The first challenge facing any animal is to balance its autonomy with
its environment, in a process known as adaptation. Much as a child must
form an identity separate from its parents but still learn from them,
for any self-aware species this becomes the primary means of
understanding the world, in definitions of self and whole. When a
species has become by its own technology self-sufficient, the struggle
becomes an internal duplicate of this division, and the individuals
involved struggle to avoid becoming self-referential and thus, losing
sight of reality as a continuous whole.

In the modern age, humans have mastered dominion over the means of
survival, but have lost the goal of adaptation, thus exist in a world
of their own definition which is separated from the process of the
whole. This manifests itself in seemingly irreconciliable splits
between body and mind, subjective and objective perspectives, and
individual and world. Without a forward goal, such as "establish
civilization and survive," humans have become lost in a world created
of their own thought and separated from the whole.

Continuity movement believes that if we look toward the ongoing process
of the whole, instead of its discrete parts as known in our minds, we
can overcome this lack of meaning and create a civilization which lacks
the problems of solipsism of our own: unstated but pervasive fear of
death, destruction of our natural environment, and lives spent in
unfulfilling tasks with little connection (or time for) the things most
meaningful to us, which are families, friends and personal achievement.
No political or social agenda can make this change, since it must come
from within, and as the goal of spirituality is to bond individual to
world, it is here that change must occur.

Every aspect of modern life mirrors this division. In politics, there
is a "left" which has an emotion of inclusiveness which runs out of
control, and a "right" which responds with rigid absolutes in a
reactionary fashion; neither has succeeded, over several centuries, of
finding an intelligent agenda or satisfying its people. This same
division occurs in spirituality and social issues. It is the result of
individual humans feeling alienated from the world, distrusting it, and
thus seeing themselves as (passively) at war with the world as whole,
fighting for their own space and autonomy.

In this light, the divisions between mind/body and subjective/objective
become more than taxonomic; they become moral absolutes which,
interpreted in either an excess of emotion or rigid force, are enforced
upon the world by humans, reversing their original function as being an
interpretation of the workings of the world. At this point, humans
become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the world in their heads
does not match external reality, yet is acted upon as if it does,
causing humanity as a whole to respond to the illusion and not the
fact.

Our societies claim a "progressive" agenda, but in both personal
development and development of civilization, this agenda consists of an
ongoing war against the world and, lacking understanding of how it
works, continual alienation from it and retreat into illusion. When
illusion exists in the mind and is not matched by the external world,
what results is this process of forcing it upon the world and
justifying its inaccuracies in terms of human constructs like right and
wrong, fostering an enduring neurotic state of mind among human beings.

It is simpler, and more accurate, to note that we are parts of the
world, and not separate from it, but that we have autonomy and can make
choices about how we craft our world. We do not have to obey absolutes
written in a single word of religion, book of law or socioeconomic
convention, but can observe our natural surroundings to ascertain the
means of the cosmos, and then apply them to ourselves. This requires
that we cease trying to create our own isolated worlds within the world
as whole, supported by our social and spiritual illusions, but that we
embrace the world as a whole with ourselves as a component of it.

The opposite of this view is selfishness, where one is so afraid and
hateful of the world that one is unwilling to accept that it can be a
meta-good, composed of both "good" and "evil" as necessary parts to
achieve its balance, and it leads to internal divisions within
civilization which, shattering its consensus on what the goal of the
collective must be, cause it to fragment and thus collapse from within.
Regardless of what predator - disease, climate change or invaders -
finally eats the corpse, the civilization has died from the disease of
alienation against the world resulting in irreconciliable internal
division.

Much as this afflicts civilization, it also attacks the human, who in a
neurotic state is unable to make decisions or be satisfied with any
state in life, thus there is a constant hyper-inflated striving for
wealth, power and material goods; this results in the creation of mass
waste, the destruction of natural environments, and the spiritual
emptiness of the individual. Individuals who feel hollow and as if life
is meaningless tend to commit destructive acts and to, however
passively, snipe at their neighbors and increase misery, because
nothing pleases the miserable except to say "it cannot be otherwise,
for all are miserable."

Humanity will either overcome this abyss of division and alienation, or
be destroyed; Continuity Movement believes this state can be overcome
by seeing the world as a continuous process of which we are part, and
by taking our part in it and doing it well, instead of aiming for
selfish ends, we can not only end our hollowness but create a greater
civilization and in it, more spiritually satisfied individuals.

http://www.continuity.us/site/belief/