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"New Consciousness for a New World"
and participate in the coming spiritual renaissance.
in recognition of the interconnectedness of all things - a new mind for a new world"...
We have underestimated the impact of human thought worldwide, neglecting to consider the power of destructive thought and "mental pollution" on a sensitive and responsive biosphere.
Within an integral world (and also within a total integral universe...), everything counts.
How we are taught (or conditioned) to, think will affect how our species manages cultural development and the culture's subsequent intervention into Earth's living systems.
It can be stated that, for the most part, humanity unknowingly participates within a cultural hypnosis.
From early childhood, our experiences are established to conform to our specific cultural norm:
Thus, our "world" is often given to us through the medium of particular cultural filters, and so each of us is literally hypnotized from infancy to perceive the world in the same way that people in our culture perceive it.
To break from this indoctrinated perceptual environment is extremely difficult and is often beset with many personal problems arising from peer pressure and ties to friends and family.
A shock is often necessary in order to catalyze one's own change of mind.
What we may be experiencing on a collective level during our planetary evolutionary transition is a near-death experience as a species.
If this doesn't shock us awake, then we may
as well sleep forever...!
Social philosopher Willis Harman has described this by stating,
This change, then, requires us to take back our rightful legitimacy unto ourselves, to decide carefully what we think, how we think, and which beliefs we choose to adopt.
This also concerns our opinions, agreements, and support, which we have previously been all too ready to give away.
Our beliefs, perceptions, and state of mind are crucial for how we understand the world around us. Thus, giving away our right over the power to choose how we wish to perceive the world serves to empower others over us.
This, in essence,
Many of us are unsuspecting as to the degree of insecurity that governs our perceptive abilities.
We focus on the immediate and seemingly ignore the long term, despite the long term having the greater urgency in scale. Our social institutions and media continue to reinforce the immediate and short term, thus strengthening our social myopia.
As a telling example, a report recently published in the United Kingdom, titled "Beyond Terror - The Truth about the Real Threats to Our World," focused on the disproportionate attention given to terrorism in the short term compared with the threats that, although they resulted in more fatalities, were classified as ongoing, long- term problems.
The report stated that in 2001 in the United States alone, the following numbers of people were killed from various causes:
International terrorism, however, had a figure of around 3,000.
This shows our old mind at work, how it perceives and prioritizes events. It is also a mind that goes very far back into our species evolution, a mind that evolved to deal with a very different world.
Our early history equipped us to live in relatively stable environments within small communities; challenges were in the short term and nearby.
The world that made our mind is now gone, and the world we have created around us is a new world; paradoxically, it is a world that we have developed limited capacity to comprehend.
It is fair to say that we now have a mismatch between the human mind we possess and the world we inhabit. Most of the momentous changes in our cultural history have taken place in the past one hundred years.
These days, we don't have that luxury of time, as events (with long- term consequences) are rapidly changing around us, before human cultural evolution has had time to readapt.
Cultural evolution has worked more or less well until the present century; now, it finds itself hampered by an outdated human perceptual system. Contemporary society still relies too heavily - and unconsciously - on ancient modes of thought and ancient styles of thinking.
This begs the question,
In the words of neurologist Robert Ornstein,
Let's be clear about this:
In a well- known analogy that places the evolution of Earth within a single year, from January 1 to December 31, with each day of the year equal to twelve million years, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, arose sometime in February.
More complex life-forms arrived throughout spring and summer, and fishes came to the party around November 20. Then the bouncers - the dinosaurs - finally arrived around December 10, only to disappear drunk on Christmas Day.
It wasn't until the afternoon of December 31 that the first of our recognizable human ancestors showed up (typically late).
Well, we knocked on the door around 11:45 p.m., which leaves all of recorded history taking place within the final minute of the year.
Our old mind was set up to be on the lookout for insecurities and fear-inducing situations:
Yet this apparatus has continued to be reinforced through social conditioning, resulting in limited perceptual capacity.
What is required now is a reinvigoration of vision:
The human imagination is a primary force:
We now need to upgrade our visionary capacity, to open up more fully to inspired thoughts and guidance.
To fail to do so will be a great loss for our species, as these are critical times for the instinctive perceptual faculties, and we need to bring these new organs of perception into being.
In Masnavi, a three-volume work of mystical poetry, the revered Persian poet Jalalludin Rumi writes:
Every change requires a change in consciousness:
Many of us are now slowly beginning to recognize this fact and to cooperate with the upgrade.
The transition stage we are to experience in the grander evolutionary cycle will likewise affect the evolution of human consciousness and may result in new capacities being catalyzed into emergence.
Yet at the same time,
Yet the twenty-first
century will not be a place for business as usual; it will be a new
epoch, and as such, it deserves a corresponding consciousness.
For example,
In that case, divine right on Earth developed into a hierarchical system of religious authority.
This belief of a divinely ordered cosmos then progressed into the Enlightenment's mechanistic, clockwork view of the universe, in which science sought to prove that natural laws held the world under linear domination.
However, this materialistic mind-set that has prevailed more or less intact up until the present moment is no longer of functional use to us.
Thus, an upgrade of our perceptive capacities
is required in a very real and practical way.
Such ideals are now rapidly contaminating our social and cultural environment and leading us on a path to destruction.
The next shift must coincide with the transition phase and involve a conscious decision to develop our understanding, worldview, and wisdom through an intensive "inner evolution."
The focus of this shift is to replace such obsolete material beliefs with ones concentrating on connection, communication, and consciousness.
Mahatma Gandhi was right when he said,
When you evolve your inner world, you also change the immediate world around you and around those close to you.
It is time to release, or abandon, obsolete and superstitious beliefs.
Our newly emerging scientific paradigm, with its quantum theories of entanglement, reminds us that we participate within an integrally connected and living universe (see chapters 5 and 6 New Consciousness for a New World).
This understanding of a living universe makes it more imperative that humanity lives in accordance with balanced needs rather than consumptive desires.
It is about living simply so that others may simply live.
As Harman puts it,
Such a macroshift in human thought requires that a critical number of people in society evolve their mind-set.
It is a radical, yet necessary, shift from a Cartesian worldview of parts to one encompassing a connected wholeness.
By way of paraphrasing what Albert Einstein said,
This is a crucial insight.
Without renewing our outdated cultural attitudes and thinking, we will be unable to regenerate today's dominant, mechanistic civilization into a rejuvenated and integral global civilization.
Thus,
This entails a behavioral shift from possessiveness to sharing, from separation to wholeness, and from outer authority to inner authority.
Humanistic thinker Ervin Laszlo offers the following outline of what he believes to be obsolete thinking:
The upgrade of our thinking patterns is a beginning step to an upgrade in human consciousness, which is necessary if we are to succeed in adapting to our rapidly and inevitably changing world.
In other words,
The human species has entered a period of profound, fundamental, and unprecedented change.
It needs to acquire new skills in order to coexist with an environment that is itself undergoing profound change within the larger fabric of living systems - planetary, solar, and galactic.
We need to upgrade our capacities in order to have the internal readiness for an upgrade in energies.
Whichever way we look at it, we are in need of preparation.
If we are not prepared, that which manifests as truth may very well seem like science fiction. The question may revolve around how our inner vision can be brought into balance with (and provide support for) the impacts of a changing environment.
If there is enough critical mass of mind change, then there is a better possibility that shifting energies will be experienced less chaotically.
Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris expresses the same sentiment when she writes,
Our priority is to first change our perceptions and way of thinking.
It is a challenge we face, to adapt our thinking so that we "think in sync" with our changing world...
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