Regardless of whether there was a single catastrophe or many—for there seem to be records of several less than global disasters, and regardless of when these occurred in time, all of humanity that remained afterward divided into three groups within a very short time, and these same groups still exist today. They formed and are formed not by race, religion, geographical region, age or sex, but by the degree of connection to, or the response to influences from, the spiritual domains. Plato did something similar, dividing humanity into the broad masses, the warriors, and the wise men. For our modern times, we will call the three groups the Many, the Powerful and the Few. A fourth group, the Fools—who also still exist today—appeared later. These four categories provide a measure of how much or how little we each react to the messages we receive from our souls or other sources in the spiritual domains, and what—if anything—we choose to do about them. Our actions place us in one of the four groups, which are mutually exclusive. Individually, we can move from one group to another, depending on our courage or weakness, discrimination or lack of it, and other factors which we will come back to later. For now, the four groups may be described as follows.

The Many

The Many refers to the vast majority of humans on planet Earth. These are the masses, the workers, the followers. They—we—may be characterized as subscribing to consensus reality, that is, the continuous acceptance of the contingent world as most of us perceive it. It is the reality that our parents, peers and the “authorities,” in every sphere of ordinary life, teach us, a process which is called enculturation. Don Miguel Ruiz calls it domestication.

The Powerful

The next group, the Powerful, refers to all political, economic, religious and criminal groups that seek to control, and do control, the Many. Formerly these were kings, emperors, warriors, priests and bishops, but now that everything is secularized, these groups have all coalesced into one, monolithic technological-military-commercial class that consists of top management and retired generals all in pursuit of financial victory and hegemony. The Many now are those who work for the Powerful. Later we will discuss the various ways such control is accomplished, but now it suffices to say their methods are all based on nurtured fear and on hiding certain knowledge the Powerful would prefer not to have widely known.

In late 2011, a new definition emerged of the Many and the Powerful. The Occupy movement, which began in New Your City, defined themselves as the 99%—the Many. The Powerful were that 1% at the top of the economic ladder, who, through their businesses and political influence, control much of what we think and desire. Little, essentially, has changed in this regard since the Middle Ages.

The Few

The smallest, group of humanity is the Few. These are the people who have been able to maintain or recover their spiritual connections after the cataclysm, and despite the subsequent depredations of the Many. When we don’t find the meaning in life we feel or know should be there, we have a choice. One choice is to just go on as before and never really search for the meaning we crave, which is ultimately a defeat, but one many people live with their entire lives. Or we can do something about it. The search for meaning in our lives takes courage. We are adopting here a very old term to describe people who are brave enough to undertake such a search: we call them Fools.

The Fools

To be a Fool, why is courage needed to search for a higher or stronger meaning in life? Because it means going against the prevailing flow and content of ordinary life—what we have called the CROD, consensus reality ontological domain. This search simply means doing different things than most people occupy themselves with, and this invariably means looking foolish in their eyes, for they don’t understand the need—within themselves—to seek anything beyond what they already have, which is a concise definition of the Many. They see nothing wrong. They are happy enough. They have their families, their jobs, their pastimes, sports, entertainments and hobbies. They are content to remain close to the average behavior and belief systems of their neighbors; indeed, they fear being too different. Thus a gap begins to form between those of the Many and those who have become or are becoming Fools. The Fool takes the risk of looking foolish, absurd, different—wasting time on useless ideas, the Many would say. Nevertheless, the search for meaning must be pursued by the Fool, as his or her dissatisfaction with ordinary life has grown so great there is no other possible choice. Without such life dissatisfaction there is not enough motivation to go “out of bounds” searching for the missing meaning in life.