In her book, Uprisings for the Earth, Osprey Orielle Lake suggests that people involved in earth restorative work engage in two different pathways as a response to our global crises. The first pathway “focuses on the immediate and urgent need to stop the destruction of the planet and the imperative to help those most in need”. The second path “involves nothing short of a profound individual and societal transformation of consciousness – a ‘new dream’ for the modern world”.
Our current societal and personal problems are so complex and interrelated that they are incapable of being addressed with our current techniques of problem solving or as Albert Einstein stated “We cannot solve our problems from the consciousness that created them”. Fritjof Capra suggests that we cannot solve any one of our global problems in isolation, that we cannot search for the right piece to fix first because all our problems are fragments of one single crisis – “a crisis of perception.” Emmet Miller in Our Culture on the Couch further suggests that many of our ‘solutions’ are actually increasing the number of our problems because the “real culprit in these recurring social and cultural disasters is the lens through which we see the problem”. Peter Russell in Waking Up In Time suggests that behind our various unsustainable actions and behaviours lie unsustainable policies but in the “final analysis, it is our current mode of consciousness that is unsustainable”.
We humans stand at a defining moment in history, described by Christopher Fry in Sleep of Prisoners as a time when “wrong comes up to meet us everywhere”.
Global problems are escalating. Terrorism, genocide, poverty, global warming, diseases, famine, economic meltdown all add to a sense of despair and helplessness. Our cherished institutions are failing us. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to re-align with nature and the larger cosmos. There is evidence that such a shift is happening. It is over 60 years since Teilhard de Chardin saw evidence of such a transformation of consciousness when he said: “today, something is happening to the whole structure of human consciousness; a new kind of life is starting”. More recently Theodore Rosak suggested that “We can discern…a transformation of human personality in progress which is of evolutionary proportions, a shift of consciousness fully as epoch-making as the appearance of speech or of the tool-making talents in our cultural repertory”.
This shift is coming about because of the crises we face.
“Crises are a sign that evolution is trying to break through a business as usual that isn’t working.” [1] Crises are what Barbara Max Hubbard calls ‘evolutionary drivers’. They are a challenge to recognise what is no longer working. They play a critical role in evolution. Crisis ignites evolution. All our current crises are presenting us with problems for which we have no solutions within our existing mental framework. The crises call us to evolve our consciousness and capacities to move into a new paradigm. To do this we need to change our story. “Changing our story is the fastest and most effective way to change our world. With a changed story, we can move rapidly to change our toxic relationship with the Earth and each other. Once the story changes the old paradigm becomes unthinkable.” [2] Buckminser Fuller expresses it in a similar way “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.
Vaclav Havel, in an address to the United States Congress in 1990, was the first world leader to link the various crises to the need for a change in human consciousness, when he said
“Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed – be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization- will be unavoidable.”
We are at a point in our evolution where a four-hundred year old age “is rattling in its deathbed as another struggles to be born – a transformation of consciousness, culture, society, and institutions such as the world has never experienced”. [3] We are at a significant transition point in our human development, where we have what Al Gore suggests; “the opportunity to join together to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing; a generative mission, a compelling moral purpose, a shared and unifying cause, and an opportunity to work together to choose a future for which our children will thank us instead of cursing our failure to protect them against a clear and present danger with equally clear and devastating future consequences”.[4]
In essence, the shift is a movement away from a story of a dead universe that assumes matter is the sole reality to a story of a living universe that sees consciousness as the primary reality. It brings with it a new understanding of nature, a new understanding of ourselves and a new understanding of God or Spirit. It represents “a movement away from ideas and institutions that embrace material values, reductionism, hierarchical control and the supremacy of the personal ego toward a new paradigm that embraces spiritual values, wholeness, integration, cooperation, and the interrelationship of all human beings, regardless of their differences – indeed the interrelationship of all elements of the universe itself”.[5] It challenges us to be aware of the powerful influence of two deeply held beliefs that have governed our actions; “the belief that ‘God’ is separate from this world and that we were given dominion over the earth and the secular belief of scientific materialism.”[6]
Interconnectedness
The shift in consciousness challenges us to let go of these limiting beliefs. It invites us, as Einstein suggests, “to widen our circle of compassion to enhance all living creations and the whole of nature in its beauty”, echoed in Brian Swimme’s call to “embrace a more comprehensive compassion to include the total community of life of the natural world on the planet”. Our human role is “to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves”.[7]
The global shift ultimately begins with each of us deepening our consciousness, one person at a time. Each of us needs to take this into our hearts and our actions, sensitive to the ripple effects of our decisions and actions, conscious that we are part of one, interdependent whole.
And so I ask myself:
“How do I live with integrity
So that the flapping of my wings
Creates a burst of energy that ripples outwards
Bring new life
Not death
Bursting through dead systems
Subtly creating
Positive change”
Carmel Bracken rsm
Northern Province
[1] Tom Atlee, Reflections on Evolutionary Activism (Evolutionary Acton Press, 2010)
[2] Sharif Abdullah, Creating a World that works for all (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999)
[3] Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age
[4] Al Gore from an article in the Sunday Telegraph , 19/11/06
[5] Edmund J. Bourne, Global Shift (New Harbinger Publications, 2008)
[6] Anne Baring & Scilla Elworthy, Soul Power (Book Surge, 2009)
[7] Brian Swimme & Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press, 2001)
