of it is pain.