Hmmmm - just reading what I wrote above makes me think that perhaps we do indeed need some sort of external catalyst to precipitate the field of human consciousness into a new state.

When I have that thought, then the role of Augie and cosmic activation of some sort begins to become perhaps clearer. Something to which we are not currently conditioned and adapted needs to enter our experience and influence global consciousness for the desired transformation to occur.

In other words, we are not going to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but could be approaching a condition of maximum susceptibility to the necessary cosmic catalyst. Makes me think of Prigogine and dissipative structures.